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Daily Bread for Whitewater, Wisconsin: 10-20-10

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a mostly sunny day, with a high temperature of sixty-six degrees.

There will be a meeting of the Effigy Mounds Task Force at 4 p.m. today, and a meeting of the Landmarks Commission at 5 p.m.

There’s a story at Wired entitled, Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market. Perhaps the title should have been Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market?



The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.

“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server….

“It’s a pretty interesting result,” commented computer scientist Sitaram Asur of HP Labs. But even though the correlation is there, Asur is reluctant to believe that the moods captured on Twitter can cause the stock market to change. Not everyone on Twitter plays the stock market, he notes, or even lives in the United States. And he would like to see the algorithm used on tweets from a wider span of time.

“If it is true, if we can actually find this correlation to be consistent, that will be a very important result,” he said. “But right now, I would be cautious about saying how important this is.”

A test of confidence would be someone’s willingness to trade based on these findings, such as they are.

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