Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA
motherjones.com
Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA
1–7 of 7 posts
Re: Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA
#2As much as I like this guy and his work, I'd downvote this if I could since the article contains almost no content that supports the title. It's just a blanent PR plug.
Re: Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA
#3As much as I like this guy and his work, I'd downvote this if I could since the article contains almost no content that supports the title. It's just a blanent PR plug.
You can't downvote articles, no matter what your karma. You may be able to flag them, though. (I don't know if flagging has a karma threshold or not.)
Re: Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA
#4As much as I like this guy and his work, I'd downvote this if I could since the article contains almost no content that supports the title. It's just a blanent PR plug.
The title would have beeen better served subbing out Wall Street and the NSA for anyone interested in exploiting information about you.
Re: Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA
#5If anyone is interested in learning some of those secret weapons, I'm actively writing a lengthy series on elliptic curve cryptography. In particular, I'm implementing the algorithms in Python (with an emphasis on human readability over efficiency).
http://jeremykun.com/2014/02/08/introducing-elliptic-curves/
Re: Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA
#6As much as I like this guy and his work, I'd downvote this if I could since the article contains almost no content that supports the title. It's just a blanent PR plug.
Can't say I was disappointed by this article, because I've grown to expect so little from the press: Unfortunately, media coverage tends to be sensational and topical. Here we see an example of a sensational headline followed by a topical article.
For a couple of years in college, I worked as a senior reporter at a newspaper, wrote hundreds of published articles, and never wrote a headline: Copy editors write headlines. Besides writing the headline and correcting spelling and grammar, editors also rearrange paragraphs, delete stuff, re-write whatever suits them, decide what page the article will appear on (front page...buried on the fiftieth page) and decide whether or not to print the story at all. Headlines themselves are written in a domain-specific language called "Headlinese." The American Copy Editors Society has an annual "Headline Contest": http://www.copydesk.org/programs/contests/headlines/
WRT the headline's boast of using math as a "secret weapon against wall st," the article said "Frenkel blames the global economic crisis of 2008-09 on inadequate mathematical models used by bankers and traders to predict the financial markets..." My reading of this is that if people weren't so math illiterate, they could have seen the crash coming and perhaps taken steps to protect themselves.
Hmm. As both a mathematician and a former vp at a wall st bank, I have a different POV on the 2008 financial crash: Massive premeditated fraud on savers and retirees perpetrated by a handful of TBTF banks, enabled by lax government regulation and an "easy money" policy by the Fed. I didn't need my math skills to see this crash coming four years in advance, and my math skills didn't give me any "secret weapons" to stop it or defend myself--it was kinda like being caught in a tidal wave, except this was a tidal wave of greed and corruption.
Journalists say, "A picture is worth a thousand words." William Schiesser said: "An equation is worth a thousand pictures." I wish there were more equations and more coverage of STEM in the popular press. It would be great if journalists proved their conclusions logically, step by step, from their premises.
But the sad truth is that journalism is nothing but a form of entertainment. And there are so few of us who find math entertaining that journalism (other than niche journalism) will never cater to us.
Re: Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA
#7As much as I like this guy and his work, I'd downvote this if I could since the article contains almost no content that supports the title. It's just a blanent PR plug.
Can't say I was disappointed by this article, because I've grown to expect so little from the press: Unfortunately, media coverage tends to be sensational and topical. Here we see an example of a sensational headline followed by a topical article. For a couple of years in college, I worked as a senior reporter at a newspaper, wrote hundreds of published articles, and never wrote a headline: Copy editors write headlin…
> WRT the headline's boast of using math as a "secret weapon against wall st," the article said "Frenkel blames the global economic crisis of 2008-09 on inadequate mathematical models used by bankers and traders to predict the financial markets..." My reading of this is that if people weren't so math illiterate, they could have seen the crash coming and perhaps taken steps to protect themselves.
Yes, and to be more specific, if decisionmakers and stockholders at financial institutions were more math-literate, they would have realized their institutions were taking huge risks based on sloppy mathematical reasoning. A higher general level of mathematical knowledge and skill would likely have prevented a crisis in which the entire economy teetered on a foundation of unsustainable mortgage debt -- obligations in which the property borrowed against was worth less than the debt, encouraging the borrower to simply walk away.