Presidential Debates/Mathbabe

We check in with George Farah, who reveals the “Secrets of the Tomb,” otherwise known as the Commission on Presidential Debates.  And the Mathbabe, Cathy O’Neil, drops in to discuss how numbers can crunch us with her book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.

George Farah is an antitrust attorney as well as the founder and executive director of Open Debates.  He is the author of the book No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates by Seven Stories Press.  His articles have been published in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Denver Post, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications.  Mr. Farah has appeared on dozens of television programs, including “Nightline,” “NOW with Bill Moyers,” “20/20,” “CBS Evening News,” and “NBC Nightly News.”

Cathy O’Neil has a PhD in mathematics from Harvard and taught that subject at Barnard College before working as an analyst for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co.  Then, she went rogue and joined Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the SEC, where she hopes to devise an alternative banking system.  She created the blog Mathbabe in order to explain and demystify the terminology and practices in the financial system and has now written a book entitled Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.