When proponents of index investing talk about the benefits of index investing, several things tend to come to the fore: share markets tend to rise over the long term, and dollar-cost averaging is a low-risk strategy to get the market returns; most active fund managers underperform index investing over the medium to long term, after … More Thoughts on Index Investing
Data Scientists, because of the versatility and range of their skills, can suffer from the paradox of choice when it comes to choosing a career. According to Barry Schwartz, a strategy for good decision-making when there is an abundance of choices will involve these steps, executed in a way that takes careful consideration of all … More What Kind of a Data Scientist Are You?
Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL) is one of those problems that still doesn’t have a solid and widely accepted mathematical definition, perhaps because the problem of Record Linkage itself, especially the kind that doesn’t reduce to supervised learning through an abundance of labelled matches, still doesn’t have a solid mathematical definition despite thousands of papers published … More Linking Integer Records: The Simplest Case of PPRL
Outside Agile, Strategy is probably the most (ab)used word in the modern corporation. I used to have a very basic definition of what a strategy encapsulates, which has four components: an analysis of the current state and how we got to where we are; a statement of the end goal we want to achieve; a … More Strategy: The Art of Creating Power
I have always intuitively believe in the virtue of sleep. I have never pulled an all-nighter. I (over-)prepare for stressful events (e.g. exams, major presentations) way in advance and then ease into a more restful state as the date approaches, including doing very little and sleeping a lot the day before. I enjoy a good … More Why I am Big on Sleep
Apparently, everything that has the word Blockchain attached to it is now news-worthy. Or at least that’s how I think this relatively small R&D collaboration between AUSTRAC and Swinburne University of Technology got a mention a couple of days ago in ZDNet, a pretty respectable technology site that has been around forever. https://www.zdnet.com/article/austrac-trialling-blockchain-to-automate-funds-transfer-instructions/ Coding the … More Legislation as Code
I have gone through quite a few articles over the last 12 months in my attempt to get a proper understanding of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes. The process was somewhat frustrating because most of the articles are either too basic, giving just very high-level intuitions, or too deep, assuming too much background on the … More Useful Technical Tutorials on Fully Homomorphic Encryption
The Peter Principle states that in most hierarchical organisations, there is a natural tendency for employees to rise in the management hierarchy through promotion until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence. This is a statistical statement about people in an organisation, and there are cultural and management practices that can be put in place to … More An Email Test for the Peter Principle
We have all read about network effects and how they underlie the business models of fast-growing and high-margin companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Apple. The book Platform Revolution by Parker, Van Alstyne and Choudary seeks to distill the key characteristics of these so-called Platform Businesses, whose overarching purpose is “to consummate matches among users … More Financial Intelligence as a Platform Business
The best investments I have made over the years tend to be the ones where the investment case is really simple and obvious, requiring only basic common sense and at best secondary-school arithmetic. In almost every case, the opportunity presented itself in a wider market downturn and the main thing I had to overcome to profit … More Opportunities of a Life Time?
Combating terrorist financing
My Irrational Life
Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics. By Terence Tao
