Events

I've got about three hours left on the 8-hour clock for my finance midterm, which is good because I think it will take me only about four hours to finish the last bits. I'm pleased we're learning all the skills required to perform detailed financial analysis at someone else's direction, rather than the skills to direct someone else to do it and to figure out what it means, because it provides a nice break from all that stuff in all our other courses. After today, we have hardly any work left this term...

Actually, almost every country is #1 at something. The U.S. is first in serial killers, for example; the U.K., CCTV; Ireland, quality of life. If I keep finding sites like Information is Beautiful, I'll never finish my morning reading.

Exhibit the First: This morning on NPR, a "retired banker from Eagle River, Wis.," when interviewed about the retirement of Rep. David Obey (D-WI) claimed, "I think the majority of people up here are independent thinkers." Exhibit the Second: via Gulliver, a study of airfare fluctuations in the U.S. market found airfares fluctuate millions of times per year for some city pairs in the U.S. For example, airfares between Atlanta and Las Vegas changed almost 2.5m times last year. Gulliver pointed out that...

I've heard of résumé padding, but, wow: [Adam] Wheeler had never attended the exclusive Phillips Academy prep school in Andover or MIT. And his academic record at Harvard was far less dazzling than he claimed. Instead of straight A's, Wheeler had received some A's, a few B's and a D. His SAT scores were also much less impressive: 1160 and 1220, not the perfect 1600 he had claimed, according to court documents. Wheeler, 23, of Milton, Del., was ordered held on $5,000 bail Tuesday after pleading not...

Mondays are Economist days over here. I've got myself into a rhythm of travel, school, work, and keeping sane that requires me to put things in small boxes of time; on Mondays I read the latest Economist. This week had two unusually interesting (and short) articles in the "Finance and Economics" section[1]. First, a report that numeracy predicts mortgage defaults better than any other variable: Even accounting for a host of differences between people—including attitudes to risk, income levels and credit...

I needed to catch my breath this weekend, so The Daily Parker fell to the bottom of the stack. Here are some of the things that passed before my eyes in the last few days: Math teacher Dan Meyer gave a TED Talk in March suggesting improvements to how we teach math. He says we should teach kids how to reason, not just plug in formulae. As I'm going through the effects of bad mathematics education myself this term, his talk resonated. The Texas Taliban have made another tinfoil hat recommendation to the...

NPR reports that a new analysis of the BP oil spill puts the gusher at 2.3 to 11.7 megaliters per day, rather than BP's original estimate of 590 kL. They've also got video. Also, there's a good reason why dead fish aren't washing up on shore yet. We've already killed them all, thanks to oxygen deprivation caused by Mississippi River runoff. The oil spill just gilds the lily, really.

Waaaaay back in ancient history, I actually reported a Nigerian scammer to the FBI. This was, oh, 1997 or so, maybe 1998. The FBI already had a cybercrimes unit in San Francisco, and I had a half-hour conversation with one of the agents there about a bizarre email I'd received from a Nigerian IP address. We actually did some IP tracing and header analysis on the email to determine its origin. Yes, the scam was that new. Who was it that said, the more things change, the more they stay the same? Right...

So, with a project running somewhere around 105%, an old and patient client that predates my current employment waiting for some updates, Global Financial Management requiring that I figure out the combined beta of two companies about to merge, Foundations of Strategy expecting a transaction cost analysis Saturday morning, and an overwhelming anticipation of seeing Diane and Parker tomorrow after almost two weeks, I find myself completely out of creativity. Heaven bless my winter office (probably, now...

I came across this at lunchtime: a Canadian analysis of how the Conservative-Liberal coalition in the UK will simultaneously introduce fixed, five-year parliamentary terms and at the same time prevent the government from calling an early election. (Why Canadian? Because Canada has a fixed-term parliament, but, as Stephen Harper demonstrated in 2006, it isn't a fixed term if the ruling party doesn't want it to be.) The whole column is a bit wonkish, but it describes something approaching an intersection...