Misleading Effects of Backtest Overfitting in Investment Strategy. Backtesting is a process where a financial strategy is tested on a predictive model that is built based on historic data.
The strategy is validated based on its performance on the model. An article published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society looks into this investment practice and highlights the perils of performing a large volume of backtest on a historical data set that it would skew the results and favor the data set but would not be as practical or efficient in another out of sample set. This is known as backtest overfitting. Improving Gas Mileage For Better Fuel Economy. Gas mileage is the ratio of the distance a vehicle travels to the amount of fuel used.
Gas mileage has been an important factor when it comes to evaluating a vehicle specially with fuel prices going up. These are three simple ways to improve gas mileage. There is a rising awareness for fuel economy because of increasing gas prices. Alternative energy and the green movement have contributed to the rise of hybrid cars and electric cars. Although these vehicles have still ways to go to reach its potential, vehicles like the Tesla and the Prius are now in the public eye and reaching mainstream status. In an early 2012 study, MIT came out with a study that shows that even with advances in vehicle and fuel technology, it has barely increased the mileage per gallon of current vehicles.
The average gas mileage in 1980 was 23 miles per gallon (mpg) compared to the current 27 mpg. If you've recently had a heart attack when reviewing gas prices at your local gas station, you're not alone. Report Studies Brain Process and Psychological Factors Behind Market Bubbles. A study led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology show that stock market bubbles are linked to traders' brain processes that predict how other traders will behave rather than relying on economic factors such as price and demand when making financial decisions.
Averting The Fiscal Cliff May Still Reduce US Scientific Research Funding. An article on the Science website discusses how avoiding the fiscal cliff through a compromise deal may still reduce funding for scientific research.
A week ago, the United States averted what they termed, a fiscal cliff. The premise of the fiscal cliff is that expiring tax cuts and decreased government spending would affect the U.S. economy and lead the country into recession. A compromise deal was reached by both Republicans and Democrats to extend the tax cuts and delay government spending cuts. The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (H.R. 8) was passed by the United States Congress on January 1, 2013.
Some of the tax cuts which were supposed to expire were made permanent while tax rates at upper income levels were increased. Quantum Day. New Process in Manufacturing Denim Jeans More Economical, Efficient, and Environment Friendly. Jeans are pants that are made from denim.
Although in popular culture, these are referred to as denim jeans, blue jeans, or just jeans. Denim jeans are identified with American culture especially the cowboy westerns. This is because jeans were popularized as work trousers during the California gold rush when Levi Strauss introduced them with copper rivets. Users From Countries With High Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Use Google to Search More About Future Than The Past. Google Trends compares a search topic and its relevance to how the whole world searches for that particular topic.
It shows how often it has been searched on Google over time. It shows how many times the topic has appeared in Google News and where in the world have people searched for it the most. Google Trends accomplishes this by analyzing a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.
Using Google Trends, researchers study the search behavior of countries based on their GDP. Study links Google search behavior to GDP Internet users from countries with a higher per capita gross domestic product (GDP) are more likely to search for information about the future than information about the past, a quantitative analysis of Google search queries has shown. "Our use of this gigantic information resource is generating huge amounts of data on our current interests and concerns.
The Stock Market - High Frequency Trading, the Algorithms and the Science Behind It. In Wall Street and other trading environments, some investors use sophisticated technological tools to trade securities like stocks or options.
This is called High Frequency Trading (HFT). HFT utilizes super computers and algorithms to generate automatic trades. One major factor for high frequency trading is that information and actual stock trends are picked up by these super computers in real time and based on the algorithm, react accordingly. An algorithm is a an order of sequential procedures for performing calculations. It is a step-by-step series of procedures used for calculation, data processing, and automated decision making or reasoning. MIT News: Increased Temperatures May Be A Factor In Damaging Economic Growth.
The economic cost of increased temperatures Even temporary rises in local temperatures significantly damage long-term economic growth in the world’s developing nations, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT economist.
Looking at weather data over the last half-century, the study finds that every 1-degree-Celsius increase in a poor country, over the course of a given year, reduces its economic growth by about 1.3 percentage points. However, this only applies to the world’s developing nations; wealthier countries do not appear to be affected by the variations in temperature. “Higher temperatures lead to substantially lower economic growth in poor countries,” says Ben Olken, a professor of economics at MIT, who helped conduct the research.
And while it’s relatively straightforward to see how droughts and hot weather might hurt agriculture, the study indicates that hot spells have much wider economic effects.