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Ben Gimpert is Chief Technology Officer with Altos Research LLC in Mountain View. Despite what that hipster in the ironic t-shirt says, everything new was done thirty years ago, on BBSs, by the D&D and ham radio crowds.
Author Archives: ben
Redots
Dorkbot is a semi-monthly meeting of “people doing strange things with electricity.” They have been chugging along in several cities for a decade-or-so. Back in 2005 I presented at a Dorkbot in London, so I have an enduring soft spot … Continue reading
Posted in altos-research, information-visualization, real-estate
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A Different House Hedge
Where do stock market winners buy houses? There are many ways to predict how the price of an asset will change in the future. For stocks, one approach is based on fundamental analysis and another approach uses portfolio diversification theory. … Continue reading
Posted in altos-research, hedging, quant, quantitative-analysis, real-estate, trading
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Fungal Houses
Ever wondered why your flat’s Zestimate bounces around so much? In high school economics class you might have learned about fungible goods. This strange word refers to things that could be swapped without the owners especially caring. A dollar is … Continue reading
Posted in altos-research, real-estate
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Sarah Palin Email Word Cloud
After three years of legal wrangling, the diligent folks at Mother Jones released another set of Sarah Palin’s emails on Friday. There are plenty of subtleties to the story. Should a personal Yahoo! email account be used for government work? … Continue reading
Posted in natural-language-processing, politics
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Case-Shiller April Forecasts
Another finger in the air, in the beginning of the month lull. My forecasts for the March, 2011 Case-Shiller index levels were quite rushed. They were released quickly so I could publicly compare the forecasts with the CFE futures contracts … Continue reading
Posted in altos-research, forecasting, real-estate, trading
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Dan Rice on How the Experts May Not Always Be Right: A Story About the Discovery of Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease in 1991
Machine learning can be a check on conventional thinking, if we let it. On the new analytics Linkedin group started by Vincent Granville, Dan Rice wrote a personal account of his frustrations with the Alzheimer’s research of 20 years ago, … Continue reading
Posted in machine-learning, medicine
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Housing Finger in the Air
The March, 2011 Case-Shiller numbers will be released this Tuesday, but the CME’s May futures contracts expire tomorrow. Some of the real estate transactions that will be summarized in Tuesday’s numbers are up to five months old, where our data … Continue reading
Posted in altos-research, forecasting, real-estate, trading
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Fighting the Last War: Shiller Paper
A new type of mortgage gets a price that means you never have to walk away. Last month Robert J. Shiller, Rafal M. Wojakowski, Muhammed Shahid Ebrahim and Mark B. Shackleton published a paper with the financial engineering to price … Continue reading
Posted in mortgages, quant, quantitative-analysis, real-estate
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Dreaming of the Cloud
So far cloud 2011 is just client-server 1997 with new jargon. As a modeler who manages a serious EC2 cluster, someone who has handed thousands of dollars to Amazon over the last few years, I remain frustrated at what the … Continue reading
Posted in amazon-ec2, cloud
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