Texan black swan

“Un événement improbable aux conséquences d’autant plus désastreuses que l’on ne s’y est pas préparé.” This weekend, there was a short article in Le Monde about the Harvey storm as a Texan illustration of Taleb’s black swan. An analysis that would imply every extreme event like this “once-in-a-thousand year” event (?) can be called a […]

the latest Significance: Astrostats, black swans, and pregnant drivers [and zombies]

Reading Significance is always an enjoyable moment, when I can find time to skim through the articles (before my wife gets hold of it!). This time, I lost my copy between my office and home, and borrowed it from Tom Nichols at Warwick with four mornings to read it during breakfast. This December issue is […]

Of abridged black swans

There is a piece in The Economist special report on the future of finance (January 24h 2009) that could save you reading the whole The Black Swan book. It summarises so nicely and crisply the book while never ever mentioning it that I suspect it could have been written by the author. (The Economist has […]

Of black swans and bleak prospects

Following a review by Dennis Lindley in Significance (March 2008) and several entries on Andrew Gelman’s blog, I decided to read The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb in order to check by myself why the analyses of those two (admittedly very different) Bayesians were so dissonant. Not very suprisingly, […]

Back swans

“Traders to Teachers is designed to turn unemployed finance professionals into math teachers in three months.” Ok, an easy pun related to earlier posts… There is an article in The New York Times of yesterday about unemployed traders turning into math teachers with the help of a New York State program. This is quite interesting […]