One of the major news stories of the last week was the much anticipated release by the U.S. Treasury of the Stress Test results. Officially known as the “Supervisory Capital Assessment Program,” SCAP for short is crammed with tables, charts and other financial arcana too far removed from the commonplace utterances of daily life.

Although media tried, all one could get from the massive coverage was the impression that the participant banks bargained hard with the regulators so that none would fail, proving the recently coined adage too big to fail. Such media coverage bodes well for the biting satire of the likes of Jon Stewart, Colbert and SNL. In fact SNL opened with this hilarious skit where Tim Geithner played by Will Forte reported to the public the results of the “written” stress test taken by the CEOs of the 19 banks.

humour aside, below is a map showing the worst case scenario (10% or more unemployment rate?) losses for each of the 19 “banks” including GMAC and MetLife.

The other side of this are the banks that would have really failed the stress test, see the map below. Of the 80 plus banks that failed since year 2000, nearly 50% failed since January 2008 and more than 30 failed since January of 2009. FDIC took these under the receivership, an euphemism for the take-over the banks that were not that big to fail!

Even after much panning in the multi-media world, the stress test have must have done something good at least to some of the banks. US BankCorp, Wells Fargo, Key Corp and Capital One have been able to raise billions in capital from private investors. And some of them will be able to repay TARP. Finally, if imitation is a form of flattery then one should note that now EU Bank regulators want to conduct their version of the “Stress Test”. More on this if and when EU ever dares to fail any of the participating banks! Because banks over there are also too big to fail!

Here are the links on Finder! to the data on Finder for:
Stress Test aka Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP)
The data also has combination of attributes based on the SCAP report as well as WSJ’s interpretation of the same.
FDIC’s list of Failed banks
The links to the maps on Maker! are shown below:
Stress Test: Worse case scenario losses
Not too big to fail banks

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The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a body of 30 developed countries has the common characteristics of maintaining representative democracy and free market economies.  The OECD collects a significant amount of data from the different involved countries with the aim of identifying good and bad social, economic, and political practices in order to  solve problems and promote positive country development. Recently the OECD published some interesting figures in Society at a Glance 2009 – OECD Social Indicators that measures leisure in different OECD countries.  They define leisure as “time spent free of obligation and necessity” and through survey, the OECD was able to reveal which country sleeps and eats the most.

This data was easily uploaded into Finder! and makes for an interesting map in Maker!. My friends and I all guessed that Spain was probably going be the leader in sleeping and eating because of the “siestas”, or midday meal and nap, we learned about in spanish class back in the day. Well, it turns out the French are actually spending the most average minutes in a day sleeping and eating:

Click here to view the map in Maker!. Please note as the OECD mentions: The available time use survey data for Turkey does not separate personal, medical and household care from eating and drinking. The Turkish figure is thus excluded. An ad hoc separation out of eating and drinking time based on OECD average shares would give a Turkish figure at around Italian levels.

Click here to view the dataset in Finder!.

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Couple of big announcements today both revolving around our enterprise work. The first is the launch of our new corporate website, and the second is a partnership with DataXstream. The website adds a lot more depth to what we’ve been working on behind the scenes in regards to our new enterprise product GeoIQ. You can see the new features and functionality in GeoIQ here. In addition to the new features you can see how the tools and data can be used to solve a variety of problems in different verticals – like this example for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies:

One of the key drivers for working with any enterprise is the ability to ingest their large amounts of data. To help make this as easy as possible we’ve been working on building plug-in connectors to critical enterprise data stores. A great example of this work is our partnership with DataXstream to provide a dynamic connector to SAP data allowing it to be pulled directly into GeoIQ. We are really excited about the potential of fusing enterprise internal data with a wide range of global external data we’ve collected ranging from demographics and economic indicators to environmental information and sensor feeds.

Lots more in the works, but the new website will shed light on what is done and the value it can bring to an enterprise. Look forward to launching the rest soon and stay tuned for more. Any feedback on the latest efforts is greatly appreciated.

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As the media was going hog wild for the last couple of weeks over the Swine flu story, the principal actor behind this Swine flu, the A/H1N1 virus with bits of bird and human genetic material, was acting quite tame. This bug with a reputation to cause world wide death and destruction has, for some unknown reason, proven to be far less harmful than the regular influenza bug of the just ended 2008-2009 North-American flu season.

So how harmful was the so called regular flu season? According to CDC’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality reports, nearly 24,000 people in over 115 large U.S. cities died because of the garden variety influenza/pneumonia.

Below are two maps showing flu deaths. The first map has count of deaths one week apart and the second map shows total death counts for the entire flu season of 2008-2009.

Weekly Influenza/Pneumonia deaths: week ending Dec 27, 2008 and week ending Jan 04, 2009

Influenza/Pneumonia deaths: 2008-2009 flu season

Compare these figures to the current swine flu death count of less than couple of dozen. Of course its is plausible that this weak A/H1N1 bug may become more virulent with the return of the flu season in the fall. Its important to remember that its much much older ancestor began as a weak strain in Kansas before evolving into the deadly bug causing tens of millions of deaths all across the globe during the 1918-19 pandemic! So a continued surveillance is the watchword of these uncertain times!

You may access the weekly flu season death count data and the maps on Finder! and Maker! by clicking on these links:

For data:
MMWR (CDC), 2008-2009 Flu Season Weekly mortality by large cities, USA, April 25 2009

CDC MMWR, 2008-2009 Flu season mortality for large cities, USA, 2009

For maps:
The Flu season: Percent deaths due to pneumonia/influenza in large cities in weeks ending 25 oct 2008 and 25 Apr 2009

Flu season 2008-2009: Total flu/pneumonia deaths

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