Category: Interesting

Posts that may be completely irrelevant to the main themes of the site, but are nonetheless interesting.

Interesting

Interesting links

Post author By Louise Pryor
Post date 24 November 2011

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 Davis] maintains its own police force, employing (as of 2009) 101 people (including administrators), far more than the largest academic departments. The officer wielding the spray is on record as earning $110,000 in 2010, more than all but the better paid full professors.” More
Social differences on public transport: the tube’s posh.

Tags academia, actuary, data, money, public transport, radiation

Interesting Uncategorized

Interesting links

Post author By Louise Pryor
Post date 20 November 2011

Some things I’ve found interesting:

Have you seen those Google ads on the tube? The example they give of a strong password isn’t so strong after all. It’s always worth checking the statistics.
The important field – as usual with xkcd, make sure you read the alt-text
Language is not writing, and some myths that arise from the mis-identification
Sometimes, animations are the best way of showing data. This is a great one on global warming.
Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia – and remember the alt-text!

Tags climate change, data, password, security

Interesting

Interesting links

Post author By Louise Pryor
Post date 11 November 2011

Some links I’ve found interesting recently:

What makes a good Regulator? (I was on one of the panels)
Berlusconi probably agrees with James Carville*
Some people think that some of us are in the right career — it’s not often actuaries make the headlines
Machine learning in action: an absence of preconceptions is a good thing
The UK lags most of Europe, as I know from bitter experience — hang on while the bytes creep from me to you

* Who said ” I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Hat tip D’Maris Coffman.

Tags actuaries, Berlusconi, broadband, Carville, machine learning, regulation

Interesting

Interesting links

Post author By Louise Pryor
Post date 8 November 2011

Some links I’ve found interesting recently:

Tim Harford thinks that capitalism should be about more than just money, while John Kay thinks that it needn’t be about greed and gambling.
For me, one of the best things about this time of the year is the start of the brussels sprout season, but those who don’t like them may have an excuse.
Try this one if you think you understand probability.
The Blackberry outage wasn’t all bad — and John Beattie reminded me that we’ve been there before, anyway.
Another great pioneer has died — John McCarthy invented Lisp, the second oldest high level programming language still in use.