Category: Blog

Over the past year, I have been participating in a Forecasting Tournament through the University of Pennsylvania. This was put on by a group headlined by Phil Tetlock, father of much of the forecasting community and author of Superforecasters. This tournament had two interesting features that you don’t normally see in prediction markets; significant collaboration… Continue reading Prediction of Nuclear Weapons Risk

By Keenan Viney With the cost of satellite launches falling quickly, high-quality imagery is becoming more available. I wanted to explore an area with some industrial application. This post will take a look at whether its possible to predict aluminum production with open source thermal imagery. I chose to look at the Talco plant in… Continue reading Thermal Imagery Analysis: Aluminum Production in Tajikistan

I think generally we lack mental models of dynamic systems. The debate around national debt often falls back on inappropriately applied heuristics; a government unlike a household is infinitely lived, it should be minimizing the long run tax burden and faces a borrowing constraint that is not time bound. Here I present a simple model… Continue reading Dynamics of National Debt

Epidemiology models need a middle way, between SEIR (with no forward-looking expectations) and agent-based simulation (too many free parameters). SEIR’s ultimately need to pin down a value for R0, but it is never a fixed value, especially in a global pandemic. The R0 value is only applicable at the very beginning of a pandemic where… Continue reading An Economist’s View on Epidemiology Models

Here is a link to the paper, written by Sophia Boutilier, Ali Jadidzadeh, Elena Esina, Lana Wells and Ron Kneebone (2017): https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/sppp/article/view/42627 I reached out to a representative of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy on January 24, 2021 and so far, haven’t gotten a response from the authors. What follows is a… Continue reading Critique of “The Connection Between Professional Sporting Events, Holidays and Domestic Violence in Calgary, Alberta”

Here is list from a year of university, none of these books were assigned. The bolded titles profoundly changed the way that I think: The Road Cormac McCarthy PS3563 A232R63Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pychon PS3566 Y55G72The Education of Henry Adams E175.5 A172 1931Sputnik Sweetheart Haruki Murakami PL856 U6758713Metamophosis Franz Kafka PT2621 A26V413 1986A Non-Random Walkdown Wall… Continue reading A Reading List