I’ve just published my annual reading list for 2025 here, (a little late, but its still January!) as I’ve done for over a decade. Do check out the whole thing, but here are a few of my particular highlights from this year’s books, which, as always, are a bit of an eclectic mixture.Continue Reading
Four years after starting my COVID reflections series, I’ve learned that:
– Looking for a bit of beauty every day is a great way of finding positives in the world
– Writing about what is happening the world is much better for my state of mind than doomscrolling
– A community of people reading and reflecting is even better!
– Basic, widely available data and information is a vital part of government’s role, and one which they are still not doing enough.Continue Reading
The first phase of uninhabitability is uninsurability – Michael Mann, renowned climate scientist.
As climate risks to property increase, the people who live in places exposed to those risk are less and less able to afford to insure their properties. Which will start to create climate ghettos. And the housing crisis in Australia will worsen, as areas in areas with high risk of disaster become uninsurable.Continue Reading
Book Review: Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models can lead us Astray and What we can do about it, by Erica Thompson
Today I’m reviewing a book that I loved, a book for any actuary, or indeed model builder or model user to read. I felt as if I highlighted half of this book, so I’ll try and give you enough of a flavour of Thompson’s insights so that you feel compelled to read it yourself.Continue Reading
How do we balance the risks of vaccines and the benefits of our population being vaccinated? How do we balance the individual risks and benefits and the collective risks and benefits?
My view is that we should be asking people to take remote individual risks (such as vaccination complications) for the collective benefit (ultimately population immunity against Covid19). And we need to have this conversation as a society as population immunity becomes closer.Continue Reading
Sobering statistics on sexual harassment in Australia. Of the 20 million people in Australia over the age of 15, in the last 12 months approximately 1.6 million women and 840,000 men – nearly 2.5 million people – have experienced sexual harassment of any kind. Included in this are 148,000 women and 57,000 men who were sexually assaulted – 201,000 people.Continue Reading
As Australia has its annual debate about whether it is appropriate to have our national day on the anniversary of the day when a British naval officer planted the British flag, and claimed half a continent for Great Britain, ignoring the people who already lived here, I’m looking at someContinue Reading
As Australians rally across the country to protest against mistreatment and deaths of Indigenous people, inspired by the week of protests following the death of George Floyd in the US, I’m comparing the statistics in the two countries. It saddens me to find, as I expected (I’ve blogged about this before), that Indigenous people are treated overall much worse by the police and prisons in Australia’s judicial system than black Americans are by theirs.Continue Reading
Six weeks ago, I posted about the Coronavirus in China. Reading that blogpost now seems like reading something I wrote years ago. Since then, I’ve been reading obsessively and contributed a bit in the background to some of the Actuaries Institute material, and we now have more than 1,000 cases in Australia (there were 15 when I wrote the original blog post). This post is the start of my series of posts on the Coronavirus from an actuarial perspective.Continue Reading
Climate change affects extremes more than you think. If the distribution shifts even a little bit to be hotter/wetter/drier/windier, then even without changing the likelihood of extremes, the very rare extremes we were used to become much more likely. Continue Reading