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.
I agree, he's a very interesting figure. I was going to add that he invented or at least popularized hot chocolate, but after looking into it a bit more it turns out that the story is more complicated than I thought. Here's the official narrative I'd heard (via the Natural History Museum):
"While in Jamaica, Sloane was introduced to cocoa as a drink favoured by the local people. He found it 'nauseous' but by mixing it with milk made it more palatable. He brought this chocolate recipe back to England where it was manufactured and at first sold by apothecaries as a medicine.
Eventually, in the nineteenth century, it was being taken up by Messrs Cadbury who manufactured chocolate using Sloane's recipe."
But this post from the Sloane Letters blog argues that it's basically a myth (although it seems more accurate to say that the evidence is circumstantial at best and that we don't really know what his role was, if any, in the 18th century chocolate recipe that bore his name):
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.
They are passed to be able to work, not to live a long and healthy life. For instance, someone very obese might have high blood pressure and diabetes, but could probably still work in a call centre.
>> 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.
Pensions are welfare spending. If you're going to arbitrarily pick sections off then you could make any amount of spending look like a reduction. You could argue about the priorities, but not that welfare spending has gone down.
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.
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.
