# Posts

### July 25, 2014

+
Filed under: pictures, Running, Travel Tagged: art brut, Bagneux, biking, CREST, paint, stains, truck
+
My op/ed about math teaching and Little League coaching is the most emailed article in the New York Times today.  Very cool! But here’s something interesting; it’s only the 14th most viewed article, the 6th most tweeted, and the 6th most shared on Facebook.  On the other hand, this article about child refugees from Honduras […]
+
Are students customers, or are they just students? Perhaps there's a third way -- to think of them as clients, and faculty as consultants.
+
Anne Pier Salverda writes: I came across this blog entry, “An Experience with a Registered Replication Project,” and thought that you would find this interesting. It’s written by Simone Schnall, a social psychologist who is the first author of an oft-cited Psych Science(!) paper (“Cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments”) that a group of […] The post “An Experience with a Registered Replication Project” appeared first on Statistical […]
+
Yesterday was a day filled with secrets and codes. In the morning, at The Platform, we had guest speaker Columbia history professor Matthew Connelly, who came and talked to us about his work with declassified documents. Two big and slightly depressing take-aways for me were the following: As records have become digitized, it has gotten […]

### July 24, 2014

+
A new arXival on nested sampling: “A statistical test for nested sampling algorithms” by Johannes Buchner. The point of the test is to check if versions of the nested sampling algorithm that fail to guarantee increased likelihood (or nesting) at each step are not missing parts of the posterior mass. and hence producing biased evidence […]
+
It reminds me of Martin Amis’s The Information, in that it is a really well-made thing, but one which I think probably shouldn’t have been made, and which I’m probably sorry I read, because it’s sick in its heart. Everything else I can say is a spoiler so I’ll put it below a tab. 1.  I […]
+
People keep pointing me to this. P.S. I miss the old days when people would point me to bad graphs. The post If it was good enough for Martin Luther King and Laurence Tribe . . . appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
+
Aleks points us to this beautiful dynamic graph by Noah Veltman showing the heights and weights of NFL players over time. The color is pretty but I think I’d prefer something simpler, just one dot per player (with some jittering to handle the discrete reporting of heights and weights). In any case, it’s a great […] The post NFL players keep getting bigger and bigger appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
+
I'm passing this on from Mark Zelcer (CUNY): A group of researchers in philosophy, psychology and mathematics are requesting the assistance of the mathematical community by participating in a survey about mathematicians' philosophical intuitions. The survey is here: http://goo.gl/Gu5S4E. It would really help them if many mathematicians participated. Thanks!
+
Earlier this morning I received an email question from Yair Hayut. Is it consistent without the axiom of choice, of course, that there are free ultrafilters on the natural numbers but none on the real numbers? Well, of course that the answer is negative. If $\cal U$ is a free ultrafilter on $\omega$ then $\{X\subseteq\mathcal […] + I was wondering whether the outerplanar strict confluent drawings I studied in a Graph Drawing paper last year had underlying diagrams whose treewidth is bounded, similarly to the treewidth bound for the usual outerplanar graphs. The confluent graphs themselves can't have low treewidth, because they include large complete bipartite graphs, but I was hoping that a treewidth bound for the diagram could be used to prove that the graphs themselves have low clique-width. Sadly, it turns out not to […] ### July 23, 2014 + [Here is a second guest post on the ABC in Sydney workshop, written by Chris Drovandi] First up Dennis Prangle presented his recent work on “Lazy ABC”, which can speed up ABC by potentially abandoning model simulations early that do not look promising. Dennis introduces a continuation probability to ensure that the target distribution of […] + via @CERN http://t.co/9Rac42mBVh #CPviolation #CPsymmetry #matter #antimatter The CP violation is a violation of the CP-symmetry, a combination between the charge conjugation symmetry (C) and the parity symmetry (P). CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle, and then its spatial coordinates are inverted.The CP violation is discovered in 1964 by Christenson, Cronin, Fitch, and Turlay (Cronin and Fitch awarded the Nobel […] + A reporter asked me for a quote regarding the importance of statistics. But, after thinking about it for a moment, I decided that statistics isn’t so important at all. A world without statistics wouldn’t be much different from the world we have now. What would be missing, in a world without statistics? Science would be […] The post A world without statistics appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. + I spent about a month in the UK earlier this summer, and that meant I took a lot of train trips. I love riding trains: the feeling of endless possibility I get when I look at the departure boards,... -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com + Yesterday we were pleased to have Suresh Naidu guest lecture in The Platform. He came in and explained, very efficiently because he was leaving at 11am for a flight at noon at LGA (which he made!!) how to think like an economist. Or at least an applied microeconomist. Here are his notes: Applied microeconomics is basically […] + A recent Telegraph article suggests that “females, as a whole, are not hugely engaged by science.” Emphasis mine: The problem with science is that, for all its wonders, it lacks narrative and story-line. Science (and maths) is about facts, and … Continue reading → ### July 22, 2014 + …already Thursday, our [early] departure day!, with an nth (!) non-parametric session that saw [the newly elected ISBA Fellow!] Judith Rousseau present an ongoing work with Chris Holmes on the convergence or non-convergence conditions for a Bayes factor of a non-parametric hypothesis against another non-parametric. I wondered at the applicability of this test as the […] + Sweave and Pweave are programs that let you embed R and Python code respectively into LaTeX files. You can display the source code, the result of running the code, or both. lhs2TeX is roughly the Haskell analog of Sweave and Pweave. This post takes the sample code I wrote for Sweave and Pweave before and […] + by @ulaulaman http://t.co/Q3AODpvKAs #Godel #ontologicalproof #god #computer The ontological arguments for the existence of God was introduced for the first time by St. Anselm in 1078: God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist.There are a lot of phylosophies, mathematics and logicians that proposed their ontological […] + When in London awhile ago I picked up the book, “How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian,” by Stewart Lee. I’d never heard of the guy but the book was sitting there, it had good blurbs, and from a quick flip-through it looked interesting. Now that I’ve read […] The post Battle of the cozy comedians: What’s Alan Bennett’s problem with Stewart Lee? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social […] + One of my favorite books when I was growing up was the Mathematics volume in the LIFE Science Library. I didn’t own the book, but my uncle did, and I’d browse through the book whenever I visited him. I was too young at the time to understand much of what I was reading. One of […] + When I was prepping for my Slate Money podcast last week I read this column by Matt Levine at Bloomberg on the Citigroup settlement. In it he raises the important question of how the fine amount of$7 billion was determined. Here’s the key part:  Citi’s and the Justice Department’s approaches both leave something to […]
+
Devo dire che con questo libro Jack mi ha un po' sfidata, non per i contenuti ma per come è scritto: soprattutto nella prima parte si poteva incontrare un punto (in senso di punteggiatura) anche dopo una pagina e mezza, e in quella pagina e mezza passare da diversi eventi, incontri, situazioni. Una sfida che ho accolto e apprezzato, perché è una bella storia d'amore ma senza troppi fronzoli (forse è proprio l'assenza di fronzoli che ai tempi questo libro non fu ben […]
+
No ones knows who invented the wheel...but we always try not to re-invent it! Somebody in ancient China was clever enough to invent the printing machine while another discovered the formula for gun powder. But they didn't file any patent for that!. Some brilliant mathematician in India came up with the idea of using zero and built the foundation of mathematics; yet s/he fell short of
+
Algebraic thoughts on the threefold way and ten-fold way.

### July 21, 2014

+
The diagram below describes a finite state machine that takes as input a description of an indifference graph, and produces as output a 1-planar drawing of it (that is, a drawing with each edge crossed at most once).Indifference graphs are the graphs that can be constructed by the following process. Initialize an active set of vertices to be the empty set, and then perform a sequence of steps of two types: either add a new vertex to the active set and make it adjacent to all previous active […]
+
On morphisms pullback along which preserves weak equivalences, and their name(s).
+
The flight back from ISBA 2014 was not as smooth as the flight in: it took one hour for the shuttle to take us to the airport thanks to a driver posing as a touristic guide [who needs a guide when going home?!] and droning on and on about Cancún and the Maya heritage [as […]