Blog: 2011

...well, if you find the "profit" application, let me know.

Google labs has a new product called Google Correlate.  You can read the product's introductory description here (in comic book form).  The service takes any time-based data series you give it and matches the Google search queries that have the highest correlation with your series, then does you the additional favor of plotting it on a map---very cool.

One of the first things that drew my attention to combining math and art, and signaled to me that their combination might still be useful to both was teaching myself Action Script.  With little Flash programming experience, I had to fall back on models that I knew---methods for financial series, simulation, and state-space models, including forecasting and credit risk.  So while I was learning a new tool, I wondered whether there was any insight to be gained from making them beautiful, something you might see by visualizing the same data differently than before.