Analyze This

A letter to the FT depicts the medieval Christian church as an early regulator rooting out creative accounting practices:
The medieval Christian view was highly sympathetic to risk capital formation. The key was the word “risk”. What was objectionable to the medieval mind (and Mohammed confirmed that this was far from exclusively a Christian view) was [...]

For the past few months I’ve been teaching myself to write spiders - little Perl programs that crunch through URLs and download data. In the spirit of learning by doing, my first project was to grab 5,000 health inspection reports for Manhattan restaurants from the NYC Department of Health website.
The reports list a lot of [...]

I’ve written about fraud among the Mormons before. Here’s another angle, from a social networking thread on Slashdot:
Salt Lake City is the smallest city to have its own SEC office, and the state suffers from a high rate for people getting ripped off by people they know. This has been attributed by the close network [...]

Rashomon retold for fans of Goofus and Gallant.

Interesting conversation on Slashdot about Hollywood Math and Science Consulting, which helps screenwriters portray math and science accurately in their scripts.
The company’s first client was the TV show Numb3rs, about a mathematician who solves crimes via pattern-recognition techniques. It’s a fascinating idea, and I love the eccentric professor played by Dragonslayer’s Peter MacNicol. Unfortunately, he’s [...]

I’ve held investments through both TIAA-CREF and Merrill Lynch, and I can’t imagine two more different companies. TIAA-CREF has always been like a big old family-run business - cheap, paternalistic and a bit backwards, but also old-fashioned in its commitment to the educators who comprise its customers. In contrast, Merrill Lynch - like many full-service [...]

You may be a great performer on your own. But how much do you help your team? The metric de jour of the NBA - the plus-minus statistic - goes beyond so-called “glory statistics” like points or rebounds to measure a player’s total contribution to victory.
Refined by Dan Rosenbaum, an economist at UNC Greensboro, plus-minus [...]

PWC and KPMG say that 90-95% of business spreadsheets have errors, that each error costs a business $10,000 to $100,000, and that complex spreadsheets (more than 100 columns or rows) have a probability of error approaching 100%.
Gee, do you think the folks at PWC or KPMG know anyone who might be able to audit my [...]

Forty-three ways to cure writer’s block.

Also from the recent PRMIA meeting on liquidity risk:
Ken Winston, CRO of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, threw out the following idea on how to hedge against market illiquidity: sell off-the-run Treasuries and buy on-the-run issues. As liquidity disappears, the on-the-run bonds gain relative to the off-the-run issues.
You could offer the hedge to a customer, adding [...]

Went to the liquidity risk discussion at PRMIA’s New York chapter a few months back, shortly before GM was downgraded to junk status. I had meant to write about it at the time, but computer problems and the hassles of moving from Blogger to Moveable Type and then WordPress interfered. In hindsight, though, here’s what [...]

The Body Mass Index of presidents is the subject of a chart in Sunday’s New York Times. (Unfortunately, only the accompanying article is available online.) The article points out that BMI is meaningless by itself. Our 6-foot 194-pound president, who regularly runs 6:30 miles at the age of 58, has a BMI of 26.3 - [...]

A small Utah-based lender, the Bank of Ephraim, collapsed after discovering that 90% of its loan portfolio consisted of loans to a doomsday sect of fundamentalist Mormons.
Sect members, believing that the end of the world was imminent, took an oath several years ago to drain the bank of money before doomsday. They borrowed $18 million [...]

LoanPerformance, which sells retail credit analytics to mortgage lenders, says text mining can boost the accuracy of default models. If a customer uses any of these words when talking to a call center rep, the software flags the customer as more likely to default:
Rental
Renter
Rent
Roommate
Hazard
Debris
Fraud
Death
Marital Problem, Divorce
Mold
Sad
Jail
Motorcycle
If I were a sad divorced guy riding a motorcycle [...]

Follow this link to try the Autism Quotient test. After taking it, I’m ready to believe that autism is just a special case of being a guy.
The average score is 16.5, and 80% of those diagnosed with autism scored 32 or more. Your score appears to depend mainly on (1) your comfort in social situations [...]

OK, not really, because it’s all about golf. But just listen to the rest.
The job title is Data Analyst, but it could also be called Database Journalist. The PGA wants someone to mine and analyze data from ShotLink (the PGA scoring system) to “create a depth of analysis, insight and entertaining information never before possible [...]

I just love PlasticBag.org. Like Andrew Sullivan (before he went bonkers), but techie and profane. In this post, Tom Coates creates visualizations of his last five years of posts, showing, for example, how his writing style deteriorated as posts become longer and less frequent. There’s also a reference to a Perl module that calculates Flesch-Kincaid.