All about risk
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Excerpt:
Panic buying has driven demand up by 20 per cent, one tracking firm says
Unleaded petrol reached its highest price since November 2014
The FBI accused the DarkSide criminal gang of carrying out the ransomware attack
Publication Date: 12 May 2021
Publication Site: ABC News Australia
Excerpt:
Reports of fuel shortages across the U.S. emerged on Tuesday as the national average for gasoline prices soared to its highest level since 2014 amid a key fuel pipeline shut down, per Bloomberg.
What’s happening: Operator Colonial Pipeline aims to have service restored by the week’s end following last Friday’s ransomware attack that shut down some 5,500 miles of pipeline from Texas to New Jersey. The governors of Florida, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina declared states of emergency Tuesday due to shortage concerns.
Author(s): Rebecca Falconer
Publication Date: 12 May 2021
Publication Site: Axios
Link: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
Excerpt:
A tale of two theories. After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002, in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.
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Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.
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One of the very few establishment scientists to have questioned the virologists’ absolute rejection of lab escape is Richard Ebright, who has long warned against the dangers of gain-of-function research. Another is David A. Relman of Stanford University. “Even though strong opinions abound, none of these scenarios can be confidently ruled in or ruled out with currently available facts,” he wrote. Kudos too to Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who told CNN on March 26, 2021 that the “most likely” cause of the epidemic was “from a laboratory,” because he doubted that a bat virus could become an extreme human pathogen overnight, without taking time to evolve, as seemed to be the case with SARS2.
Author(s): Nicholas Wade
Publication Date: 5 May 2021
Publication Site: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/berkshire-hathaways-stock-price-is-too-much-for-computers-11620168548
Excerpt:
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is trading at more than $421,000 per Class A share, and the market is optimistic. That’s a problem.
The price has grown so high, it has nearly hit the maximum number that can be stored in one common way exchange computers handle digits.
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Nasdaq’s computers can only count so high because of the compact digital format they use for communicating prices. The biggest number they can handle is $429,496.7295. Nasdaq is rushing to finish an upgrade later this month that would fix the problem.
It isn’t just Nasdaq. Another exchange operator, IEX Group Inc., said in March that it would stop accepting investors’ orders in Class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway “due to an internal price limitation within the trading system.”
Author(s): Alexander Osipovich
Publication Date: 4 May 2021
Publication Site: Wall Street Journal
Excerpt:
It is a wonder that nobody choked on their morning toast and tea, for if Imperial modelling has stood for anything in this crisis, it is relentless pessimism. Plummeting figures were certainly not predicted by its researchers. The difference this time is that the Government has pressed ahead with reopening despite the doom-mongering, and so has proven the models wrong.
Here is what they said would happen and what we know now: Hospital admissions When the Government published its roadmap out of the pandemic on Feb 22, it was largely based on modelling assumptions from Imperial, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Warwick University.
Imperial modelled four unlocking scenarios, ranging from “very fast” to “gradual”. Under the fastest, full lifting would occur at the end of April, while under the slowest, Britain would not see restrictions eased until Aug 2.
In the end, the Government chose a path somewhere between “fast” and “medium”, yet the Imperial model predicted that would still lead to Covid hospital bed occupancy of about 15,000 to 25,000 in the summer and early autumn – which was higher than the first peak in April 2020.
Author(s): Sarah Knapton
Publication Date: 5 May 2021
Publication Site: The Telegraph (UK)
Link: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/about-pension-check-miscalculation-case-broader-implications
Excerpt:
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently addressed several issues of first impression in Bafford v. Northrop Grumman (9th Cir. April 15, 2021), a lawsuit involving retirees who received vastly overstated pension benefit estimates from the plan’s recordkeeper reminds employers of the importance of careful administration. The case highlights the need to ensure that electronic recordkeeping systems and tools align with the plan terms. Participant requests for plan or benefit information using online portals or other electronic means still demand timely and accurate responses as required by ERISA’s disclosure requirements.
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On appeal from the district court, the Ninth Circuit agreed that the participants’ ERISA fiduciary claims should have been dismissed, aligning with the First and the Fourth Circuit’s view that a named fiduciary is only liable for a fiduciary breach if they are performing a fiduciary function. The court said that calculating pension benefits using a pre-set formula is a ministerial function, not a fiduciary function. So a miscalculation error would not create a breach of fiduciary duty claim.
Author(s): Craig A. Day, Suzanne G. Odom
Publication Date: 25 April 2021
Publication Site: The National Law Review
Link: https://www.soa.org/sections/modeling/modeling-newsletter/2021/april/mp-2021-04-campbell/
Excerpt:
If nothing else, having a checklist to go through while working on modeling can help you make sure you don’t miss anything. Hey, ASB, make some handy-dandy sticky note checklists we can stick on our monitors to ask us:3.1 Does our model meet the intended purpose?
3.2 Do we understand the model, especially any weaknesses and limitations?
3.3 Are we relying on data or other information supplied by others?
3.4 Are we relying on models developed by others?
3.5 Are we relying on experts in the development of the model?
3.6 Have we evaluated and mitigated model risk?
3.7 Have we appropriately documented the model?
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: April 2021
Publication Site: The Modeling Platform at the Society of Actuaries
Link: https://logiccomppeople.blogspot.com/2021/04/cell-maps-critical-comments.html
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Cell maps are intended as tools for reviewing spreadsheets. If you spot an error or an inconsistency in the cell map this should be recorded and, if practicable, corrected.
The cell mapping software provides a method for recording a reviewer’s comments. All comments are linked to a specific map (or data table), The comments for a workbook under review are collated in a single worksheet.
Publication Date: 18 April 2021
Publication Site: Logic, Computing, and People
Excerpt:
A software mistake caused a Tui flight to take off heavier than expected as female passengers using the title “Miss” were classified as children, an investigation has found.
The departure from Birmingham airport to Majorca with 187 passengers on board was described as a “serious incident” by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB).
An update to the airline’s reservation system while its planes were grounded due to the coronavirus pandemic led to 38 passengers on the flight being allocated a child’s “standard weight” of 35kg as opposed to the adult figure of 69kg.
Author(s): PA Media
Publication Date: 8 April 2021
Publication Site: The Guardian
Link: https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/
Excerpt:
For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle. They were stuck essentially pulling bugs at random, but it was never clear if that issue was important.. New bug reports couldn’t be triaged effectively because finding duplicates was nearly impossible. So the open ticket count continued to climb. The team had been stalled for months. I was tasked with solving the problem: get the team unstuck, get reverse the trend in the open ticket count, come up with a way to eventually drive it down to zero.
So I used the same trick as the magician, which is no trick at all: I did the work. I printed out all the issues – one page of paper for each issue. I read each page. I took over a huge room and started making piles on the floor. I wrote tags on sticky notes and stuck them to piles. I shuffled pages from one stack to another. I wrote ticket numbers on whiteboards in long columns; I imagined I was Ben Affleck in The Accountant. I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.
Author(s): Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Publication Date: 7 April 2021
Publication Site: Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Link: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/03/working-from-home-during-the-pandemic.html
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Those who substituted some or all of their typical in-person work for telework tended to have higher household incomes than those who did not switch to telework.
In the highest-earning households — those with annual incomes of $200,000 or more — 73.1% switched to telework (Figure 1). This is more than double the percentage (32.1%) of households with incomes between $50,000 and $74,999, a range that includes the 2019 median U.S. household income ($65,712).
Lowest-earning households were less likely to switch to telework. Only 12.7% of households earning under $25,000 reported teleworking in lieu of in-person work.
Author(s): JOEY MARSHALL, CHARLYNN BURD, MICHAEL BURROWS
Publication Date: 31 March 2021
Publication Site: United States Census Bureau
Excerpt:
The steep losses at Archegos come as a council of top U.S. regulators known as the Financial Stability Oversight Council is already scheduled to meet on Wednesday to discuss hedge-fund activity during the pandemic-triggered crisis. The meeting is the first for the risk council during the Biden administration, which has pledged to scrutinize financial weaknesses revealed by the pandemic-triggered market tumult from March 2020. The council is made up of the heads of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and other agencies.
Mr. Dweck, the consultant, pointed to a case that many on Wall Street are hearing echoes of this week: Long-Term Capital Management, a massive hedge fund that blew up in 1998. Firms learned the full extent of the hedge fund’s problems only when government officials summoned them to Long-Term’s offices to pore over its records, he said.
“The upshot is, you’re going to have stuff like this happen,” Mr. Dweck said.
Author(s): Maureen Farrell, Margot Patrick, Juliet Chung
Publication Date: 30 March 2021
Publication Site: Wall Street Journal