I’ve just published my annual reading list for 2023 here, as I’ve done for over a decade. Do check out the whole thing, but here are a few of my particular favourites from this year’s list, which, as always, is a bit of an eclectic mixture.Continue Reading
With COP26, the global conference to achieve action on climate change, starting tomorrow, I’ve taken a quick look at the data (as opposed to the rhetoric) on Australia’s current progress on carbon emissions. Two great graphs recently caught my eye.Continue Reading
There is increasing evidence that in a pandemic, public health measures (including lockdowns) help the economy compared with the alternative of not locking down – countries which reduced deaths from Covid19 also had better economic (GDP) outcomes in the quarter ending June 2020. Increasingly, studies are looking at the linksContinue Reading
Read this book, and if you have any influence over data; its collection or its use; think honestly about whether you are considering women as much as men in the way you collect your data. And remember that the more often decision makers reflect the general population (whether by gender or other measures of diversity) the more likely it is that decisions will be good for that diverse population.Continue Reading
Today’s book review is Weapons of Math Destruction, How big data increases inequality and threatens Democracy, by Cathy O’Neil. Cathy O’Neil is a data scientist, with a PhD in mathematics, who blogs here. She has built models, and also tried to deconstruct them for those affected by them. This book is aContinue Reading
Today’s book review is of The Son also rises: Surnames and the history of social mobility, by Gregory Clark. This book is an extremely wide-ranging attempt to answer the question of how much your parents matter to your ability to make your way in the world. A common way of measuringContinue Reading
My employer, NAB, gives us two volunteer days of leave a year – days in which we can volunteer in the community. One day is supposed to be used by teams together; to find something that is both team building and useful to the community. The other day can be usedContinue Reading
The Financial System Inquiry, headed by David Murray (former Chairman of the Future Fund and CEO of Commonwealth Bank) has released its Interim Report (all 460 pages of it). For those who haven’t been following this, this inquiry (which is already known as the Murray inquiry) is the natural successor toContinue Reading
The Eye family is on holiday in Japan at the moment. Our family of four (three male, one female) accidentally jumped into a women’s only carriage on the Osaka metro the other day. It took us one stop to run the gamut of emotions from surprised, to embarrassed, to indignation (thatContinue Reading
I’m not going to make a habit of this, but there have been some great articles for interested actuaries this week that I wanted to point to. Tim Harford in the FT wondered whether in our enthusiasm for Big Data, we have forgotten some statistical principles: Four years after the originalContinue Reading