Asked about the motivation for recent cyberattacks on the Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system, banking security consultant Shane Shook said
These hacks specifically target financial institutions because smaller efforts result in much larger thefts. It’s much more efficient than stealing from consumers.
Shades of Slick Willie.
The BBC has a surprising headline:
Leading financial institutions welcomed a crackdown on tax dodging? That’s a surprise. Which institutions are these? Goldman Sachs? Deutsche Bank? Maybe UBS? Well, no. What they mean are International Financial Institutions (capitalised), which is a different thing from financial institutions (such as banks) that happen to act internationally and have the world economy by the throat. Government institutions. Somewhat less surprising.
Even the reference to “financial institutions” (plural) is misleading, since the only institution that is mentioned by name in the article is the IMF. Maybe the World Bank requested anonymity.
I strongly appreciate the importance of a reputation for probity.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
So many vague accusations and suspicions can float around in everyday life where the best basis for judgement is to appeal to prior probability. But this goes too far:
Mossack Fonseca says it has operated beyond reproach for 40 years and never been accused or charged with criminal wrong-doing.
Mossack Fonseca has just mislaid 11 million documents that show its complicity in a vast web of tax evasion through secret accounts in Panama. Even to say that it has operated legally would be stretching credulity. To say that it has been “beyond reproach”… well, I suppose it’s technically true, since no one knew enough about them to reproach them. Similarly a master burglar, when finally caught with his home full of stolen jewels and cash, could say, “This is an outrage. No one has ever cast such aspersions on my good name.”
I passed this shop recently near the train station in Leamington Spa:
Fireworks and upholstery foam. It sounds like a joke that would come up after insurance underwriters have been up drinking all night.
I’ve been on Sardinia for the past few days. In the supermarket I noticed this: 
Of course, in Italian the words caffeine and coffee are more similar than in English, but I never would have thought they would invent what seems like a nonsense word — deteinato — as an adjective for decaffeinated tea. A bit like the way broadcasting on television became, in English, telecast.
Baroness Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College London, has warned against new legislation that would make it easier to establish private universities.
Sweeping general legislation might make it easier to set up a really small, innovative, educationally wonderful institution, but it’s much more likely to mean we end up with the American-style catastrophe.
There are all kinds of catastrophes in America, many of them due to inadequate public oversight over the private sector. I’d be on her side if she were using the US as a bogeyman to warn us against conservative tendencies in healthcare, policing, schooling… pretty much anything. Not universities, or, at least, not in such a blanket fashion. It’s not clear, either, whether she is concerned primarily with improving educational opportunities or with national brand management, with a broad array of institutions “damaging the UK’s reputation for higher education”.
I think you would be hard pressed to convince anyone that private universities overall have damaged the US reputation in higher education.
From John Holbo I got this link to weird libertarian rantings by a financial journalist I never heard of. I was particularly struck by this Randian comment
Maybe we should shut Wall Street down for 24 hours, see how everybody who blames Wall Street for everything likes that.
Well, what would happen? I think I know a fair amount about the role of financial markets in the economy, and while I don’t consider them useless, I really can’t see what the problem would be if they were shut down for 24 hours. Not only that, I’m not even sure what their staunchest defenders might claim the problem would be.
In fact, didn’t we try this experiment already? The NYSE, and pretty much all the New York financial industry got shut down for several days or a week after the 9/11 attacks. Did anyone mind? I’ve heard a lot of commentary about the impact of 9/11, and I’ve never once heard anyone even suggest that there had been negative consequences to closing the financial markets for a week.
Journalist Simon Jenkins has launched a broadside against the teaching of maths in school, or at least against taking it seriously. He goes further than Andrew Hacker, who argues prominently for a focus on more concrete mathematical skills.
No one would argue that pupils should not be able to add, subtract and multiply. But I studied higher maths, from calculus to number theory, and have forgotten the lot. All the maths I have needed comes from John Allen Paulos’s timeless manual, Innumeracy. It is mostly how to understand proportion and risk, and tell when a statistician is trying to con you.
Presumably, once you know how to count to 1000 you’ve learned enough. (I’m wondering about this claim about his having “studied higher maths”. At least according to Wikipedia his university subjects were philosophy, politics, and economics. Now, I have no doubt that some people can learn very advanced mathematics in their spare time and understand it wonderfully. I wouldn’t even object to them saying they had “studied” the subject. But if your private study of mathematics left you with no memory of what you thought you had learned, that suggests that perhaps the fault was in your mode of study, and not in the subject. It’s rather like someone who says, “There’s no point learning to swim. I spent years on it, and I still can’t cross a pool without drowning.”
And why is it that statisticians are always accused of trying to “con” people? Is it that statisticians are particularly dishonest? Or is it that statisticians make things sufficiently clear that you can see where you might disagree with them. What subject would you study to understand when a journalist is trying to con you? There isn’t one, because the journalist’s con is ambiguous, and for the most part his claims are clouded in rhetorical smog.
Then there’s this:
I agree with the great mathematician GH Hardy, who accepted that higher maths was without practical application. It was rather a matter of intellectual stimulus and beauty.
Now, GH Hardy was indeed a great mathematician. He probably knew more about higher maths, from calculus to number theory, than even Simon Jenkins in his prime (before he forgot everything). But I think we can also agree that the man who wrote in 1940
No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years
did not have the most acute vision of the scope of mathematical application. In any case, Hardy’s goal was not to argue for or against the potential utility of mathematics, but rather to defend mathematics against the charge of uselessness — basically, to defend it against people like Jenkins.
Any league table that has China at the top, Britain at 26th and America at 36th tells me something more important than merely who is good at maths. If the US and Britain – among the most vigorous economies and most successful at science – are so bad at maths, it suggests their young people are applying themselves to something more useful. Chinese students are rushing to British and US universities to join them….
Maths is merely an easy subject to measure, nationally and internationally.
I am reminded of a bumper sticker I saw in Florida, responding to the popular boastful messages that parents would paste on, saying “My kid is an honor roll student at Dingdong Middle School”; the response said “My kid can beat up your honor roll student.” This is that bully-boy bumper sticker expanded to a national scale. Let the inferior races waste their time on mathematics. Our kids will learn how to be “vigorous” and kick their asses.
Jerome Karabel’s wonderful book The Chosen describes how elite universities in the US in the first half of the 20th century, dismayed at how the meritocratic elements of their admissions process were being abused by Jews, who were simply outperforming their gentile compatriots on admissions tests, leading to the freshman class at Harvard in 1922 being more than 20% Jewish. The response, driven by fear that Jews would “drive away the Gentiles” (in the words of Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell) was to de-emphasise quantitative measures and tests, in favour of the all-important “character” of applicants, a quality husbanded mainly by WASP families in exclusive boarding schools.
There’s kind of a Nietzschean flavor here: Mathematics has replaced Christianity as the intellectual tool used by the weak (nerds) to dominate their natural superiors (men of action and vigor like Jenkins). The soul-breaking catechism has been replaced by the binomial theorem. The priests are statisticians and bureaucrats, obsessed with counting and what can be measured. I am reminded of a remark by CS Lewis (I can’t find the exact quote now), that soft virtues like love and mercy had come to be more discussed than rigid virtues like chastity and courage, because it is easier to persuade yourself that you have been loving than that you have been chaste or courageous.
I’ve just been reading the novel Infinite Jest, and immediately struck by the originality of Wallace’s conception of corporate sponsorship. Universities such as my own have been willing to paste sponsors’ names on buildings, institutes, libraries, posts, scholarships, quadrangles, and pretty much anything else that is identifiable on a map or organisational chart, but they have left the temporal dimension barely touched. Whereas in Wallace’s novel the naming rights to years are sold off, so that a date might be referred to as 1 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar, we still name our terms for medieval feast days: Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity terms. Imagine if, instead, we had Nuffield Term, Sainsbury Term, and (Your-Name-Here) Term.
Of course, that is not the limit. (Of course!) There are periodic arguments in my subject over abandoning the dowdy name of “Statistics”. “Information science” and “Data science”are two alternatives that have been proposed. But if we are going to change our name, why not get paid for it? We could become the Department of GlaxoSmithKline. Across the way the Computing Laboratory would become the Department of Google. And what we now know as the Department of Mathematics would be more recognisable to prospective students as the Department of Goldman Sachs. They’re not fooling anyone.
It is decided: The Rhodes statue remains at Oriel College. What was promised to be a long and thoughtful reconsideration of the appropriateness of honouring a notorious racist in the facade of an educational institution of the twenty-first century was short-circuited by threats to withdraw £100 million pounds in donations. The ruling class has spoken! Surely, at the least, we can agree that this demolishes the notion that Rhodes is a mere quaint historical figure, whose ideology is of no concern. Clearly there are quite a few mighty pillars of the establishment who feel that an assault on the honour due to a man who brought great wealth and power to Britain through dispossessing, subjugating, and frankly murdering members of what he considered “childish” and “subject races”.
Most bizarre is the appearance of an extreme form of the standard political-correctness jiu-jitsu, whereby students raising their voices in protest constitute an assault upon free speech, while the superannuated poobahs who tell them to shut up until they have their own directorship of a major bank are the guardians of liberty. And we academic hired hands are neglecting our pedagogical duty if we don’t help them tie on the gag.
As I remarked before, they talk as though the protesters sought to excise the name of Rhodes from the history books with knives and acid, rather than proposing that the Rhodes statue be removed from its place of honour to a museum, where it can be viewed neutrally among other historical artefacts.
There is an argument that says, the Rhodes Must Fall argument points to general iconoclasm. What statue would stand if we judge the attitudes of our past heroes by contemporary standards. Putting aside the question of whether a complete lack of granite equestrians would impoverish modern urban life or undermine public morals, there is a vast difference between a historical figure who is honoured for great accomplishments and services to his country, but who shared in what we now consider benighted attitudes of his time; and Rhodes, whose accomplishments consist in dispossession and subjugation of other races. Take away the racism and imperialism from Rhodes and nothing remains.
Obviously, different views of the Rhodes statue are possible. What I find extraordinary is the accusation that even to raise the issue is somehow improper. That this is presented as a defence of free speech only demonstrates how the implicit critique has driven some portion of the elite into unreasoning frenzy.
Common Infirmities 