Fighting Woodpeckers of Shellpot Creek

These two woodpeckers were fighting and teasing each other.  I think they were trying to claim the trees in our yard in order to impress lady woodpeckers.  These are red-bellied woodpeckers according to the pictures in the Delaware Museum of Natural History woodpecker collection.  (Cornell lab link with sounds!)Incidentally taken with my new Panasonic DMC-ZS20 camera.  it is a  point and shoot with a really good 20X...

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More Excel based destruction - this time in support of austerity

A coding error in excel, among other errors, has seriously weakened the conclusions of an important financial paper (by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, "Growth in a Time of Debt." ) regarding GDP growth at high debt to GDP levels. Another paper, ("Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin) tracked down the flaws - Excel spreadsheet...

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Beware the excel spreadsheet - especially when it can destroy the economy!

A variety of links about the ubiquitous use of excel in business and about the dangers of poorly designed software and models. Excel is a great liberator and allows the masses to create many different models, it also allows the freedom create bad or incorrect models and its very ubiquity means that it is likely to end up at the center of some big mistakes. In my model creation I try to separate data from calculations in a spreadsheet and I am a big proponent of database style formats (read columns) because then I can run a pivot table or...

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