Owen Sims sent me this interesting article which looks at whether Twitter can predict the stock market. Johan Bollen, a computational social scientist, used algorithms to measure the mood and sentiment of tweets in order to to gauge the public mood. The measure he developed was correlated with subsequent movements in the stock market. This correlation may be spurious, but behavioural economists have increasingly been interested in how public sentiment affects asset markets and they have used the news media to get a handle on sentiment. See, for example, Paul Tetlock's work in this area - click here.
Michael Aldous and I had our book The CEO: The Rise and Fall of Britain's Captains of Industry published a few weeks ago. You can find out more about it and buy it at Cambridge University Press's website . It is also available at Amazon , Waterstones , and Barnes & Noble . The CEO has already been reviewed in The Sunday Times , The Observer and Financial Times .