Newsworthy Math
A Discussion about Mathematics in Society
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Synthetic Collateralized Alchemy
What Was Wrought CDO’s (collateralized debt obligations), see this for my introduction to these, depend on underpriced low grade debt. If I can get a 20% discount on debt that has a 10% chance of defaulting, then I should just buy this all day. All I need is enough risky debt (and some confidence in [...]
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Insurance and Mortality Curves
The life insurance business is very good at calculating the probability of you dying within the next year. It’s one of these things that we’ve being doing so long that we’re pretty good at it. Given your circumstances, they can produce a curve showing the probability of you dying at any given year from then [...]
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How Collateralized Debt Works. (And Where It Got Us.)
Collateralized debt sounds like a damn good idea, and it can be. It’s fairly complicated, but it isn’t rocket science, and it’s really worth knowing enough about to make sense of the news these days. Bad Debt: 15% Off Many relatively high risk borrowers need, or would like, credit; many investors would take a small [...]
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"Show Your Working"
One of the many things that makes math difficult to learn is the seemingly universal reluctance to be comfortable with incomplete thoughts. In math terms this translates to “write down you’re intermediate results”. Kids hate to do this. If you ask them to do a multi-step problem it is an enormous struggle to get them [...]
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Six Suggestions That Can Make You a Better Maker
A designer friend recently sent me a link to an excellent post by Eric Karjaluto on design. The original post is design specific – and well worth reading – but it also struck me as completely relevant to programming, which I do professionally, and to a great deal else that I’ve done and tried to [...]
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