Sep 19, 2012
Flood Insurance Claims
Histogram of NFIP claims from 1996 to 2010 in 2010 constant dollars—it looks like it might be log-normally distributed.
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Archive page 62 of 73
Aug 25, 2012
OMG, this is the way math was meant to be written
The quadratic formula is [latex]x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}.[/latex] MathJax is freaking awesome.
Mar 24, 2012
Measuring the Impacts of the National Flood Insurance Program
Measuring the Impacts of the National Flood Insurance Program from James Howard Above are the slides from my presentation at the William and Mary Graduate Research Symposium. The associated paper can be…
Jan 28, 2012
Fiscal Year CPI Indicators
As noted before, the federal fiscal year can cause problems for economic analysis when converting from nominal dollars to constant dollars because the federal fiscal year runs from October 1 to September…
Jan 22, 2012
Dissertation Proposal Defended
I defended and passed my dissertation proposal yesterday. One of the more challenging aspects the public policy program at UMBC is the amount of information going into the proposal. Where some programs…
Jan 20, 2012
Dissertation Proposal Defense Slides
Below are the slides from my dissertation proposal defense. I gave the presentation this morning and was approved. My notes are also included. NFIP Dissertation Proposal Defense from James Howard
Jan 18, 2012
Ex-Post Social Discount Rates
When performing ex post analysis for net social benefits, there is surprisingly little guidance on the matter of selecting a social discount rate. This is remarkable given the handwringing by the Office…
Jan 10, 2012
Talk on the NFIP at the Graduate Research Symposium
I will be presenting on the National Flood Insurance Program at the William and Mary Graduate Research Symposium in March. The abstract of the talk is: The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)…
Jan 5, 2012
Touchscreen HCI Disorder
It isn't listed in the DSM yet, but I think I have a condition I am calling Touchscreen HCI Disorder. The cause is using too many touchscreen devices. The symptom is assuming…
Jan 4, 2012
Recoding County-Level Data
This evening I finished recoding a list of grants from FEMA for Flood Mitigation Assistance. This dataset contains 2108 entries, and contains the following columns, among others: State County Subgrantee ---------- -----------…
Jul 21, 2011
A RESTful interface for MD5 hashes
Or not quite. I had a need to generate MD5 hashes inside a Google Spreadsheet, but Google does not include an MD5 function (and neither does OpenOffice.org). Google does, however, support a…