A voice of reason in CiF

It would have to be a mathmo, wouldn't it? Sam Howison, an applied maths professor, looks at why the first 50 Fields medal winners were uniformly male and, refreshingly, comes up with a range of explanations with the starting point that there just aren't many female mathmos:

Data is scarce in this rarefied region, and hypotheses are hard to test; so, too, is the influence of the culture of their chosen field. Nevertheless, such astronomical odds of a woman winning the medal are disturbing, and they are just an extreme point of a range of evidence that women are underrepresented in mathematics at many levels.

It's indisputably true that you don't find anything like a 50% proportion of women at the top level of maths, or theoretical computer science for that matter. On the other hand, in my experience the women that you do find there aren't obviously any less smart and capable than the men, so if you were making randomized choices based on intellect you'd expect women to be far more frequent in Fields medal holders than they are.

This year, Stanford professor Maryam Mirzakhani won a Fields medal. She's clearly a hard-core pure mathmo; I defy anyone with anything less than a Ph.D. in maths to read about her research interests and not have their brain leak out of their ears. This is not just "I don't understand what this is about", this is "I can't even picture the most basic explanation of this in my head". Compared to that, even Fermat's Last Theorem was a walk in the park - solving polynomial equations is standard A-level fare, and even if you can't understand what Andrew Wiles did to prove it you can at least understand the problem. With Mirzakhani's work, you have no frame of reference, you're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie.

Howison's point about the astronomical odds of the Fields medal award gender distribution (50 tails in 51 unbiased coin tosses) is a nice point of probability, but of course the first place you'd start is to look at the eligible pool - top-flight mathematicians, generally at (UK) professor level, with a substantial track record of publishing. That will tell you your bias; if 1 in 10 people in the pool are female, you're tossing a biased coin which will show tails 9 times out of 10. Still, it's pretty clear that even with that pool the Fields medal gender split is way out of line with what you'd expect.

Howison makes an interesting point that I hadn't considered up to now:

[...] people with successful careers have usually had a high degree of support from a mentor. As well as providing academic guidance and inspiration (as Mirzakhani freely acknowledges she had when a student), the mentor will introduce their charge to influential colleagues on the conference circuit and elsewhere, and arrange invitations to speak at seminars and workshops. That is one way for a young mathematician to get their work noticed, and to improve their chances of getting a position in a world-leading department where they can thrive. Is this perhaps (if only subconsciously) difficult for women in a community where the majority are men?

The usual reason for explaining the lack of women in senior positions in Fortune 500 firms (banks, Big Pharma etc.) is that they're not as good at men at talking their own book, preferring to be more even-handed in giving credit for the achievements in which they'd participated. However, Howison tantalisingly hints at a squaring function in gender representation here - will junior female mathmos only get good support and PR from a senior female mentor, and do such senior female mathmos pick up juniors with a blind eye to gender? It would be fascinating to get some data here.

I do wonder whether that perennial topic in gender discrimination, motherhood, plays a role here. Because the Fields medal only goes to people younger than 40 - Andrew Wiles, who cracked Fermat's Last Theorem, was a notable omission from its holders due to his age - if you take time out from academe to have children then this disproportionately affects your time where you're eligible for a Fields medal. The Guardian interviewed this year's sole female awardee, Maryam Mirzakhani but she didn't make any comment about her family life so I have no idea if she has kids.

So mad props to Maryam Mirzakhani for being the first female winner of the Fields medal, and here's to hoping for many more. Apart from anything else, if we can start to get some data on what factors determine female Fields medal winners we might have a hazy glimpse of what we need to fix in the academic lifecycle to get more top-flight women choosing to follow it.

Fixing Healthcare.gov - the inside story

The new Time covers in depth the work of the team who fixed Healthcare.gov. It's a fantastic read, with good access to the small but extremely competent team who drove the fix - go absorb the whole thing.

The data coming out of the story confirms a lot of what I suspected about what was wrong and how it needed to be fixed. Breaking down by before-and-after the hit team arrived:

Before

1. By October 17 the President was seriously contemplating scrapping the site and starting over.
2. Before this intervention, the existing site's teams weren't actually improving it at all except by chance; the site was in a death spiral.
3. No one in CMS (or above) was actually checking whether the site would work before launch.
4. The engineers (not companies) who built the site actually wanted to fix it, but their bosses weren't able to give them the direction to do it.
5. There was no dashboard (a single view) showing the overall health of the site.
6. The key problem the site had was being opened up to everyone at once rather than growing steadily in usage.
7. The site wasn't caching the data it needed in any sensible way, maximising the cost of each user's action; just introducing a simple cache improved the site's capacity by a factor of 4.

I refer the reader in particular to my blogpost The Curse of Experts where CMS head Marilyn Tavenner was trying to dodge blame.

During the Tuesday hearing, Tavenner rejected the allegation that the CMS mishandled the health-care project, adding that the agency has successfully managed other big initiatives. She said the site and its components underwent continuous testing but erred in underestimating the crush of people who would try to get onto the site in its early days. "In retrospect, we could have done more about load testing," she said.

As the Time article shows, this was anything but the truth about what was actually wrong.

After

1. There wasn't any real government coordination of the rescue - it was managed by the team itself, with general direction but not specific guidance from the White House CTO (Todd Park)
2. The rescue squad was a scratch team who hadn't worked together before but was completely aligned in that they really wanted to make the site work, and had the technical chops to know how to make this happen if it was possible.
3. Fixing the website was never an insurmountable technical problem: as Dickerson noted "It's just a website. We're not going to the moon." It was just that no-one who knew how to fix it had been in a position to fix it.
4. The actual fixes were complete in about 6 weeks.
5. One of the most important parts in improving the speed of fixing was to avoid completely the allocation of blame for mistakes.
6. Managers should, in general, shut up during technical discussions: "The ones who should be doing the talking are the people who know the most about an issue, not the ones with the highest rank. If anyone finds themselves sitting passively while managers and executives talk over them with less accurate information, we have gone off the rails, and I would like to know about it."
7. The team refused to commit to artificial deadlines: they would fix it as fast as they could but would not make promises about when the fixes would be done, refusing to play the predictions game.
8. Having simple metrics (like error rate, concurrent users on the site) gave the team a good proxy for how they were doing.
9. Targeted hardware upgrades made a dramatic difference to capacity - the team had measured the bottlenecks and knew what they needed to upgrade and in what order.
10. Not all problems were fixed: the back-end communications to insurance companies still weren't working, but that was less visible so lower priority.

The overall payoff for these six weeks of work was astonishing; on Monday 23rd December the traffic surged in anticipation of a sign-up deadline:

"We'd been experiencing extraordinary traffic in December, but this was a whole new level of extraordinary ... By 9 o'clock traffic was the same as the peak traffic we'd seen in the middle of a busy December day. Then from 9 to 11, the traffic astoundingly doubled. If you looked at the graphs, it looked like a rocket ship." Traffic rose to 65,000 simultaneous users, then to 83,000, the day's high point. The result: 129,000 enrollments on Dec. 23, about five times as many in a single day as what the site had handled in all of October.

Despite this tremendous fix, however, President Obama didn't visit the team to thank them. Perhaps the political fallout from the Healthcare.gov farce was too painful for him.

The best quote that every single government on the planet should read:

[...] one lesson of the fall and rise of HealthCare.gov has to be that the practice of awarding high-tech, high-stakes contracts to companies whose primary skill seems to be getting those contracts rather than delivering on them has to change. "It was only when they were desperate that they turned to us," says Dickerson. "I have no history in government contracting and no future in it ... I don't wear a suit and tie ... They have no use for someone who looks and dresses like me. Maybe this will be a lesson for them. Maybe that will change."

The team who pulled President Obama's chestnuts out of the fire didn't even think they were going to be paid for their work initially; it looks like they did eventually get some money, but nowhere near even standard contracting rates. And yet, money wasn't the motivator for them - they deeply wanted to make Healthcare.gov work. As a result they did an extraordinary job and more or less saved the site from oblivion. This matches my experience from government IT developments: it's reasonable to assume that the government don't care about whether the project works at all, because if they did then they'd run it completely differently. Though if I were President I'd be firing Marilyn Tavenner, cashing in her retirement package and using it to pay bonuses to the team who'd saved my ass.

If you have a terribly important problem to solve, the most reliable way to solve it is to find competent people who will solve it for free because they want it to work. Of course, it's usually quite hard to find these people - and if you can't find them at all, maybe your problem shouldn't be solved in the first place.

The progress from first world problems

One of my favourite thinkers, Virginia Postrel, has a great take on how this Christmas's UPS next-day-delivery failure is actually a vital step in world progress:

Counting your blessings is always a good idea, but calling the Christmas delivery breakdown a "first world problem" points to what's wrong with that criticism. We want first world reliability, and if the public just shrugged when things went wrong we wouldn't get it.

The instinctive reaction when UPS delivers your friend's purchases 1-3 days late is to snark about "first world problems", but Postrel point out that actually this kind of demand is what drives most if not all of modern progress. In software, for example, many of the key leaps forward have been due to someone dissatisfied with the obstructions that current technology put in their way. Larry Wall was dissatisfied with shell scripting and ended up inventing the programming language Perl which glues together too many websites to count; Donald Knuth put together the TeX typesetting language because he was dissatisfied with the mathematic typesetting available to him writing The Art of Computer Programming ; Linus Torvalds created Linux because the existing Unix operating systems weren't sufficiently accessible for tinkering.

We should therefore complain when life falls short of our expectations, no matter how wonderful our current situation would be to someone from 20 years in the past or a thousand miles in the distance:

Complaining about small annoyances can be demoralizing and obnoxious, but demanding complacency is worse. The trick is to simultaneously remember how much life has improved while acknowledging how it could be better. In the new year, then, may all your worries be first world problems.

By the time Christmas 2014 rolls around, UPS will have a lower-latency method of tracking its order load versus maximum capacity, and be able to either buy up additional delivery capacity from other mail firms or start to signal to retailers that it will not be able to deliver goods next-day. This way customers will have a better delivery experience, and technological progress will have been achieved.

Safety training

Hidden underneath short screeds about "Lincoln" and Mad Men is a little gem from train-driving blogger Electro-Kevin. In the context of the recent train crashes in Spain and Switzerland he discusses the individual tweaks towards safety he makes in his job, summarising the situation nicely:

You can't pack a rush-hour train with doctors, businessmen, scientists, politicians and have an idiot at the front driving it.

A fully loaded train at rush hour, travelling into London, can easily carry many hundreds of such people to work. Assuming the average cost of a life at £1M, which is probably low for a professional in a rush hour train, you're looking at half a billion quid at risk on every single journey. On balance, you don't want this being done by a half-trained chimp. Ironically, for most lawyers and management consultants on the train, you could substitute half-trained chimps and make a net benefit for society, but I digress.

Electro-Kevin is acutely aware of this responsibility, and so aims to make his trains safer:

In addition to Press-and-Call I wear rubber charity bands. I use them in the following way:

• around my palm denotes that my train is longer than normal (so I stop at the right marker on platforms)
• around my fingers denotes that I have an irregular stopping pattern (so I don't miss stations)
• wrapped around fingers AND palm denotes that I am under a cautionary sequence of signals approaching a red.

I find this system works well at all times, especially in darkness. The light tugging of the band whilst traversing a long red section means that I am thinking constantly about the red signal.

Do you see how clever this is? He has built himself an analogue reminder system - if he's proceeding towards a red light but forgets, and starts to accelerate to his normal speed, the sensation of train acceleration combined with the squeezing of his finger and palm will trigger "hey, this feels wrong" in his sensory system. He has removed the need to remember a special condition with no visual input ("I'm proceeding towards a red signal"), aware of the fallibility of human memory, and backstopped it with a sensory stimulus.

Clever, n'est ce pas? What Government agency or safety consultancy came up with this system?

This system is simple and cheap and is the most effective that I have come across and - best of all - it was invented by ME !

To be fair, this works for Electro-Kevin but may not work for other drivers who process sensory stimuli differently. It is however an excellent way of providing another layer of safety in the system of driving a train through a busy and complex mesh of track. It's a reminder that if your system relies on human recollection to avoid an accident, you're going to discover how foolish is such a reliance.

This is why paying train drivers very substantial salaries can make sense; if, as a result, you can employ people with an active interest in the safety of their train then you're buying yourself a bargain in reduced risk of accident. Of course, the real trick is ensuring that salaries and safety are actually aligned. How do you objectively rate the safety of a driver in a system where the first serious accident a driver causes is usually his last, and such accidents are in any case extremely rare? The best you can do is try to spot precursors to accidents, e.g. signals passed at danger (SPADs) and base salaries on incidence of precursors, but even then you give drivers - and to a lesser extent their friends in the signal box - a strong disincentive to report such precursors, which might otherwise warn you of an imminent accident at a given junction.

Considering the number of trains on the busy criss-crossing tracks around London, it astonishes me that we don't have a serious crash every couple of months. It seems to astonish Electro-Kevin too. I'm not sure whether that reassures me or not.

Do you have a right to be heavy?

As with many air travellers, I have in the past been forced to share a significant fraction of my seat with parts of my overflowing neighbour. As a result, I can only applaud Samoa Air's move to charge passengers by weight:

Air Samoa's rates range from $1 (65p) to around $4.16 per kilogram. Passengers pay for the combined weight of themselves and their baggage.

Samoans are famously large, ranking number 2 in the world for fraction of adults overweight. Air Samoa operates small and medium-sized planes where passenger weight is a substantial fraction of the aircraft, so they are in the top right corner of special cases. It will therefore be extremely interesting to see how this plays out.

I would expect there to be an immediate flow of heavy or luggage-laden passengers from Air Samoa to other airlines on the same routes. In parallel, of course, lighter and luggage-light passengers and families with small children would probably find Air Samoa a more competitive fare. As the cabin composition changes and the mass of passengers relative to space, it's quite possible that Air Samoa will find itself having to charge a minimum price per seat to cover its costs. Other airlines will be looking very carefully at the results - you can just imagine o'Leary of RyanAir salivating at the opportunity to offer prices "£5* to Dublin return!" with the caveat in 2 point text "(*) for passengers weighing 10lb and under".

If this spreads more widely, to the point where passengers on certain routes have no choice but to pay by weight, I can see several consequences. One is that the airport loos next to the check-in desk will be much more heavily used. Perhaps they'll need to charge £1 per person entrance as a result. Airport food will become more expensive as it becomes more expensive to check-in with food on your person or in your baggage. I wonder if airlines will need to re-check weights just before passengers board, in case they leave the heavy contents of their hand luggage with a friend before they check-in and then re-pack the bag before going through security. It's all going to be vastly entertaining.

Soon enough, surely, some large gentleman is going to sue the airlines claiming that they are (price-) discriminating against him based on his medical condition causing him to be overweight. I have no idea which way this claim is going to go, but I'm fairly sure the lawyers will get substantial fees in any case.

Still, if it means that I don't have the large rolls of fat from Mr. Smith billowing over the seat handle into my lap, I look forward to other airlines adopting this pricing technique post-haste.

Tax, made real

Dick Puddlecote has the right idea on how to introduce his kids to the concept of taxation:

I'm not sure exactly when the practice started, but we've taken to pinching small portions of the little uns' bits and bobs every now and then. For example, a few chips from a Maccy D's meal, a spoonful of their after dinner dessert, a couple of sour sweets from the pick'n'mix. You know, that sort of thing.
We call it 'tax'.
[...]
They each received a Galaxy selection box, amongst other things, yesterday morning and we - with tongues firmly in cheek - announced that the tax would be a Ripple bar from one and a bag of Minstrels from the other. It was heartening to find out later that the very sweets in question had, without our noticing, been spirited away into hiding places in their rooms.

Is this tax avoidance or tax evasion? Whichever, the parents have been deprived of illegitimately acquired cavities.

Give the taxpayers what they ask for

Karl at the US political site Hot Air has a proposal so simple that it's genius. Cutting through the Democrat-Republican cat fight about what mix of tax raising and spending cuts should address the deficit, he proposes that noted Republican "shock jock" Rush Limbaugh should back raising taxes to fund current and planned spending with no cutbacks:

If the Democrats want to increase taxes and leave entitlements unreformed, why not propose that the federal government raise the taxes necessary to fund these purportedly essential programs?

It sounds like it might just work - but what levels of tax raising would be required?

The four year plan he proposes would be popular for at least the first couple of years: households with over $250K annual income get nailed in the first year, and those with over $100K in the second year. However, by year 3 all the "rich" have been squeezed as hard as possible, and the spending deficit is still 3% of GDP. So it's time for every other taxpayer to pay up:

In 2019, increase all tax rates on ordinary income 5 additional percentage points, phased in over 10 years. Increase both tax rates on capital gains 10 percentage points (to 20% and 33.8%), phased in over 5 years.

But that still doesn't keep spending under control, so the only thing left is year 4:

Impose a 10% national value-added tax, phased in over 5 years.

This will actually give a balanced budget, finally. Obviously the US still has $20tn or so of debt, but at least it's not adding to it. Everyone who pays taxes is then bearing the spending burden of the state. And in 2016 it's election time once more...

This, I think, expresses the essential dishonesty of people clamouring "tax the rich" as a solution to the current deficit crisis - and this is true in the UK quite possibly as much as in the USA. You can't fix the deficit and keep spending at the present level without hitting everyone who pays taxes, hard. Now perhaps that's what people want, but it would be interesting to make the decision very real for them. "Do I as an average taxpayer want a 60% hike in what I pay in taxes, or should I start demanding that the government stop pissing away so much money?"

Grace on light

Grace Hopper explains a nanosecond. The inimitable jgc provides print-out-and-keep nanoseconds for you.

Of Ayn Rand and modern day politics

Probably my achievement of the month; I managed to slog all the way through Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Holy Hoppin' Hippos. I'm glad I did it, but don't think I'd choose to do it again - maybe dip in and out of the more interesting parts in future.

As a book of its time, I'm frankly astonished that it got published at all, and more astonished that the editors let it go out as-is. (Perhaps they didn't, and this is the cut-down and cleaned up version of some behemoth original. What a thought.) I think there's a far better and more conventional book in there somewhere, weighing in at maybe 400-500 pages of the current 1100-odd. The 70+ pages of Galt's radio speech are, frankly, masturbation. Perhaps the success of The Fountainhead gave Rand more leverage with her editors than a first novelist would have had. I also hate, hate, hate the ellipsised semi-monologues that pepper the book. The Project X digression feels like an unnecessary branch line from the main track of the story.

Having said all that, I'm going to go against what seems to be popular opinion - I actually liked the story. It's very imaginative without really veering off into the truly implausible, the villains (and there are many) are unusual and interesting, and the denouement is nicely done. I even enjoyed a few of the characters, notably Ragnar Dammerskjöld who's a very likeable and imaginative pirate, and Cherryl the unfortunate waitress. Dagny got annoying about 30% of the way into the book and never quite redeemed herself. I'm still not sure how I feel about Hank.

Where the book really scores in my opinion is the way in which it truly nails 2012 politics. Given that we're 55 years beyond the book's publication, one can either ascribe this to astonishing foresight on the part of Rand, or some good guesses associated with a sizeable dose of luck. I'm torn. Obama's recent "You didn't build that" speech came serendipitously when I was in the middle of reading the book, and we can only imagine what trenchant comments Rand would have made about it; sadly, she died 30 years ago so never really got to see her predictions come up trumps. Characters such as the weasels Mouch, Thompson and Ferris are all too common in modern day political life; one hopes that their real life counterparts would balk at the collectivisation implemented in the book, but given their thirst for control one would never be quite sure of this.

I'm now actively curious to see Atlas Shrugged - the film (part 1). It's just possible that they do a good job of keeping the wheat and throwing away the chaff.

451 - illegal post

An inspired RFC from Tim Bray of Google: he proposes an additional code in the 400 (client error) series to cover content that cannot legally be made available to the client. Yes, I'm aware than 95%+ of readers have already dozed off, but bear with me.

Which 400-series code does he choose to represent this? 451. I'm not sure what the late Ray Bradbury would have thought of this, but my sneaking suspicion is that it would have tended towards approval.

Censoring Fahrenheit 451

You just couldn't make this up: a book publisher censoring a book about book-burning. The late and great, great Ray Bradbury recalls, in the 1979 Coda to Fahrenheit 451:

Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel [Fahrenheit 451]. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the fu­ture, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony.

If Ballantine Books had any integrity, I would hope that they cast the offending editor out of the nearest window. I would hope further that their offices back then were at least on the 30th floor, so that the editor had time to reflect on the irony of his mistake.

I am delighted that Bradbury lived to see an era where the staggeringly rude and yet wonderful Rachel Bloom could record and broadcast to the world an extremely suggestive and sexual video about her and the master of future fiction. (Not safe for work. Really, I'm not kidding. Not in the slightest. Minimum safe viewing age probably about 80 years. Just fantastic. Use headphones.) Nevertheless, censorship hasn't gone away: "damn" is just fine these days, but I fear that militants of other groups are thriving. Hands up who thinks this couldn't happen today:

...the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play — it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried!
Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!
I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn't.

In my dreaming moments, I can see just this scene playing out in a student union meeting somewhere. Then the ghost of Bradbury descends and smites the offending head-up-arse-earnest "progressives", thundering a denounciation that shrivels what remains of their souls...

Gene Simmons, we salute you

Rock god Gene Simmons isn't impressed with a lot of folks in the debt crisis but unlike practically everyone else opining in public, he doesn't give a free pass to the victims:

It's so simple. If you spend more than you tax, you're out of business. MPs don't know what they're talking about.

And we created this miserable economic state. It's like fat people who think it's the bakery's fault they got fat.

No, you kept going in there and you kept eating cake. It's not the bakery's responsibility to tell you to slow down.

He's writing in the Sun, of all places. I can't imagine any article better suited to make Polly Toynbee spontaneously combust. Do go and read the whole thing (it's the Sun, it's not like there's a lot of text) especially his closing argument.

Dear Sophie Lee...

Damn you, Google, for making me bawl my eyes out.

Why studying maths is important

A strong contender for the biggest arithmetic error of recent times has to be an unknown accountant at Hypo Real Estate who calculated HRE's debt at E216.5bn when it was "only" E161bn. Germany improves its debt-to-GDP ratio by a whole 2.6% (which is the really bad news, if you think about it).

Johann Schmidt, or whatever your name is, we salute you.

Engineers with too much free time

An early entry for this month's "Engineer with too much free time" award is Mr. Plum B's Lego assault rifle. The mind-aching attention to detail and engineering prowess, notably in the slot-in magazine firing mechanism, should cause a conniption fit of admiration from anyone who wears black socks with their sandals. Stand up and take a bow, Mr. B.

[Hat tip: The Register]

What does the tale of Kweku tell us about UBS?

The most interesting signals from UBS will come over the next 6 months or so as various people are quietly sidelined and/or 'encouraged to move on'. The former positions of those people will tell watchers quite a bit, although some care must be taken to avoid jumping to the wrong conclusions. If heads roll high in the Operations department it doesn't necessarily mean that Ops was most fundamentally at fault; it could just be that Compliance shouted loudly and pointed the finger early enough to avoid too many awkward questions about its role. It's shocking how many decisions in a bank are taken on the basis of who can shout loudest and wave their willy most vigorously. Someone on the board is going to have to go, so the question is whether it is someone representing London (the location gets the blame), or Operations/Compliance (failure to detect gets the blame).

What was the trigger for the loss? He was dealing with ETFs, so you'd think that if he was trading on an exchange then the margin calls as his position moved underwater would have sounded bells - you'd hope that even an incompetent bank would notice a huge and growing flow of money out the front door. Zero Hedge has speculated that he was very long the volatility of the Swiss Franc (CHF) which has been moving around like no-one's business over the past few months; however, once the Bank of Switzerland announced that it would hold CHF below $1.40 by printing as many francs as required to do so, volatility dropped off a cliff. The timing seems plausible for this to be related, but could be just coincidence. If it was this sudden then perhaps the margin calls were similarly sudden.

How did he get himself in this position without anyone noticing? The story of Jerôme Kerviel at SocGen is striking in its similarities - successful trader, sudden billion-sized loss, turns out to be unauthorised trading. One wonders if Kweku was the only one who thought that the firm's controls need not apply to him, or if a loose attitude towards controls and Compliance was prevalent among his peers and immediate superiors.

If I were a UBS shareholder I'd be asking pointed questions of various people and organizations. To wit:

1. Operations: how was this position's VaR calculated? Was it calculated at all? If not, how did a contract backed by UBS avoid being flagged as missing a VaR calculation? If so, who implemented the VaR calculation and how was it faulty? What process was used to verify VaR calculations?
2. Compliance: who was responsible for training and verifying this desk's compliance issues? What procedures were they following? Who wrote these procedures? Was it operator error or design that made them fail to identify this position?
3. The FSA: how did UBS in London fail to implement suitable controls on this desk? Who in the firm was ultimately responsible for checking this? Who in the FSA was responsible for verifying the competence and actions of the firm representatives? Since the episode with Kerviel, what extra checks were added to detect that kind of fraud and why did they not work this time around?
4. Kweku himself: if we promised not to sue you personally for the loss, could you point us at other places in the firm where this may be going on?

Traders and managers at the other banks must be regarding this with a mixture of amusement and concern. The former because Schadenfreude is an integral part of trading, and the latter because if this can happen in a bank where Compliance and the FSA were previously satisfied with its controls, why couldn't it happen in their own bank?

Update: UBS announces it wasn't the CHF trade but rather S&P, DAX and EuroStoxx positions, with risk offset by fictitious positions. So Kweku could cover multi-$bn positions with matching multi-$bn fictitious positions. Somehow this doesn't reassure me.

The A-level fiasco

And a fiasco it is. 8.2% get A*, 27% get at least an A making it clear that the current generation is the brightest ever. As a member of a previous generation I'd just like to say bollocks.

For non-Brits, "A-level" is short for the GCE Advanced Level exam, a course that normally requires 2 years of study by 16-18 year olds after they complete GCSE exams at age 16. Typically a student would take 3 (occasionally 4) A-levels, each in a distinct subject e.g Maths, English Literature, German, Biology, Economics. It used to be assessed on a small number of exams taken right at the end of 2-year study, but over the past 20 years more coursework has counted towards the final grade. Grades used to be A (best) through E (poor), with U (unclassified) as an option if you were completely asleep throughout all exams.

I've read the paper Changes in standards at GCSE and A-Level:
 Evidence from ALIS and YELLIS by Robert Coe of Durham University, for the Office of National Statistics in 2007. Maths grades over 20 years have risen 2 full grades from 1988 to 2006 - a C student in Chemistry in 1988 would have got an A in 2006. And for maths it's over 3 full grades, so a D student would have an A. WTF?

Is this a problem? As someone heavily involved in recruiting, I assure you it is. The minor annoyance is that it is tricky to compare candidates' grades across multi-year gaps: AAB in 2005 may not indicate a student who is any brighter than one with BBB in 1998, say. But that's not too common a situation. A major annoyance is that you lose the ability to spot distinctive candidates; a 3-A candidate was the exception back in the early 90's, and so if you spotted one you'd move heaven and earth to get them in for interview. But now everyone and his dog has 3 A's.

But the greatest problem, one that seems seldom discussed, is ego. Ten years ago, if you worked hard and gained A-levels at ABB in Maths, English and Physics then you could rightly feel that you were approaching a mastery of the first subject but realise that you had some way to go to get a proper grip on Physics and English. Nowadays, you'd have A grades across the board and you'd feel invincible, despite your Physics knowledge having significant gaps and being unable to write grammatical English. If someone tries to correct you, you'll have none of it: "Oh, I have top grades in those subjects, I know what I'm talking about".

My solution? Grade on a curve. Fixed percentages of A, B, C, D, E; at least in the major subjects which don't have significant skew in the ability of those studying them (Latin and Greek are tricker to grade fairly for this reason). Better yet, give the student their percentile position directly in bands of 5% or so. I'd also like to see at least one impossible question in each subject's exams, just to keep student egos in check. Those who think they know it all really annoy those of us who do. (Ahem)

A new word for our times - hermicide

Coined by commentator Josh over at Mr. Worstall's place:

hermicide - the act of shooting the messenger.

Olli Rehn, please take note.

Happy 99th Birthday Alan Turing

The father of modern computing, he would have been a year short of his century today -- had not an ungrateful nation, or at least its Crown Prosecution Service of the day, hounded him to an early death. You utter unmitigated bastards.

Although his Turing Machine came to characterise the general programmable computer, it's worth noting that his practical work building on the Polish bombe was very much a specialised highly-parallel application-specific computation engine. I wonder what he would have thought of the evolution of the Field Programmable Gate Array over the past 20 years, as we try to get around the single-thread bottleneck innate in microprocessor design. Yes, yes, quad cores in user desktops these days, whoop-de-frickin'-do - check out Deep Crack and tell me how many 1-U blades you need to glue together to match that performance.

Turing would have felt quite at home in the modern geekosphere. As was noted eloquently in the Jargon File's portrait of J. Random Hacker:

...the ties many hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive — after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any more.

RIP Alan Turing. Thank you for everything, and I'm so sorry it came at such a cost for you.