Category: writing

blogs.reuters.com……

blogs.reuters.com……

blogs.reuters.com……

What follows are some remarks I intend to make on Friday Oct 21 2011 at a panel on global risk organized by GARP and the Federal…

The sun’s gravity pulls at all parts of the planet, and the bits of earth closer to the sun get pulled harder than the bits…

This is an extended version of a review I wrote on Amazon for 

I went to the NY Film Festival for the first time in years last night and saw 

In this 

I came across 

Having been a scientist, one of my major pet peeves is the naïve use of science. Let me give you several examples. The influential biologist…

On my way to New York from South Africa in the Sixties, I stopped in Israel. It was midsummer, and in Ramat Gan where I…

For a couple of years now I’ve had a bad feeling about the field of finance. Though I often inveighed against the mechanical use of…

If God had only had a committee of business writers to help him, I think he could have done a better job: Single AuthorThe Committee…

I grew up in a post-WWII world where, temporarily, because of their capacity to create devices that wreak destruction, physicists had lots of influence in…

Capitalism depends on lending and borrowing, and hence on banks. In that sense banks are a utility, like 

The internecine arguments by economists in the daily papers show that a good part of economics is about what is good; and how to achieve…

Theories deal with the world on its own terms, absolutely. Models are metaphors, relative descriptions of the object of their attention that compare it to…

The big quant boom began in the mid-’80s, when investment firms started attracting venerable names like Emanuel Derman, a South African-born physicist described by Patterson…

I have been working for the last few months on a book about the way people are compelled to theorize and to build models of the…

Emanuel Derman expected to feel a letdown when he left particle physics for a job on Wall Street in 1985. After all, for almost 20…

The complex financial models that got us into this mess too often mask human nature behind false limitations of risk Whirring away at the center…

When I was in grade school we used to build model airplanes out of kits. The frame was made out precut pieces of balsa wood,…

Today’s economic turmoil, it seems, is an implicit indictment of the arcane field of financial engineering — a blend of mathematics, statistics and computing. Its…

This is a noble proposal, but I remain a bit of a skeptic with respect to the ability of a cohort of scientists and economists…

The truth is that computers are created by humans. They are not superintelligent. Even on Wall Street, they merely count very fast at the behest…

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and…