best way to become a "Numerati"?
fbbwsa: i think there are still plenty of fun things to find in stock market data. most quants are looking at the same problem. i play with market data a lot and you'd be amazed how uneducated the general public seems to be.also, i second ntoshev's recommendations for netflix prize -ish applications. collaborative filtering/clustering seems to be an inadequate science at best as far as i can tell.