I met Cathy in Cambridge when she spoke at MIT a few years ago. This is  re-posted from Naked Capitalism.  Cathy’s whole TED Talk can be watched after the fold. Data Scientist Cathy O’Neil: “Algorithms Are Opinions Embedded in Code” Cathy O’Neil has a PhD in mathematics from Harvard and is the author of the […]

Robert Waldmann points to Song of PI:

Part III – How to think about time series data. For reference:Part II  Federal Spending as a Fraction of GDP Part I  Federal Spending Growth Some commentors to the previous posts have rightly concluded that I consider spending under Obama in the context of historical trends.  In fact, if you don’t consider historical trends, you […]

A post like this really shouldn’t be necessary, but part of the right wing canard that Obama has been a profligate spender is based on spending as a percentage of GDP. It looks like this – Graph 1. Graph 1.  Fed Expenditures/GDP Sure enough, by the end of Clinton’s term the ratio had fallen from […]

Via David Zetland’s Aguanomics comes this reminder (1959) of ‘why math is fun’ worked for kids.  He didn’t see it till taking calculus.  Can you imagine it being produced now?