Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman is one of those books to read slowly, and reread multiple times. It is full of fascinating and counterintuitive facts about how we think. That makes it sound dense. It isn’t. I found it very easy to read, devouring it in great gulps,Continue Reading
A roundup of the links that caught my eye this week. This week the big news for stats geeks was the release of the Australian census, with lots of news. I haven’t had time to play with the data yet, but here is the link. @mattcowgill points out that inContinue Reading
A roundup of links that I’ve found of interest this week. Some Daniel Kahnemen links: Tim Harford interviews psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Jonah Lehrer from the New Yorker quotes some of Daniel Kahnemen’s research on Why Smart people are Stupid, and a summaryContinue Reading
Here’s a roundup of interesting links I’ve seen this week: The speed of light is too slow! New Scientist article about traders choosing microwaves to transmit trading instructions ahead of fibre optic cable – light is slowed by a significant amount by the cable. Giving people permission to fail –Continue Reading
Today’s book review is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive, by Bruce Schneier. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security guru (he even has his own internet meme). He started out as an expert on cryptography, but he now has much wider security interests. Liars and OutliersContinue Reading
At the Financial Services Forum last week one of the big questions was about the future of financial advice. This is also known as FOFA, which is what the government is calling it. The changes to the nature of financial advice were the backdrop to many of the presentations IContinue Reading
I’ve just come back from the Actuaries Institute’s biennial Financial Services Forum; a forum for actuaries and other professionals in the financial services industry dealing with wealth management, financial planning, life insurance, banking and risk management. I’m hoping to post in more detail about some of the topics that interestedContinue Reading
Regulatory change is a constant in most financial services areas these days. Insurance in Australia is no different. APRA is in the middle of a major upgrade to the regulatory capital regime for life and general insurers, which is due to start from 1 January 2013. So far, most ofContinue Reading
Last month, the annual fertility rates were released by the ABS. I last did a post on this two years ago, so it is time for an update. My broad conclusion was that fertility rates are pretty stable in Australia, with the very important caveat that that stability is in theContinue Reading
Currently on our travels, I’m in Norway, and Norway, in the 21st century, is proud of its position as one of the most equal countries (by gender roles) in the world. Statistics Norway has a special gender equality index, and 40% of the parliament (the Storting) is female. Norway has goneContinue Reading
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