Dear reader, who are you?

While working on an updated (not to say revised) version of Blogging in Academia, a Personal Experience, I noticed that I now have a better understanding of me as a blogger (this academic alter-ego, to use Vanessa Paz Dennen’s words), the role of blogs within academia, and the community of academic-bloggers. But tonight, in the train, I was asking myself about the readers. I mean You. I know from the stats of my blog that a few thousand people will read this post, that you are 32% American, 21% French, 6% Brazilian and 3% Swedish. That it is quite unlikely that you use a Linux computer. But I don’t know much more…

Since I have always claimed that my blog was a place to experiment, I wanted to try one! Dear reader, if you have 10 seconds, can you please post a comment, with your age, your gender, and your background (I’d like to know if you’re a student, a colleague, an economist, a mathematician, a biologist, a journalist, an astronaut, a lion tamer, an actuary, a modeler, a model, a robot… ). If you want to spend more time explaining how you ended up on my blog, I’d be glad to know… But at least, your age, your gender, and your ‘academic background’ (since I have some sort of academic blog), that would be great! If you come frequently on my blog, you should start to know me, and I thought it would be great if I could know more about you…

Le Mans Insurance & Finance Risk Colloquium

This Thursday and Friday, a Colloqium on Insurance and Finance risks will take place in the University of Le Mans. I will be giving a talk on non- and semi-parametric inference for risk measures, inspired by recent work with Emmanuel Flachaire. Our first paper log-transform kernel density estimationof income distribution is online  on http://papers.ssrn.com/id=2514882, and should appear soon. The second one is still in progress, codes are still running. I will upload the slides once the working paper is available…