Kevin Joseph

1. Which economic indicators are the best and worst predictors of the value of the stock market?
2. Kevin Joseph, Moeed Faisal, Eric Rubarkh, Ethan Miller, Keerthana Rachamadugu

Personally, the important takeaway from this course was the exposure to working with actual data sets. I believe that this was fundamental to the learning process because it took a step away from the conceptual understanding of data and facilitated hands-on involvement with data. This aspect of the course helped to show that data is not only just…[Read more]

I used Gmail’s data driven service on a daily basis. The spreadsheet representation of the data used for that service would require rows dedicated to each email in the inbox. To complement the rows, the columns of the spreadsheet would contain descriptive features or characteristics of the email: sender, time received, subject, message preview,…[Read more]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/banks-turn-to-virtual-world-to-modernize-physical-commodities-trading-1491303623
Blockchain, the technology responsible for bitcoin, is finding greater application in different markets. The latest innovative application is in the world of commodities trading. Commodities trading is a field historically centered on the…[Read more]

One of the few KPI’s I consider on a daily basis is my daily water intake. This KPI is specific and measurable: water intake can be a precise measure of daily fluid ounces. It is achievable: I can consume more water on any day depending on my effort and conscientiousness. It’s relevant: amount of water intake has several positive health effects.…[Read more]

Hours spent working on project per week, Number f tasks completed per week, Time spent communicating outside of meetings per week, Number of meetings attended per week, Average response time to group members over a week

I have made mistake number 3,4,6,7,8,9, and 10 while working with data in the past. In most of these instances, I realized at some point (sometimes later than I would like to admit) that I had made a mistake and was able to carefully “undo” anything I had done to corrupt the data. Eventually, I was always able to restore the data to its original…[Read more]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-newest-bank-blockchain-will-this-be-the-breakthrough-1488285211
Blockchains are digital ledgers for cryptocurrency (e.g. Bitcoin) transactions. The latest push in the world of finance is develop technology that effectively manages this data, which would lead to considerable cost savings on middlemen and third…[Read more]

From the eight principles, simplicity has precedence as an essential for data visualization, but I believe the exploratory principle is the most important principle because it establishes greater meaning for data visualization. The ability to explore relationships within data is vital for transforming data to useful information. The capacity of a…[Read more]

I believe the most important takeaway from last week’s discussion was that although data is a powerful tool, it is never the complete answer. Useful research will always take this into account and supplement findings with other measures for accuracy and completeness. For example, when I was using census data to make conclusions about different…[Read more]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stocks-seek-direction-as-political-risk-counters-positive-data-1486096662
This article exemplifies the, often interesting, speculative role of data in financial markets across the world. Efficient financial markets are known for their ability to process new information into the pricing of the market, so US economic…[Read more]

One piece of popular conventional wisdom commonly used to ease a person’s concerns is “you can’t know what will happen in the future.” Obviously no one can be certain about the future, but I think it would be useful to test the correctness of this statement by evaluating if we can, in fact, have a high enough level of certainty about future…[Read more]