That's my talk title at tomorrow's TEDx conference in the EU parliament. Just heading out to Brussels now. I'll be piecing together an eccelctic mix of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica and how education must urgently follow the "real" world into fully deploying computer-based math. It's a lot for 18 minutes!
Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 10:19AM "Let the reader drive" was central to my talk on "Publishing the future" today at the Mathematica Users Conference. I compared narrative and reference books, server and clients models, applications and documents. But whatever the publication style, technology or field, the aim should be simple: to optimize the flow and use of ideas from author to reader (and do much better at it than we manage with the 350-year-old way it's usually done today).
Demonstrations is one good example of this radical publishing approach, one that's both innovative and successful--a rare combination!
Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 2:58AM Why do governments, banks, insurers and others who manage our world often assume the correlation between different risks to be far smaller than it is? That the risk of one disaster is independent of another--when so many calamities (eg. Lloyds of London's near collapse to the present financial crisis) have shown they are not?
This was the question I posed to Professor Paul Krugman after his talk at the World Knowledge Forum in South Korea from which I've just returned. He answered that several factors were at play that I'd summarise as: greed, stupidity and governments being accused of overzealousness in assuming correlation. I'd add complexity: it's much harder to model correlated risks, so people don't or can't.
Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 11:29PM I'm often told I have a different take on the world than others...so here goes! I'm planning to post little snippets that pique my--and hopefully your--interest. Tell me what you think.
Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 11:00PM 
