The title of this blog is a shameless crib from a recent blog of Athene Donald’s, in which she discusses the Equality Challenge Unit‘s annual survey of statistical information about staff and students in UK universities. [...] overall 76% of professors are white and male. Such a lack of diversity cannot be healthy. The numbers of BME [...] Read more
I found these interesting: Kaprekar’s constant — not everything has to be useful to be appealing and fun. Apparently the Roman Empire was more equal than the USA, while in Britain income inequality rose faster between 1975 and 2008 than in any other OECD member country. How to get your keys back if you drop them down [...] Read more
Tags: data, equality, Kaprekar's constant
A few weeks ago the Economist’s blog had a piece with the tag line “How increases in computing power have driven higher share turnover”. It shows a nice chart with two lines rising inexorably upwards, pretty close together, one representing the transistor count in integrated circuits from 1947 to date, and the other shares traded [...] Read more
Tags: causation, correlation, log scale
Numbers are often perceived as a sign of respectability. Press releases often include them — it seems so much more believable to say 75.4% of people do such-and-such than to say many or even most people. Quote a specific percentage and people tend to believe it. The trouble is, the numbers we see in the press [...] Read more
Tags: causality, data, statistics
There’s some cool stuff here: Are shredders still useful? From the results of a recent DARPA unshredding contest, I’d say they mostly are. Hat tip Bruce Schneier. Good arguments for transparency in the corporate world. An economist would say “what would I do if I were a horse?“ One of the best advent calendars on the [...] Read more
Tags: advent calendar, Bruce Schneier, charts, economics, shredder, technology, transparency
It’s well known that people are very keen to find causality in the world, and reluctant to accept that a lot of what goes on is just random. Those of us who’ve been educated properly know that correlation is not causation, but it’s sometimes difficult to put that into practice. There are some common examples. [...] Read more
Tags: causality
I’ve found these interesting, in one way or another: Is the eurozone a casino? The current betting strategy is madness. Do what I say, not what I do. xkcd’s really on a roll at the moment — one for mathematicians. One for your Christmas list. It would be so cool! You should choose your Christmas cards carefully [...] Read more
Tags: 3D printing, astronomy, axiom of choice, betting, climate change, John Kay, martingale
One result of the unrelenting increase in computing power is that the amount of data is now huge. Earlier this year, it was estimated that 295 exabytes of data was being stored around the world in 2007. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. That’s a lot of data, though admittedly it’s not a yottabyte yet (a million exabytes). [...] Read more
Tags: Moore's law
Following the micromort, a 1-in-a-million chance of sudden death, we now have the microlife, which is 30 minutes off your life expectancy. Both micromorts and microlives are good units for comparing risks: Here are some things that would, on average, cost a 30-year-old man 1 microlife: Smoking 2 cigarettes Drinking 7 units of alcohol (eg 2 pints [...] Read more
Some things that have recently struck me in one way or another: Literary references to actuaries aren’t that common Some interesting graphical representations of relative sizes from xkcd: money (recent) and radiation (older). And from elsewhere: how big is a PhD? Old news is the latest thing US/UK culture gap: “Like most US universities, [UC [...] Read more
Tags: academia, actuary, data, money, public transport, radiation