Gavin Barwell is a decent enough chap, but the more you read of his time as Theresa May’s chief of staff, the more you realise why her government was doomed. He paints a picture of a low-energy government in the midst of high-energy national crisis.
Nothing demonstrates this better than the corresponding reading lists of Barwell and his successor at 10 Downing Street, Dominic Cummings.
This is the reading list Cummings set for data scientists interested in applying to his ‘weirdos and misfits’ job advert at the beginning of the year:
- This Nature paper, Early warning signals for critical transitions in a thermoacoustic system, looking at early warning systems in physics that could be applied to other areas from finance to epidemics.
- Statistical & ML forecasting methods: Concerns and ways forward, Spyros Makridakis, 2018. This compares statistical and ML methods in a forecasting tournament (won by a hybrid stats/ML approach).
- Complex Contagions : A Decade in Review, 2017. This looks at a large number of studies on ‘what goes viral and why?’. A lot of studies in this field are dodgy (bad maths, don’t replicate etc), an important question is which ones are worth examining.
- Model-Free Prediction of Large Spatiotemporally Chaotic Systems from Data: A Reservoir Computing Approach, 2018. This applies ML to predict chaotic systems.
- Scale-free networks are rare, Nature 2019. This looks at the question of how widespread scale-free networks really are and how useful this approach is for making predictions in diverse fields.
- On the frequency and severity of interstate wars, 2019. ‘How can it be possible that the frequency and severity of interstate wars are so consistent with a stationary model, despite the enormous changes and obviously non-stationary dynamics in human population, in the number of recognised states, in commerce, communication, public health, and technology, and even in the modes of war itself? The fact that the absolute number and sizes of wars are plausibly stable in the face of these changes is a profound mystery for which we have no explanation.’
Already a subscriber? Log in
Keep reading with a free trial
Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.
There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.
Or
Comments
Don't miss out
Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.
UNLOCK ACCESSAlready a subscriber? Log in