manifold

His collections were also the basis for the founding of the British Museum (which later split to also form both the Natural History Museum and British Library), and he took over as president of the Royal Society from Newton. Quite an amazing legacy.

Yes, inter-country inequality has been coming down despite in-country inequality going up. The rich have been getting richer and the poorest have been getting richer while the middle class have stood still.

Yes, but having been declared fit to work you would expect that their health has been assessed and "passed" and so expect lower mortality rates in this population, or at least lower than the total claimant population. Without the official statistics it's impossible for anyone to determine whether the total figures are reasonable or not.

I disagree about austerity being a PR exercise. As far as I can tell the £28bn increase in the total "welfare" budget is almost all pensions, and what people typically think of as welfare (child care, housing, unemployment, etc) has dropped by 6% overall, although the social exclusion budget within that has actually risen.

There's broadly two approaches actuaries use (I can't speak for this particular site which uses UN projections):

- One is to look at the average level of mortality improvements in the past at a population (or cohort) level and project those forwards. There are lots of models that do this, for example based on some combination of age, sex, year of birth and calendar year. You make the assumption that even though the specific advances in the past won't be repeated, future advances will follow a similar trend. The Lee-Carter model is an easy to understand example, although it's not particularly cutting edge.

- The other is to look at individual mortality factors (falling smoking levels cause less instances of cancer, etc) and project those forwards based on a mixture of historic advances and expert judgment. With these models you have to take into account that the people not dying of e.g. cancer are now at risk of dying from something else. These models are a lot harder to create because they rely a lot more on expertise. You also don't get information about the whole population, so you would end up using a combination of this with the first model.

Also, the site sounds like it is using period (i.e calendar year) life expectancy rather than cohort, so it might not be projecting ANY future improvements. I'd need to find their actual data source to be sure.

> One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy ... it’s not as big an advance as you might think.

Thinking about improving total life expectancy in this way is not so useful because the large gains have already been made. For instance if no-one in the UK ever died between birth and age 60 it would only add 2-5 years to life expectancy at birth. 100 years ago the same situation would have added 20-25 years.

Perhaps more interesting would be to look at increasing the maximum life span, reducing the variance about the age of death, increasing the median age of death, or to consider the effect of curing cancer/other diseases on healthy life expectancy which I think could still be meaningfully increased.

You're publicising a problem with the company and so it has more of an incentive to deal with it quickly.

My problem was mainly the availability of the materials. Codecademy and duolingo give you access to as much as you require from the start and you can go through as quickly as you like. The university driven sites limit access to so much per week (though I'm not sure how courses will operate the second time) and demand you stick to their schedule, though granted this may be due to their need to peer-review the more demanding assignments.

Unfortunately my free time isn't available in nice predetermined six-week chunks, but even if I am able to catch up three weeks or more in a weekend the courses gave a very negative vibe about continuing to progress as soon as you miss a single one of their deadlines (i.e.- "you missed our deadline for this multiple-choice computer marked test, so your effort no longer counts"). I've 'failed' several coursera sessions in the fourth or fifth week for that reason.

Timetabling seems a very traditional educational view, and it contrasted sharply with codecademy and sites like duolingo where I spent Jan and Feb learning the basics of new languages - computer and human. I finished the courses I took because I did them at my own pace.

It's possible to turn on circular calculations and to limit the number of iterations at a global level (I've never seen it limited at a local level), which could be used as recursion to some extent. I think it would be quite rare to find a case where circular calculations would be a better solution than doing the same thing in a macro, writing a custom function or finding a closed form solution.

The biggest problem with circular calculations is that they may not converge fast enough (before the limit is reached), and if the output is important that's not a good feature to have.

Excel 2010 is certainly more novice friendly, but I'd take 2003's interface back in a flash - customising/grouping shortcut icons doesn't seem nearly as friendly in 2010 and it's a big drawback. I also find it much quicker to scan lists of vertical text when looking for a menu item than to scan horiztonal lists of icons/text.

The Data Protection Act 1998 would presumably apply in the UK and Ireland, and the EU has a data protection directive. My expectation would be that they could not disclose everything without consequence.

It's not perfectly linear in the short term, though what tends to happen is a longer-term cyclical effect rather than spikes.

This makes sense - medical advances won't be widely adopted immediately, then there will be a gradual acceleration of adoption (and improvement rate) once its benefits are proven and costs come down, and then no further contribution to improvements once wide adoption is the norm.

What you also tend to see is that advances affect improvements by year of birth more prominently than by year of discovery. In the UK we have a 'golden cohort' for example, which you could Google for more info.

Spikes do tend to occur during and after big causes of death (spanish flu, world wars) as the improvement rate drops sharply and then recovers again.

The other thing to consider is how the causes of death interact, and who it is that's contributing to mortality/survival rates. For example, perhaps people in France have higher cancer mortality rates because they are not dying from heart disease at a younger age. Perhaps the US has better survival rates for cancer because the incidence rates are higher among lower age groups, and people's general health is better at those ages, and so on.

I often speak with a colleague by phone and for whatever reason our connection creates this effect. It's very disorienting at first, but you can get used to ignoring it quite quickly.

Ok thanks for clearing that up. I hadn't appreciated the difference between the two.

Yes, but the average value of the sampled values will tend towards a Normal distribution by the central limit theorem, and I'm probably misapplying it by wondering whether the next sample tends to be from nearer the middle. I think skimbrel is right that as the sample being drawn from is decreasing each time the CLT will be invalidated anyway.

Great article. This is probably a question for the statisticians: Would repeatedly sampling from a uniform distribution mean that on average the next card chosen will come from the middle of the remaining pack (as repeatedly sampling from a uniform distribution gives a normal distribution), or does the decreasing sample size somehow cancel that effect out? Then at the same time the algorithm is moving cards from the end towards the middle. Intuitively it feels like the shuffle ought to be biased towards selecting the middle-end of the pack first, but wikipedia indicates it's unbiased. Any help with getting further intuition?

Edit: (search box was broken: http://i.imgur.com/Z5chu.png) Ah, it was a zoom issue with firefox. I like the redesign. Perhaps long-term you can make zoomed/unzoomed pages degrade more gracefully, or at least keep the search bar on top :)

Safari on iOS 4.3.3; standard 3GS setup.

They have, but it hasn't worked particularly well: http://imgur.com/PSvIm

The text is illegible against a good number of the background images they've chosen (at least on a mobile browser). That doesn't seem like a good advert for a design team, or am I missing the point?

I agree that a 150 year life expectancy is very unlikely in the next 20 years, but the possibility of people who are alive in 2030 reaching 150 seems plausible. I think that's the argument de Grey was making, and their source article had confused the two issues.

The main form of stress for actuaries that they measure is deadlines. There might be a bit of travel if they are a consultant, but otherwise job security tends to be quite good, salaries reasonably high, there's a continuous intellectual challenge, peers tend to be friendly and clever(er than oneself) and so on.

I'm planning on learning Python and R. A career advisor gave me some very bad advice at 16 ("you're too old to learn programming properly") and I intend to rectify that this year.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ is a useful reference point for creating fluid design. Essentially you can specify different css depending on the width of the browser window, which means you can cater to multiple types of user.

For a real example: http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/ implemented a 4-column layout at the end of June that looks great on both my 1920 monitor, and my mobile. Try resizing your browser window to see the effect in action.

As a European user I feel let down that we still haven't got a paid app catalogue, and we're constantly lagging in the version updates. I think of it at present as a very promising phone that's let down by some major functionality issues (the alarm clock being unreliable for instance).

This reminds me very much of a short-story by Stephen Baxter called "Glass Earth, Inc.", which was set in a society where everyone has to watch a daily ad-quota, and is monitored to ensure that they do.

That's all fine and dandy in theoretical world, but I'd dispute that the probability of a transaction resulting in value v is uniform. I'd guess that there's some fairly prominent banding due to psychogical pricing at or just under 'round' figures.

It's important not to overlook the role that disease still plays in old age. Engineering a standard lifetime of 200 years without improving the current morbidity rates would be an enormous drain on society.

I tried this experiment a few years ago with a roomful of actuaries, who I suspected would be likely to "iterate" their response a few more times than the average person, and the answer came out at 14.

I don't understand the connections the article is trying to make. It seems to be about improving prescriptions based on metabolic profiling, which makes sense. However, I've never had a doctor take my fingerprints in order to prescribe medicine, and I'd surely walk out with haste if they tried to.

I thought that the point of taking fingerprints was that they are something people can unintentionally leave behind at a crime scene. I don't imagine that many criminals urinate over everything just before they scarper, so I remain clueless as to why fingerprints are mentioned at all.