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If you're going to take ODEs and PDEs then the more abstract linear algebra will be needed rather than the more computational matrix algebra. Also, as the previous poster indicated, there's a chasm between computational math and the more conceptual and proof-oriented real analysis, measure...

Politics is such a dirty word that "politicizing monetary policy" is portrayed as something undesirable. The Fed is a private cabal -- with no real democratic oversight. Paul's proposal has the same chance as a snowball remaining intact in hell.

That's correct for various reasons having nothing to do with racism or white supremacism (such as wanting similar people around you with whom you can socialise and wanting people why can speak fluent and idiomatic English). I wouldn't be surprised if there is some bias towards white Americans...

For those interested in the political, military, and geostrategic backdrop to financial markets, I would recommend "The Global Minotaur" by Yanis Varoufakis. I've had the book for a while but the reason it came to mind was a book review written by someone I know...

I didn't know the book prior to your mentioning it. I think it has been published only in Danish. Some good books I've found in English are 1) Probability-Through-Problems 2) Measure-Integral-Probability 3) Probability Theory in Finance. Dineen. AMS. 4) Introduction Measure theoretic...

What is your own level and what books have you found so far? I presume your interest is in measure theory directed towards probability?

Agreed. The BBA is going to have to cut corners. If it doesn't even include a course in real analysis, how far and how carefully are people going to go in areas like stochastic processes, PDEs or numerical analysis? Crucial chunks will either be diluted and watered-down or simply omitted altogether.

You can't in the short term. An elephant has to be eaten one spoon at a time. Any quick answer I gave would be worthless. One thing I've noticed in every area of study is that everyone is in such mad haste to reach the peak that they pass over the foundations without mastering them properly...

The veteran programmer/CS major can't implement even bad and inefficient code for numerical methods: he doesn't understand numerical methods. He and you are applying for different kinds of jobs. The programming skills will also differ -- you as a prospective quant will be interested in those...

The answer is you probably would if you could. General coders are plentiful, but only a small subset can code scientifically (i.e., can marry coding to numerical analysis). I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that a quant is primarily a scientific coder. So numerical analysis will...

What do you mean by "refining your C++?" What have you done with it, what can you do with it? If your question isn't precisely worded, how can anyone answer it?

Article in the Daily Mail.

And an interesting article by Paul Mason.

Interesting essay by James Meadway.

Excellent trilogy and narrates the transition from European feudalism to early modern (i.e., mercantile) capitalism. Along the same lines but more modern and covering more ground is Wallerstein's "The Modern World System." Four volumes are out and a couple more still to come (but unlikely to be...

It is, see here. I personally am weary of American and British brand name universities, where the brand name serves only to extort exorbitant fees for a mediocre product.

If they really teach what they indicate they will in the program overview, it will be a very rigorous and very comprehensive program.

More Keiser. I could do with a stiff whiskey. http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-305-max-keiser/

You can bypass C. In C++ concentrate on things like (ordinary) pointers and function pointers. And memory management.

Always a pleasure to listen to Max Keiser. A 3 1/2 minute video here where he explains the insolvency of the major banks.

Also a bit of discussion on pp. 77-78 of the 2nd edition of Musiela and Rutkowski's "Martingale Methods in Financial Modelling."

There is roughly 3/4 of a page's worth of explanation on pp.96-97 of Williams' "Probability with Martingales." "Previsible processes" are also known as "predictable processes" -- under which name you might find more references in the literature. There's a bit of discussion on pp.226-227 of...

A transcript of a podcast interview Orlov gave a few weeks ago. I particularly like his description of economics. http://cluborlov.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/from-alpha-to-omega-podcast.html

Interesting article in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/08/why-uk-no-longer-superpower I'll buy the book when it comes out late next month: Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014

I follow Dmitry Orlov's blog assiduously. He posts a new essay every Tuesday. Here is his latest, where he cites Taleb. http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/06/fragility-and-collapse-slowly-at-first.html#more

An insightful review of Graeber's book by Benjamin Kunkel at LRB: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n09/benjamin-kunkel/forgive-us-our-debts

Merged with Westfield College some years back to become QMW. It's about a half mile walk from Mile End tube station. Jobs in general are over. But that could be the topic of another thread. The West has moved from industrial economy to post-industrial service economy (to some extent) on its...

Those people who boast of putting in 80 hours a week -- what are they doing? Sitting in meetings? Writing memos? On the road or in the air going from one location to another? With such long hours most of what they do is going to be mechanical and repetitive -- it can't be creative and...

Good idea.

This is what Brown and Hesketh argued in their 2004 book, The Mismanagement of Talent (review here). But there's even more going on than Brown and Hesketh indicate: I prefer to see the talk of employment patterns embedded in a more panoramic meta-narrative of the future direction of Western...

Higher education has been sold under false pretences all over the world but particularly in the US and UK (Blair's daft target was to get one of every two youngsters into higher education). It gets politicians off the hook with regard to pervasive unemployment, stagnant (if not falling) wages...

Interesting article in the Guardian:

Quite right. High unemployment among the young is a global phenomenon -- which ignited both the "Arab Spring" and the Occupy movement (though the latter is more of a joke). It is also high in Europe, particularly among Club Med. The difference in the United States is high and non-dischargeable...

It's a buyer's market, that's why. Employers can be as picky as they want and still find people measuring up to their exacting specs. Furthermore the job market is not going to change for the foreseeable future (if ever). The WSJ article is advising young grads to be more accepting of their...

I learnt it as a teenager but in reality the curve for total cost is not concave upwards nor is the curve for total revenue concave downwards. If memory serves, Steve Keen demolishes this (and many other economics arguments) in Debunking Economics, but I'm too tired to pull the book out of my...

Does anyone actually use this? Or was it created because some economist finally understood what the first derivative means?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-07/billion-dollar-traders-quit-wall-street-for-hedge-funds.html "Wall Street's biggest banks have lost almost two dozen of their most-profitable credit traders in the past 13 months as regulators limit the kind of risk-taking that amplified the housing...

Too vague. How limited? And does the MFE presuppose skill with C++?

This was made three or four years back. If it was true then, it's doubly so today.

A case can be made for reintroducing a slave society where at least those who work get board and lodging. During the Great Depression teachers used to work for just that. There are no jobs and there is no "recovery." I rather liked Max Keiser's take on the unemployment figures: And I agree...

Complex won't give you any problems -- there are maybe ten or twelve major results in elementary complex variables -- Cauchy-Riemann, Cauchy's theorem, residue theorem, Rouche's theorem, Laurent expansions, and a few other results and ideas. After getting through it, you will be a wiser person...

With regard to an MFE, ignore the overall reputation of the school -- or at least don't make it a primary factor. There are many second-rate MFE programs that have tried to piggyback on the overall strength of their universities. Conversely, Baruch is a very strong MFE program -- but as an...

They were the hot thing at the time -- lots of e-commerce programs were being offered with unis falling over themselves to introduce them. The leading MBA programs had e-commerce courses which were heavily subscribed to (often even the MBA could be tailored to an e-commerce concentration). Then...

It's a more complex reality. On this forum Dominic Connor has a number of times pointed out that it's not clear how much value a program adds. Haas isn't taking second-rate people earning $35,000 a year with degrees from some second-tier school and transforming them into $150,000 quants. They're...

You're in the wrong place. The areas of interest to you are known as 1) Management (or equivalently, cost) accounting and 2) Managerial Finance. In my time books like Stephen Lumby's "Investment Appraisal and Related Decisions" were useful. These areas are far removed from quant finance.

Clearly 100 minutes (just kidding).

I'm a disciple of Paul Feyerabend so I don't believe in "scientific method." I'm also a disciple of Bruno Latour, so I don't believe in "empiricism" either. But the thing is each discipline trains thought differently. Doubtless you've seen people who are subtle and profound in one area who...

I don't know what is meant by "getting trained in economics" just as I don't know what people here mean by "being good at coding." These are vague and general statements. Surely it doesn't mean working through compendious and flawed texts like Samuelson and Lipset? Is what is meant "a framework...

It's inevitable. You've got people coming from the narrow and cloistered disciplines of physics, math, engineering and computing, often not even comfortable with English, and you're expecting them to have an interest in, and understanding of, Western economic structure, finance, and politics. It...

This is analogous to answering "What is x?" with "x = y + z," where neither y nor z have been defined. What's the nature of these "leadership" and "communication" skills? It's a great mystery to me.

There is now a glut: capitalism tends to produce gluts. Someone here -- Ken Abbott, was it? -- recently pointed out that there were only a handful of schools a decade back and those who graduated had no problem lining up jobs. But then more and more schools started to get on the bandwagon as it...

Pick up and read a basic text in probability if you haven't already taken a first course. The course description above seems to assume a first course.

Yes, your instincts are good.

Garry Kasparov agreeing with Peter Thiel here:

Is the following excerpt (taken from this presentation) strictly accurate? I'm not competent to judge but I have my doubts.

There used to be a time -- though they've stopped doing it -- when they would sneak in an unsolved research problem into the exam papers. And occasionally these problems would be solved -- by one of your freakishly clever people -- under exam constraints.

I'm looking at the Part III math courses for 2011-2012 here: http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/postgrad/mathiii/descriptions.pdf It remains impressive. I doubt any other school in Britain is offering so many worthwhile high-standard math courses. And even to be prepared to take these assumes a very...

I can only speak for pure math. Part III and the post-Part III courses bridge the gap (or used to, in my day) between undergrad courses and research frontiers. The courses in algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, number theory, representation theory, elliptic curves, and so on did just that...

If you rephrase the original question as "In the job market in general is an Oxbridge 2:1 considered at par with a First from anywhere else?", I can answer that as "Yes, it is considered at least at par."

There are usually quotas set aside for such minorities under some sort of diversity or affirmative action program. That these are also unfair is another matter. The ones really getting squeezed out -- at top-tier schools -- are white American applicants. Some (or most) of these countries are...

That's my opinion as well, at least with regard to pure math. The courses are structured and taught far better. I went to King's College London and the courses were a joke. In number theory the prof was in the USA for half the semester and left the teaching to an unprepared PhD student of his...

I agree but in status-conscious Britain it does matter. Not only in the City but in academia as well. Shouldn't be this way but it is.

This is a fascinating essay on the tragedy that took place at Oikos "University" some days back:

Yes, you rebalance at the end of each year to keep the money equally apportioned among the seven commodities. Otherwise, as you say, the total portfolio return would be just the average of the commodities' total return. By rebalancing, the fact that the standard deviation of the portfolio is...

Why not? Go ahead.

But what about the MFE bubble?

If one has a strong sense of integrity, one should avoid finance altogether. If one expects finance to be clean and expect that it does not have a negative impact on people all over the world, one must be naive. Maybe some quants are -- they don't see further than equations and lines of code in...

Mr. Smith seems to be an extraordinarily naive gent. GS has been doing this for years. His op-ed in the NYT will create a stir for a day or two, then fade from public memory. Meanwhile I doubt any financial firm in the US will hire him again. In the US at least, to get along you've got to go along.

(Lord) Sugar and (Sir Richard) Branson both quit school at the age of 16 or 17. Likewise, the deceased (Lord) Goldsmith, who used his poker winnings as a teenager as seed capital.

How does independent component analysis (ICA) compare to PCA? Surely we should prefer the former?

The impression I get is that it's taught mindlessly: the meaning of principal components analysis is rarely discussed. Ideally an instructor would want to start with two variables, followed by three variables, and work through some examples in detail, explaining the significance of PCA. Jackson...

In the Guardian: Now that's the way to live.

Interesting article by Philip Mirowski on how mainstream economists have survived with their reputations untarnished: And also this excerpt:

Many of the prospective MFE students posting here seem to be suffering from the same misapprehension.

Yes, paying several hundred dollars for a good suit usually works out better in the long term (provided you take care of the suit). Cheap suits are poor value. On a side note, I was talking to a retired construction friend of mine earlier this evening. Apparently all the contracts were really...

And this matters if you're "networking" -- i.e., you need a network of influential contacts. If you're at the top of the heap, or a self-made entrepreneur of any kind, maybe you don't need it (though from experience I've seen even entrepreneurs need to "network").

Andy Schiff responds. And demonstrates the validity of Einstein's theory of relativity.

Peer pressure seems to be the driver. What can one say about bankers who've been pulling in $2m a year and have gone through all of it? What will they have to show after five or ten years? No real capital accumulation for sure. As I see it, for employees, certain jobs seem to have certain...

Hehe, he can afford to live poor (though the statement sounds paradoxical). For two reasons: 1) He's his own boss, so doesn't need to keep up appearances like anxious, striving, insecure, middle-class employees do (sending children to exclusive schools, going on expensive holidays, and...

Article at Bloomberg:

But it's not clear what the nature of these "profits" is. For example, lefties and liberals like to say that US corporations are sitting on $2 trillion. But they don't understand that this money cannot be employed as capital -- there is nowhere to invest it in the real economy. So are the...

The first one seemed the more interesting to me. An excerpt: As I see it, the increasing "financialisation" of the economy has served a purpose of camouflaging the general weakness and stagnation of the real economy. Before the crash of '08, finance accounted for 8% of GDP (up from 4% of...

Financial engineering has become like the online game Second Life: the money it deals with has no basis in reality. The ongoing crisis that started in the last part of 2007 and that continues through to today is because of the lack of relationship between the virtual world of financial...

Excellent post. One thing to add to the mix is the observation that in the next few years, the profession of financial engineering is going to change beyond all recognition (if it survives at all).

No. Java and C# shield you from things like pointers (by using them under the hood while you only use references), and take care of things like dynamic memory management. But you want to learn to do these things before you let a language do it for you. However, a case can be made for starting...

That's a good question. To what extent can the stochastic calculus used in finance be reconstituted in heuristic terms? I think -- like Wilmott -- that stochastic finance can and will be reconstituted on a heuristic basis (if it survives at all).

You are not being clear. If you have already worked through most of the concepts, why do want an expository book at all? And if you don't want an elementary book, what kind do you want?

*Shrug* -- typical financial engineering book, i.e., mediocre. It claims in the preface to be a text for advanced undergrads, grad students, and professionals. I don't think it can be used by the first category and even the second category will have problems with it. Professionals might like it...

Why not Stanislaw Ulam?

My comments here are not serious and I was curious to see it anyone would take the bait. You did. Analysis, incidentally, is not a revolution -- at least not by itself. Linear algebra, abstract algebra, topology, algebraic curves, diff eqs -- all can lay a claim to transforming a math student's...

I agree. He who knows nothing of Banach algebras is uncivilised. I sneer at all this talk of the difficulties of elementary analysis. The real math starts at a different level.

There are topics accessible to upper-division undergrads -- for instance, the Spectral Theorem for compact self-adjoint operators on Hilbert space, which is a generalisation of the finite-dimensional Spectral Theorem to the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space setting. The last third of Simmons'...

If the basic ideas of real analysis are covered in the calculus sequence, those who've taken the courses should not have any difficulty with the generalisation to metric and topological spaces: after all the definition of continuity in terms of open balls pulling back to open balls (or open sets...

After real analysis, complex analysis, which is aesthetically so much more satisfying, appeals to one's heart as well as to one's mind, and leaves one a richer and more complete human being. Though I concede that from the viewpoint of PDEs, functional analysis is of crucial importance.

Why do they trip up in analysis? Bad books? Not familiar with techniques of proof? Don't see the need for proving intuitively plausible results like intermediate value theorem and Rolle's theorem? Teaching is poor? If a savvy student surreptitiously buys one or two back-up texts and gets a bit...

A coder's dreams here.

These well-paid managers with generic degrees in management and communications are a relic from another era (an era when you could come out of U with degrees like this and get taken on as a management trainee). Their numbers are declining. And once they lose their jobs (because of outsourcing...

So, for a non-tenure-track assistant professorship at a very second-tier university, should show outstanding promise and/or accomplishments. Interesting.

Francis Fukuyama interviewing Peter Thiel here. This is a real gem.

You mean a job. Does anyone have a career anymore? They want to see your thought processes. Which usually means being able to apply ideas in nimble ways and hopefully coming up with Aha! insights. A stock problem of this sort is removing two corner squares on the same long diagonal of an 8x8...

I won't say anything about the feasibility of doing an MFE (as I'm sceptical about the prospects of the financial industry). There's seldom one right way of thinking about mathematical problems. Often the elegant methods are dead ends while the messier and longer solutions lead to further...

It will still stand you in good stead. Yes. Those statements are "doublespeak." They're all insisting it's "not required" while (with the exception of Chicago) not saying it would be an advantage nor specifying how much of an advantage it would be. Incidentally, as pointed out by Andy, one...

In what area? If it is something like algebraic number theory or algebraic topology it will not be much (though still greater than zero, as it will at least demonstrate tenacity and a modicum of skill at coming up with ideas). Any area of applied math (PDE, numerical analysis, stochastic) and...

Second-tier. Its management school is well-known and established.

What about obviously 2nd tier places like the universities of Ohio, Wisconsin, and Oregon?

Yes, and/or they have more cachet than local institutions. Thus a grad degree from Swampwater University may be absolutely useless in the USA -- but will still have marketable value in India and China. Indian and Chinese students know this, and so does Swampwater University.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/285160/how-elite-business-recruiting-really-works-jim-manzi

They didn't say that. What they said was this is how globalisation was sold: the Americans would do the high-value-added design and marketing work and the Third-Worlders would wield the screwdrivers. Then they proceed to demolish this line of reasoning by showing how Korea, China and India have...

At 2nd and 3rd tier places, I'm convinced the placement and salary levels are horrendous. With regard to MIT, the $30,000 figure may have been an outlier, or someone who returned to India or China.

I am sure people factor this into their calculations. But the problem is often lack of worthwhile alternatives. So they are willing to chance it, hoping, dreaming, praying, they will be one of the lucky ones. What the article is saying is that the "expected payout" is going down -- but buyers of...

This is an interesting article based on the recent book -- The Global Auction -- by Brown, Lauder, and Ashton.

For languages like C# and C++, several months if not a year or two. It's not just learning the basics of the syntax -- though for a newcomer even this can be daunting. It's enough mastery to be able to code fluently without needing to open a book all the time. It's the difference between someone...

As far as I know, the chartered accountancy firms hire all sorts of grads they train as chartered accountants. You don't need an accounting degree to get hired as a trainee CA. In England they look -- or used to look -- at your A level grades, particularly your math grade, as these gave them a...

It might also behoove universities to collectively ask themselves about their standards of schooling if college graduates can't write a simple f***ing essay. That is to say, if they can't make a list of pertinent ideas, tie them together conceptually, and flesh out the outline into a coherent...

Article by Gillian Tett in today's FT.

That may be true in general but invariably the MBA and MFE programs are self-financing and tend to be nice little earners for the universities and for the departments hosting them. One plausible explanation might be that enrollments fell dramatically(?).

Look: You asked, I answered. I don't want to be dragged into another damn fool debate.

No, but were he raised in Africa, he might not be able to fully develop his potential. And were his descendants to continue living there, there would be a perceptible decline in abstract intelligence (as defined in the West) over the generations because the environment, via natural selection...

It's not just true for Africa -- it's also true for South Asia. The Indians, Pakistanis, and Bengalis coming to the USA (and to the West in general) for higher education are among the best their countries have to offer. Sure, there are stories about how Indians who got rejected by their IITs...

That's one way. There are good books on C like Kochan's "Programming in C." Or the book by Prata, "C Primer Plus." But it's also possible to start straight with C++, provided the book does some hand-holding. One such is the book by Gaddis, "Starting Out with C++." The current edition is pricey...

He was a fine writer. I read "The Seven Sisters" many years back, along with "The Sovereign State of ITT" and "The Changing Anatomy of Britain," all of which were written during the '70s. For the oil industry I would recommend Engdahl's "A Century of War."

I've been a fan of Nitzan and Bichler for the last ten years. The following is a hilarious account of how an FT editor commissioned them to write a piece on differential accumulation but then didn't have the cojones to publish it:

I have no idea.

Nothing is wrong with it, but there are a number of other good books on C++ which hardly get mentioned. Deitel I don't like either. But Prata is good, Gaddis is good, so is Josuttis, so is Koenig and Moos' "Accelerated C++."

What's so great about the Eckel books that people here keep recommending them? Josuttis is fine, with Prata for backup. If you're a newbie to coding, Gaddis will hold your hand.

It's a Catch-22: those who would most like to emigrate are those least likely to have the money and skills to be able to do so. If you're skilled and/or moneyed enough to get accepted for immigration or work authorisation by, say, Germany, you probably already have a very good job in the USA or...

One argument might be that if the US had more generous social welfare provisions and wasn't slashing back on what little there has historically been, there might not be such emphasis on keeping costs low. Mexico and Canada are the easiest places to get to -- that makes sense. But another problem...

Makes sense. I don't see the US job market ever recovering and there's going to be a permanent underclass of unemployed and poorly paid partly employed ("precariat"). This, together with the USA's threadbare social welfare provisions, makes staying in the USA completely unenticing.

If you flesh out your application with some convincing details (showing that you know what a trading job entails and that you can make connections between what will be taught and what is actually done on the trading floor) you will be making a real case for your candidacy. That's what they want...

So tell them you want to be a trader and present some halfway convincing reasons why an MFE will assist you in becoming one, or becoming a better one. Show them you already know a bit about trading and present some plausible reasons how knowing about things like GARCH (or whatever) will either...

Interesting article in RT. Note, however, that RT specialises in bashing the US.

I'm surprised Notices published this: it could be a brochure for DE Shaw. And some of the essay sounds pretty silly:

A fine piece on Putin's Russia by Eric Walberg. In passing, I unequivocally recommend Walberg's recent book, "Postmodern Imperialism," which I think I bought for under $20.

Better than Yeltsin I think.

I think perhaps Nynorsk is a little closer to Danish.

They are roughly the same: Swedes and Norwegians can understand each other's languages (hardly surprising considering the two countries are adjacent and Norway was under Swedish control until 1905). The two main versions of Norwegian are Bokmål ("book language") and Nynorsk ("new Norwegian")...

Is it possible to get admitted to an MS in applied math when you only have a minor in math in your undergrad?

Looks like the authors are not defining "financial recession." In my exceedingly humble opinion, this is not a recession/depression brought about by financial excesses: rather, the excesses covered up for a while deep-set problems with the real economy by means of asset-price bubbles. When these...

For big-ticket items where there are real savings, typically only one or two are allotted per store -- which the public knows, thus explaining the mad stampedes. Retail is taking a whacking. People have been holding back the last couple of months to save a few dollars on Black Friday.

What's the Black Friday casualty list so far? I hear someone used pepper spray in LA but I haven't heard of any other casualties. I didn't buy anything either -- they're not going to elicit a Pavlovian response from me by decreasing the price of some superfluous gizmo by a few dollars. I'm still...

I think for thousands of years the older generation has been saying the younger one is lazy, undisciplined and feckless.

Interesting article at Takimag.com.

She created one-dimensional characters because she couldn't write worth a damn and they served merely as the mouthpieces of her half-baked ideas. Her psychopathic conception of society antecedes pearls of wisdom like Ivan Boesky's/Gordon Gekko's statement that "greed is good." Societies...

In real life those who are politically connected inside a firm tend not to get fired in the same manner as those who are not connected -- even if the latter are superior performers making more money for the firm. Political logic works differently to technical, profit-maximising logic...

Sure. Classics like "Atlas Shrugged" can compare with Tolstoy's "War and Peace."

Sounds like Friedman was another disciple of Ayn Rand (along with Alan Greenspan).

I've been following Zhirinovsky for 20 years. This is another great video, where Z demonstrates the way American politicians should be treated:

Looking at the candidates for 2012 makes my heart sink. For example, look at Herman Cain's performance here. I think I would rather vote for Zhirinovsky. Or Putin.

Tell them the only god you worship is Mammon.

To paraphrase the words of a poster on this forum some years back, it will be a pig of a software job with some quant lipstick applied.

Fictitious paper wealth, you mean. And since late 2007, Western states have been co-opted into maintaining this pyramid of paper wealth -- no matter what the cost to everyone else (like austerity measures).

It's about money making money with superior information and insight. That's the way Brown describes it, without making excuses about some supposed social function it might serve. You might as well ask whether poker playing is socially unproductive.

Read Aaron Brown's book, "Red-Blooded Risk."

Though it has to be said that the part III courses are appreciably more difficult than the part II courses.

Can you get into the Part III with a mere upper second these days? Used to be you needed a first. Matter of fact I knew someone who got an upper second at Cambridge in math, got rejected for the Part III and ended up at Imperial -- a big step down.

The link below is with regard to Britain. http://equalityhumanrights.com/legal-and-policy/inquiries-and-assessments/inquiry-into-sex-discrimination-in-the-finance-sector/

Amusing exam response: This link is readable.

On top of lack of money and lack of status, there isn't even any security in a job as scientist. This is why Americans don't go for scientific careers and American academic departments are full of Asian graduate students. I don't know if science and engineering are dead in the USA but certainly...

There's scant guidance and encouragement during the freshman and sophomore years, when students are having to work through relatively unstructured and poorly-motivated 1000-page texts on calculus and basic physics, and attending classes filled with 100+ students.

That's already the case. M is saying it will become even more so. In addition, the political climate is changing and what impact that will have can only be negative.

The "99%" are among the world's top 10%. Funny how now they suddenly start making moral arguments about the rapacity of bankers when those same bankers and institutions (IMF) have been doing the same in the rest of the world for decades. I've got no sympathy for the so-called 99%. A fair number...

A couple of good essays today. One by Zizek in the Guardian. And another at Counterfire.

Interesting but demanding essay on the function of debt by Michael Hudson; he'll be delivering it as a talk in Berlin a couple of days from now.

Their shirts aren't ironed. Many look like they don't shower or shave regularly. I have come to realise my outlook and values are closer to the 1%. And what I feel about the 99% can be summed up with: "Let them eat cake."

A 6-page article on David Graeber in Businessweek.

The more I see of them the less I am impressed with them. Ignorant -- yet unwilling to listen or learn; unable to plan; poor taste in attire; and most importantly, atrocious taste in whiskey.

This issue of percentiles is pertinent. The movers and shakers of any country are usually concentrated among the top one or two percentiles. It's important they have some idea of the world they inhabit. Who gives a rat's ass what the other 98% think or know?

I agree. There's also this foolish idea floating around that since the US government and military are involved all over the world, ordinary Americans will have a better idea of the rest of the world than other people. It's a daft notion. An ordinary American has probably not even heard of...

Okay, I will try to name them roughly from west to east (and no cheating): Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas...

A review by Steve Sailer.

Domestic dissidence is now classed as "low-level terrorism." During the past decade, under the pretext of "terrorism," the USA has become ever more of a national security state where even citizens have very few rights (if any). They can even be assassinated by executive order. The FEMA camps, I...

Things happening in Oakland: http://ows.bylinebeat.com/post/11933577103/video-occupyoakland-live-steam Looks like they're using sound cannon. And apparently tear gas and rubber bullets as well.

British English. I override my spell-check all the time (e.g., "learnt instead of "learned", "recognise" instead of "recognize," "centre" instead of "center," "labour" instead of "labor." Here is the Daily Telegraph using "misspelt." BBC doing the same thing here. More here on the topic of...

I find myself supporting what you're saying. I don't want to be taxed to support someone else's health care -- even if it were a life and death situation. I'm not my brother's keeper in the USA. Medical costs keep soaring and I don't see why I should foot the bill in a nation of mutual...

The placard-holder is complaining about the influx of Spanish-speaking Mexicans into southern states -- Arizona, California, Texas. In these states, signs and notices can be found in both Spanish and English. And in many neighborhoods in cities like LA and Houston, you can't make yourself...

He's a Ron Paul type. I see a fair number of them among the Occupy-ers (but couldn't specify a percentage).

That fat multimillionaire buffoon, Michael Moore, is on CNN (Piers Morgan) at the moment, portraying himself as a champion of the 99%. A parasite on progressive causes. Heard that Susan Sarandon went to some Occupy in a chauffeur-driven limo -- and wasn't recognised. Limousine liberals like...

Not the same thing (even if thinking might be along the same lines). When I think of Tea Partiers I think of people like this, or the Tea Partiers telling the government not to interfere with Medicare (source). But I won't quibble on the issue: have it your way. Incidentally, and changing the...

You could find many stupid Occupy-ers. But I don't think you could find an intelligent Tea Partier.

I think Fixed Income Mathematics is a lucid book.

They like veggies in the abstract, just as they like nature in the abstract. But not if they have to do the dirty and detailed work that goes into growing veggies and maintaining nature

I've ordered a copy for myself. And the same question: Has anyone read it? Overall impression?

I prefer this one but from the surface I don't see anything wrong with the first (applied).

Dunno. What are the topics for each and what precisely are the differences other than those of topics (e.g., differences in emphasis, in rigor)?

Don't stress yourself out over measure theory. Real analysis without measure theory should be fine. You can teach yourself the measure theory you need as you go along -- it's not a difficult topic. Albeit it is a boring one, with the ratio of definitions to interesting theorems abysmally poor...

Pick up a copy of Capinski and Kopp's Measure, Integral and Probability. You should be fine. If you want to move at a faster clip, try the first few chapters of Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis.

Some places still use Principles of Mathematical Analysis. There are so many other introductory analysis books around today.

The shifts are long -- about 12 hours -- in very hot and humid weather (95 F) and often dealing with toxic pesticides and chemicals. In addition there's an emphasis on speed. Even young illegals often drop because of heat stress or the pressure of work. The pay can be as little as $4 an hour for...

Only in terms of the books (obviously). You don't need general topology (open sets, closed sets and definitions of continuity and compactness based on such sets; a fortiori you don't need Banach spaces either). The book should be called "Real Analysis II." It won't hurt you but you'd probably be...

I have both books (somewhere in my basement ...). The first one is okay and you need it. The second one (published by Cambridge, I think) is something you do not need and you can safely avoid it.

OWS crowd doesn't know what a derivative is. Nor are they willing to listen to details. All they know is that the banks are screwing them -- somehow. And they chant it like the sheep in Animal Farm chant "Four legs good, two legs bad."

I always enjoy Linh Dinh's essays, which appear on Dissident Voice. This is his latest.

Though it does raise an interesting question about the degree to which public spaces have been privatised in the last few decades. Part of the reason there's no public qua public is there are few public spaces for them to assemble in. It seems the powers-that-be want people either as individual...

The word for this is "OCCUporn."

Nope, only the video footage: I don't understand French.

Hot chicks of OWS: a sound reason to join the movement.

To give one specific example of how theoretically impoverished they are, the oversimplified idea that is ubiquitously circulating is that the 1% has become rich because of the 99% that has become poor. Why? Because (supposedly) the 1% are avaricious. Well, were they not avaricious fifty years...

If they had a point to make, I might join them. As it is, none of the ones I've spoken to has a coherent picture of the world. So as Anthony indicates, they use a truckload of cliches and slogans (End the Fed!). No program, no detailed list of realisable political objectives, and of course no...