BizResearch

Are expert forecasts ever any good? And more maths of the credit crunch

  Forecasting

2008 contained so many surprises that any self-respecting forecaster might want to take care before venturing a confident prognostication.

So are expert forecasts ever any good?  

 

Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology in the University of California Berkeley and author of Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Do We Know.

 

Professional forecasters, according to Professor Tetlock, are only marginally better than monkeys at predicting the future. 

 

More maths of the credit crunch - Financial maths expert Paul Wilmott

Financial mathematics guru Paul Wilmott continues with his series explaining how mathematical blunders contributed to the credit crunch.

 Financial traders are taught that the way to maximise profit and minimise risk is to diversify. So why did so many end up doing the same trades? The answer, according to Paul, might lie in the maths of the bonus system.

 

 

How best to caluculate the average wage

Listener Bill MacDonald has heard the average wage in the UK described as around £24,000. He thought that seemed a bit high and asked us to find out how it is calculated and whether it fairly reflects typical earnings.
Our reporter Oliver Hawkins explains the importance of selecting the most appropriate measure of the average.

 

 

These items were part of a fascinating programme on BBC Radio 4: More or Less.

More or Less is: "devoted to the powerful, sometimes beautiful, often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers."

You can download or subscribe to this programme's podcast at from the BBC wesite.

Click here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Business innovation is vital for corporate survival, but is innovation best left to companies?

Peter Day hears from the innovators who say that it is the users of goods and services who generate the best ideas, and now's the time to make innovation a truly open and collaborative process.

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this Sunday 13th at 9.30pm

Click here for more information.

More information about forthcoming business broadcasts can be found in BestofBiz

Portal>Library>A-Z list of Databases>BestofBiz

Contributors to the programme:

Soren Lund - Marketing director, LEGO

Jason Railton - Member, Lego’s expert users’ group

Professor Eric von Hippel - Head of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Group, Sloan School of Business. Author of Democratising Innovation

Richard Halkett - Director of policy & research, NESTA (National Foundation for Science, Technology & the Arts)

Don Tapscott - Author : Wikinomics

Joachim von Heimburg - Director Corporate R&D, Proctor & Gamble

Dwayne Spradlin - Chief executive, Innocentive

Global Leadership Summit podcasts

The Global Leadership Summit was held at the School on 2 July. Podcasts from the Summit, available from The Times Online, have been downloaded nearly 10,000 times.  Additionally, School podcasts featuring members of faculty are ranked in the top ten downloads on the I-Tunes business list.