Michael.Walker's blog

A new paper entitled "The Great Mortgaging - Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles" crunches the data and finds powerful evidence that credit buildup particularly with mortgage lending is the strongest predictor signal of future financial crisis events.

Here is a summary:

1. Mortgage lending was 1/3 of bank balance sheets about 100 years ago, but in the postwar era mortgage lending has now risen to 2/3, and rapidly so in recent decades.

Read paper @ http://bit.ly/1xvP27L

Identifying and Attacking the Saddle Point Problem in High-dimensional Non-convex Optimization - Abstract

The "Big Data" marketing hype obscures the fact that more actionable, valuable insights are likely to be found in the right smaller "Smart Data" sets in contrast to large data sets.

While the term "Big Data" is properly defined as data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time - the marketing hype promises technology to collect, store and crunch huge amounts of data to get value and provide advantage.

Speed kills and the new Cassandra v.2.1 release makes analytics super fast, provides new data model patterns and usage, and is the first version suitable for production use on Windows.

See: http://cassandra.apache.org