You're not wrong, but I think the author referenced in the original post and you are addressed different parts of the whole problem of financial markets. The willingness of financial services salespeople - mortgage brokers, stock brokers, etc - to basically lie their asses off because there's so much money on the line is one problem.

"Quant" analysis of financial markets is, really, another, related problem. The same moral hazard of too much money to make cutting corners worth it exists, but the basic problem here is that many "quant" models are bullshit. Quantitive models for derivative securities can be realistically valued -- if and only if the risk of the underlying primary asset has been properly assessed (along with several other critical assumptions about the marketplace for the security -- but that's the JUDGMENTAL assumption fundamentally inherent in the models.)

Risk assessment is not actually that difficult -- insurance is built on the ability to do risk assessment. The real problem with the current financial problems were that NO ONE KNEW WHAT THE UNDERLYING PRIMARY ASSETS WERE and everyone operated on the belief that Nothing Could Ever Possibly Go Wrong (because no one could prove otherwise, because no one knew what the hell was actually going on).

This is and was every bit as monumentally stupid an assumption in the financial realm as it is engineering, computer programming, science, or any other real-world discipline.

I think what Wilmott is proposing is the development of models that are more reactive to real-world inputs, models that are much more Bayesian in nature in their ability to refine and revise their predictive nature based on actual events.

Admittedly without reading TFA, that sounds like his point - that what "quants" should be doing is developing good empirically good heuristic models rather than wanking over what are essentially hypothetical analytical ones based on complete SWAG parameters, where the parameters supplied by salesmen will invevitably be optimistic best case ones (and that's putting it charitably).

A piece of standard 25th century technology - the communicator - is sitting in your wallet, or, if you're geek enough, clipped to your belt. It doesn't have enough power to pump a signal to LEO...YET.... so the only golly-gee technology in that sucker is...the battery.

The politics gets dated, the style gets dated - what were passionate issues in the 60's don't translate so well to the opening years of the 21st century.

The reboot was necessary - if you want to tell tales about Kirk and Spock and keep telling new stories aobut the voyages of Enterprise and NOT have every character turn into Wesley Crusher - you're gonna have to allow some creative leeway to back up, refocus on the essential elements of what makes Star Trek worth watching, and begin again.

Wrath of Khan was the best of the movies by far because the emotions of the characters were so complexly developed.

by Ian Stewart

highly readable non-technical tour of things like congruences, axiomatics, abstract algebra, topology and other elements of "real" mathematics, although as he rightly points out, he doesn't do much with analysis, because you really can't do much with analysis that isn't technical in nature.

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Modern-Mathematics-Ian-Stewart/dp/0486284247

The IT department at my company does a piss poor job at actual user support, in terms of user education, learning curve, office apps, etc.

You know, the things people actually USE on the computer.

So it falls to people like me to provide user support in my department to everyone - "Hey, I've got an Excel question..." is usually something I'm happy to help out with, since it only happens a couple times a week.

But if it happens several times a day, because no one knows what their spiffy new software does, I will go completely ape****. So, no, changing systems is not a good idea

Not sure what you can use to create a visualization, but the information you need is in the IMG.

I don't have a need to develop a visualization of the whole of our SAP implementation, just my little FI-CO corner of it, and that's a big enough pain

I don't disagree that desktop support and network support are vastly different things, nor do I disagree that the IT staff should NOT be doing this stuff, simply because desktop stuff is a teaching / training issue more than anything else (until you get to hardcore automation stuff where the coding skills of the IT staff start to come into play).

But in the bigger picture, if the IT department wants to lock down end users as far as what can be installed on their computers, and dictate what is and isn't allowed, then they are necessarily going to have to accept responsibility for the suitability and usability of what is there. That's just the way the universe works, and they look like sulky and spoiled children if they refuse to accept responsibility for supporting what they shoved down everyone else's throats. That's how it plays to the rest of the world.

But there seems to be a lack of common sense involved that goes beyond even that...

There's this story: Our corporate office sent out a piece of financial reporting software we were required to use for planning and reporting. We had to install it on our computers. Now this was some years ago, pre-XP, whether it was win95 or 98 I can't remember, anyway, I dug into the documentation corporate provided, figured out what was needed, including edits to sys.ini and autoexec.bat and got up and running. There are 5 other people in the accounting department who needed this software, none of them remotely as computer sophisticated as I am, and I don't claim to be very sophisticated at all. I wrote up a HOWTO and walked it over to the IT department and explained that I expected that they didn't want everyone messing around with system configuration files, and here you go, these are the other folks who need installs....

"We don't support user applications," I was told. Well, I explained, I'm an accountant, and installing software and configuring system files isn't my job, either. So I'll pass this along to my colleagues and let them figure it out for themselves, too.

Phone started ringing off the hook in IT about 20 minutes later.

At the level of network infrastructure, I have no problem with this. Frankly, I don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of the network. I want it to work for me. I want to be able to call the IT org for help and trust they'll straighten things out when necessary.

However, IT does NOT know better than the rest of us about how to do OUR jobs and many IT policies impact them. For instance, our new security guy decided that some forms of iternet access were a Bad Thing - like e-commerce for those lazy thieving cube-dwellers out there. Too bad many of our suppliers have taken to electronic invoicing and our Accounts Payable department needs to download invoice documents via those same electronic commerce pathways you just blocked.

As another example, Excel may not be the greatest thing in the world, but if you're an accountant, for good or ill, you're stuck with it. It's a critically important tool to doing your job. So the day to push across that "latest" MS security update that's been sitting around since forever is NOT the first day of the fiscal month when every accountant in the company is under major deadline pressure to close the books and thereby knocking down everyone's computer for 2 hours.

Finally, if you a)hand me a computer system with Office on it; b)announce that you don't provide user support/help for Office, then you have no right to expect that I will do anything but regard you with suspicion. Office is what users use - it is how they interact with the computer and you've just announced you're blowing them off and yet you wonder why your users think you're a waste of time and a pain in the ass and that all IT policies are subject to workaround?

So, really, it cuts both ways.

A little common sense, a little communication, a little humility, a little training goes a long ways.

...pretty much, yeah.

Which is why it took about exactly one encounter with Fairpoint customer dissservice for us to completely dump them as any kind of service provider whatsover and switch everything over to our cable provider.