Via NY Times ( For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics) “The key is to let computers do what they are good at, which is trawling these massive data sets for something that is mathematically odd,” said Daniel Gruhl, an I.B.M. researcher whose recent work includes mining medical data to improve treatment. “And that makes it easier for humans to do what they are good at — explain those anomalies.

The man who conforms never transforms

Thanks to Sanjiv Sir’s forward, this note on financial models is one of my best reads till date, on the crucial differences between a Physics based Model and a Financial Model. Why should a financial modeler be extra cautious in whatever he/she does and not carried out away by math jazz is something that is well brought out by the paper by Andrew Lo. _If Tycho, Kepler, Galileo and Newton had been confronted with such “quasi-periodic” data for the cyclical paths of the planets, it may have taken centuries, not years, of observational data for them to arrive at the same level of understanding of planetary motion that we have today.

Applied math is too important to be left to pure math types - Paul Samuelson

Look at some of the numbers … Its a scary picture! Massive Option ARM resets in 2010 Extremely tight lending norms leads to lesser demand for housing and further home price fall A total of 6,130,000 U.S. workers had been unemployed for 27 weeks or more in December 2009. In fact, it is more than double the 2,612,000 U.S. workers who were unemployed for a similar length of time in December 2008.