One of the problems for students of matters financial is that predicting stuff is very difficult, especially when it's about the future. However, this pales into insignificance with the greater problem that we can't even predict the present. In economic terms, basically, we really have no idea what's happening in the world at any given time. Predicting the present, snappily known as "nowcasting" is an area that economists spend lots of time worrying over, developing really neat algorithms that work right up to the next time they don't. However, the rise of the internet has opened a new window on the world and analysts are now starting to nowcast by looking at trends emerging from data culled from the web. Perhaps, just perhaps, this can be turned this into a model which is near enough real-time to stand some chance of being useful.

Guess My Economics

Mostly we only find out what's going on in global finance months or even years after the event. Stuff like whether we're in a recession or not can only be figured out in retrospect, which isn't much use if you're tying to do useful economic things like fix interest rates or estimate demand for your products or produce investment analysis reports. In the latter case we use "useful" in the loosest possible sense, obviously.

This is the state of play when we're dealing with major economic issues. When we're dealing with less important ones commentators are usually forced to use their intuitions and years of experience. This is what us less knowledgeable people usually call "guessing" and is a significant problem, causing most economic and investment forecasts to be somewhat less than accurate. Basically, they're what we call "crap".

However, there is some hope for the experts. The rise of the worldwide web offers researchers a more or less real-time insight into the interests and concerns of the consumer at large. Once adjusted, by stripping out items of continual general interest such as "sex", "porn", "Google" (duh) and "interactive porn" (don't ask) we find some interesting themes emerging. What's more, they may even be useful.

Disease on the Net

Back in 2009 a bunch of researchers from Google and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a paper that was both interesting and innovative, although they cunningly disguised this by using the title "Detecting Influenza…

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