Anonymous

Hackernet.IN

I am on a mailing list from Business Insider and against my better judgement (which often comes out when the internet is involved) I followed a link to an article on The Sexiest Scientists Alive. There are 50 scientists listed, and scientist number 43 is Clio Cresswell, a mathematician at the ... Read More

Back in 2009 I posted on the risk of GPS satellite positioning system degrading over the next few years, both in terms of coverage and accuracy, due a decrease in the number of operational satellites. This risk was the main finding of an audit performed by the Government Accountability Office ... Read More

Ghost in the Wires, Mitnick & SimonDisclaimer: Kevin Mitnick is a personal friend, and this review is based on a late galley copy. I have no financial interest in this book. The above link is an affiliate link.I have been reading books about Kevin Mitnick for years. Finally, we get ... Read More

I am currently in-between positions, somewhat happily, and are casting my net of interest a bit wider than my traditional roles in IT Security and Risk. One position that caught my eye from a global reinsurer in town was the role of Earthquake Expert within their Natural Catastrophe department (or ... Read More

Last year I posted on The Fabled 25 Sigma Event, referring to a quote from David Viniar, then CFO of Goldman Sachs, who was attempting to describe the magnitude of the movements in the financial markets. Mr. Viniar probably did not fully understand the implications of what he was saying, ... Read More

I am stepping out more of late, meeting new people and doing new things, which has seen more doing far less blogging over the last year. One of the site I use to find things to do is Meetup in the Zurich locality. I received the following email from the ... Read More

Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at bit.ly, a large link shortening service, has done an analysis on some of their link data to get an idea of how long links remain “alive” or “popular”. The measure was to look at 1,000 links and graph the number of hits that a link ... Read More

I recently came across two smallish examples of where randomness was the solution to two perplexing problems. That is, rolling the dice seems to help you out of a situation where a planned method was not giving you what you wanted. The first issue is the problem of how to ... Read More

A recent study has examined the prevalence of grade inflation at US universities over the last 100 years or so, and has found some identifiable patterns. The chart below shows the increase in grades between various types of schools in the primary colors, with the grey representing (unnamed individual schools) ... Read More

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have recently published research into social networks which indicates  that when just 10 percent of a network steadfastly holds a given belief, then that belief will eventually be adopted by the majority of the society. These group of 10% “believers” are referred to as a ... Read More