Model Off with excel monkeys
If there was a competition entitled "Correct the analyst's spreadsheet", that could be sort of cool, right?
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May 24, 2014
May 22, 2014
Death becomes all by cause
Cause vs age, via Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
May 21, 2014
Price-testing relied on spreadsheets not vetted
...the price-testing process relied on the use of spreadsheets that were not vetted by CIO VCG (or Finance) management, and required time-consuming manual inputs to entries and formulas, which increased the potential for errors.
Flimsy rival spreadsheets, from the likes of Google or Apple, cannot compete - too much is missing from them. Discovering that baseline Excel functionality is not there or that favourite keyboard shortcuts do not work, is - to borrow a lyric from Alanis Morissette - like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.
May 17, 2014
Net neutrality, the early days
Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest change in communications law since the 1930s. The law maintained the basic/enhanced dichotomy, but it renamed its two parts. Basic services became telecommunications services; enhanced services became information services.
Now, into which of these two categories does the Internet fall? The FCC regards the World Wide Web--the entire apparatus of browsers and HTML files, the layers upon layers of computation and presentation--as an information service (i.e., an enhanced service). It would make sense, then, that the wires through which this information service traveled were regarded as a telecommunications service (i.e., a basic service). Indeed, when most people accessed the web through phone wires with a dial-up modem, the agency did categorize phone lines as a telecommunications service--because it regarded all phone lines that way.
May 16, 2014
European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group's list of Horror Stories
The Task Force Report into the billions of dollars of losses racked up by JPMorgan's Chief Investment Office has revealed a number of things, not least of which are some impressive spreadsheet errors.
Impressive enough, perhaps, to be worthy of inclusion in the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group's list of Horror Stories.
(Yes, there is such a group.
May 14, 2014
The very best of Queens: queens.brownstoner
Not just real estate, but mostly real estate: queens.brownstoner.
May 10, 2014
Co-housing, not in Georgia's Cobb County
In Cobb, where there are fewer apartment buildings and little traditional subsidized housing, the most affordable places to live are trailer parks like Castle Lake, or older homes in the county's earliest developments--low-slung brick ranches and split-levels built in the 1960s and 1970s. Politics is a factor here too: Cobb County could have done more but refused to loosen restrictions that control how many unrelated adults can live in a single-family home. Critics say the law was racially motivated, aimed at immigrants who shared houses. "In essence, we limit people's ability to make unaffordable housing affordable," says Lisa Cupid, a Cobb County commissioner who tried and failed to change the 2007 ordinance.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/sprawled-out-in-atlanta-106500_Page3.html#ixzz31KRMYHOV
As affluent young professionals and older empty nesters flock back into cities across the country in search of better lifestyles, the suburbs left behind are increasingly stuck with a demographic--the working poor and struggling middle class--they were never built to accommodate. Many of these people don't have cars, and many of them can't even easily make it to the bus. In fact, the Brookings Institute has found, fewer than 50 percent of poor suburbanites in metro Atlanta even have access to transit, and what they have is limited.
Bus service in Clayton County, which has a 21 percent poverty rate, was canceled outright in 2010. There is no regular mass transit in exurban counties like Paulding or Bartow. In Cherokee County, there are just two fixed bus routes along with a few park-and-ride connections to the Xpress regional bus system, which brings suburban commuters to downtown and midtown Atlanta. If you don't live or work near one of these nodes, you're out of luck.
Read more: politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/sprawled-out-in-atlanta-106500_Page4.html.
May 8, 2014
The sound of Formula One F1
Andy Cowell, the leader of the Mercedes Formula One engine program, said that whereas the V-8 engines of the past were so loud that all that could be heard was "angry noise," today there is a music to the engine function.
"You just take your earplugs out," he said. "Instead of it being painful unless you had earplugs in, now you can almost enjoy the sound, the musicality of it."
"Every time, I hear the compressor spin up and spin down as the driver rolls out of the garage," Cowell added, "and he puts a little bit of throttle on, and you hear the compressor come up and there's a 'whoosh,' as the compressor comes up, and the lift-off into the corner, there is a higher pitch, a higher frequency musicality to it."
SFO much more tech-centric than NYC
San Francisco is much more of a company town. Go into any bar in San Francisco and you will hear people talking about their start-up, or a battle they recently had with a line of code. Stop by a coffee shop in some neighborhoods here and you will be surrounded by venture capitalists being pitched a new idea for a new app. All of these people rarely, if ever, interact with people outside the tech world.
Unfair? Sure, but we are talking about glossy magazine stereotypes here.
In New York, if you meet someone who works in tech you feel like you've met a long-lost relative. Bars, coffee shops and restaurants are a mishmash of people from vastly different industries.
The lack of diversity between social groups in San Francisco isn't going to change anytime soon, as the number of tech employees in the Bay Area is only going to continue to rise. Ted Egan, chief economist for San Francisco's Controller's Office, recently said that in the early-90s, tech workers made up less than 1 percent of city workers in San Francisco. In 2000, tech employees had risen to 3 percent of the workforce. By 2013, that number had passed 6 percent.