Just wanted to put make some observatons and put a pin into some things:

First, I heard Louise Yamada managing director of  Louise Yamada Technical Research Advisors LLC, speak on Bloomberg today (5/21/2012) about what might be some weakening in equities.  She sees this shortened week as one where there will be a bit of a rally off of last weeks losses, but by the end of the week, she doesn’t anticipate traders will want to hold US equities over the long weekend.  I thought it would be interested to watch and see if what she anticipates comes to fruition.  The main driver appears to be Euro weakening.  On another note, I heard also (same show) that Mohammed El-Erian, sees Greece’s departure from the Euro zone, which (in the short term) might feed into Louise’s prediction.

Now for some things I’ve been tinkering with in R.  I have been making some strides with using loops to handle an interesting task (creating a series of insightful plots based on a pre-determined vector of identifiers).  Within the piece of looping code, I have some interesting things going on with respect to customized x-axis labels and I’m working on customized export/naming of each plot as a png file.

Lastly, I did some reading in Adler’s R Cookbook (the machine learning section), this combined with my recent purchase of Conway and White’s Machine Learning for Hackers (http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Hackers-Drew-Conway/dp/1449303714), and I’m really building a great deal of interest in fining ways to apply ML techniques (specifically, MARS) to fit models in health care.  Simultaneously I’m still trying to work through the Matloffs, the Art of R Programming text (which still continues to demonstrate it’s worth every penny).