All scientists and engineers do.

We take it on faith that electrons exist, and that the great results and theorems hold up to scrutiny. We trust our colleagues and historians when they report on important experimental results.

I don't pretend to understand evolution beyond what was explained in my high school textbook, but I believe in it. I believe that the scientists employed the scientific method, and that this theorem has stood up to scrutiny over the decades.

We take these things on faith because it is impractical for us to do otherwise. Yes, with time, resources, and effort, I would reproduce the experiments I read in journal and textbooks, but this is rather unlikely, isn't it. Repeatability is a good principle, but is for all intents and purposes a platitude. We rely on faith and trust.

How are we (science believers) any different than the religious zealot who has read his holy book and several commentaries on it; has read and heard about the observations of miracles and mystical experiences from others; and intellectually agrees with the tenets of his faith? Are adherents to science that far off from religious zealots?

Science works, you say? Bridges hold up the weight of vehicles, my plasma TV set works, etc. But how do we know these results were obtained from the scientific method. For all we know, these results could have been obtained by silent medication and prayer. We trust the folks who reported these results that lead to technological progress that they used the scientific method.

These stories were written over the span of 50 years, and you can see in Isaac Asimov's style the perspectives and foci of a young versus an old man. 

I always enjoy clever protagonists and plot twists, and as a younger reader I enjoyed the way that in the stories cold calculations drafted decades previously could defeat brute force in the present. (in some ways, this is very similar to Obama's defeat of McCain: polished strategic planning against harsh, day-to-day snap politics.)

As an older man I have read his stories with an eye to his descriptions of psychohistory, the science used to shape historical forces decades before they happen. This discipline assumes that a galaxy full of people can provide enough statistical significance to treat society as a physical object with governing "physical" laws of behavior. 

I do not know how much I have been influenced by asimov, but I am actually working on ideas that bear some resemblance to psychohistory. I am using them not to save an empire but for more practical purposes, including marketing and valuation.

Ito's Lemma is probably his most famous result: this is the stochastic (ie, random) equivalent of the chain rule in derivative calculus. Without his contribution, the Black-Scholes equations/results would not be possible. Though maybe, given recent events, that would be a good thing.

Anyway, he has recently passed. Stirling Newberry attempts to explain the significance of Ito's work. Here are  more organized explanations of his work and its significance.

Hmmm. Finance professor has almost identical thoughts.

I will write here what I muttered at the screen there:

How to get through the Holiday Season:

1) STOP buying. Don't buy a damned thing this season.

2) STOP being so damned materialistic. The marketers have truly stolen our minds when people think that the success of a holiday hinges on how much crap can be bought. Are your relationships that dependent upon your gift giving?

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It is well known that the american economy and a significant portion of its GDP is dependent upon consumer spending. I don't know the comparison for other nations. But I think it's (economically) unhealthy, especially when said spending it driven by debt and negative savings rates. 

An economy whose foundation rests upon people who never save and endebt themselves to the world is doomed. Short term thinking at its worst and we are just at the beginning of the results, when in this crisis, people still haven't learned the lessons of debt, spending, and materialism.

Obama has challenged me to rethink what is possible in this country. That is, what is possible for an african american individual to achieve in a country full of bigots.

This man and his staff ran an inclusive, high road campaign, in an extremely hostile, bigoted, and partisan environment. He achieved this with self-discipline, hard work, and a strategic vision.

A black man with the name "Hussein" made it to the top. Suddenly, those boulders I see in my way don't seem so unclimbable.

He is both an inspiration and an admonishment to rise.

33 year old black male. Phd in engineering. MBA from ivy league.

Grew up listening to hip hop. Still listen to hip hop. Most of my 80GB iPOD is hip hop. Much of this hip hop has been published in the last 3 years. Yet I never listen to the rappers mentioned in this thread. (Maybe if I flip channels and happen to see a video, or hear music from someone's cranked-up car system.)

I travel the world on business and for pleasure. I have been in some off-tourist track venues in china, and stumbled across b-boy groups performing. I have browsed hip hop sections in asian and east european music stores and heard rappers I couldn't understand flowing to exotic--yet familiar--beats.

Point: To those of you pigeonholing Hip Hop and black men. STOP IT. Your myopia is laughable. Both are flying past conventional wisdom and expectations.

As you see from my sidebar, like everyone else, I have a blog roll. One unique section of my blogroll are of brothers and sisters that are expats or international travellers in locations outside of the US, African nations, and Brazil.  

 It's all good to have a list, but I like to visualize information. This custom google map was easy to create, and gives a unique perspective on the afro-precense in the world.

 Mostly the links are to blogs, but I plan to directly link posts from the Black Travels forum to their respective locations on the map.

The goal is to aid networking for business, travel planning, and plain old fun.

Imagine a college-educated analyst in a little office, working an excel sheet that describes a bunch of homeowners borrowers. This "quant" lacks crucial expertise and visibility into the mortage market, but he sure can work a pivot table!

This ignorant, but well-meaning analyst has been a crucial cog in the mortgage mess. They, and their employers, have been key influencers in the international market for mortgage-backed securities. The ratings given to mortgage backed bonds are critical to their acceptance to investors, and thus the growth of this market.

The growth of this market for mortgage-backed bonds, in turn incentivized banks and lenders to prime the lending pump, encouraging shaky borrowers, cajoling loan officers and generally cutting corners to approve more home loans. Thus, we have the growth of the mortage industry, fueled not by demand from the housing market, but by demand from the bond market.

One of my interests is in quantitative finance, partucularly in finding ways to model and price "real" assets. One of the things I have learned, and is illustrated in this article, is the fact that many folks who have to model markets and assets, have little connection to what they are modeling. The analysts had no good method of checking the validity of their models or assumptions. And the people who depended on these models to make decisions misvalued investments and misread risk. The same thing happens all the time in banks, product companies, and marketing firms.

(hat tip to Agonist)