Posts

May 08, 2013

+

12:00 PM | Is the modified Moore method an instance of the flipped classroom?

Dana Ernst, Brandon Price, and I exchanged some tweets about the Moore method and the flipped classroom recently, and I think generally we're on the same page, but here's my reasoning about this issue and, more generally, what does or does not fall under the heading of "flipped classroom".

+

11:13 AM | tea-rapy

Filed under: Travel, Wines Tagged: Chun Feng, Darjeeling, Long Jing, Palais des Thés, Pu Er, Sencha Ariake, tea, Yunnan

+

5:04 AM | Weekly links for May 7

Sears Merritt on safe leads in basketball, expanding on Bill James’ method for telling when a lead is safe. Kevin Jamieson makes a two-dimensional map of styles of beer. I’d like to see this for wine. You can buy a 3D-printed triple gear (three gears which touch in pairs and yet can all turn simultaneously! [...]

+

3:00 AM | Niall Ferguson update

I don’t want this to be a regular feature but I wanted to briefly comment on Ferguson’s open letter regarding the Keynes-was-a-ballet-and-poetry-loving-poof remarks he made the other day at that conference of financial advisors. (I’m posting this one at night, and a new post on an unrelated topic is coming in the morning, so I’m [...]The post Niall Ferguson update appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

+

3:00 AM | Like Casper the ghost, Niall Ferguson is not only white. He is also very, very adorable.

I don’t want this to be a regular feature but I wanted to briefly comment on Ferguson’s open letter regarding the Keynes-was-a-ballet-and-poetry-loving-poof remarks he made the other day at that conference of financial advisors. (I’m posting this one at night, and a new post on an unrelated topic is coming in the morning, so I’m [...]The post Like Casper the ghost, Niall Ferguson is not only white. He is also very, very adorable. appeared first on Statistical Modeling, […]

May 07, 2013

+

11:33 PM | Guest post at DeltaScape: Does this make sense?

I lost a bet with my friend and colleague Dave Coffey (remember him?) over the NCAA mens’ basketball tournament, and as a result, I owed Dave a guest post on his blog DeltaScape. Risky move on his part, in my opinion, since his blog is a consistently excellent source of wisdom about math education and teacher training. I hope I didn’t mess it up too much — my guest post, entitled “Does this make sense?” is about so-called sense-making activities and what they mean […]

+

10:13 PM | carciofi alla Scéena

Filed under: pictures Tagged: artichokes, carciofi alla Romana, cooking, Sceaux

+

1:28 PM | Is Felix Salmon wrong on free TV?

Mark Palko writes: Salmon is dismissive of the claim that there are fifty million over-the-air television viewers: The 50 million number, by the way, should not be considered particularly reliable: it’s Aereo’s guess as to the number of people who ever watch free-to-air TV, even if they mainly watch cable or satellite. (Maybe they have [...]The post Is Felix Salmon wrong on free TV? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

+

12:00 PM | Almost if and only if

The Perrin numbers have a definition analogous to Fibonacci numbers. Define P0 = 3, P1 = 0, and P2 = 2. Then for n > 2, define Pn+3 = Pn+1 + Pn+0. The Concrete Tetrahedron says It appears that n…Read more ›

+

11:07 AM | The NYC Data Skeptics Meetup

One thing I’m super excited about at work is the new NYC Data Skeptics Meetup we’re organizing. Here’s the description of our mission: The hype surrounding Big Data and Data Science is at a fever pitch with promises to solve the world’s business and social problems, large and small. How accurate or misleading is this [...]

May 06, 2013

+

10:13 PM | At the hospital

Spending three weeks in an hospital has certainly been a novel experience for me! Except for the boredom (reflected by the many books reviews found in the past posts) and the uncertainty about the success of the graft, not mentioning the occasional pain, I found the experience interesting in several ways. First, I discussed a [...]

+

7:47 PM | BF Skinner was emo

I’m sorry there’s been so much “young B.F. Skinner” material here but I can’t get enough of this stuff! In 1926, age 22, living in his parents’ attic, he writes an essay in his notebook called “WHAT I ACHIEVE I DESPISE,” which includes this: Nothing is worth doing. But we have the instinct to do, [...]

+

1:00 PM | Against optimism about social science

Social science research has been getting pretty bad press recently, what with the Excel buccaneers who didn’t know how to handle data with different numbers of observations per country, and the psychologist who published dozens of papers based on fabricated data, and the Evilicious guy who wouldn’t let people review his data tapes, etc etc. [...]The post Against optimism about social science appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

+

12:00 PM | Who does screencasting help the most?

Here's another article about a recent paper detailing a study of student screencast use in an introductory engineering class. The authors found positive correlations between screencast use and course grades, but the statistical significance depends on (among other things) the students' majors. But the strongest correlation is within majors that are least likely to be familiar with the course material.

+

11:04 AM | In defense of neglectful parenting

As I promised yesterday, I want to respond to this New Yorker article “The Child Trap: the rise of overparenting,” which my friend Chris Wiggins forwarded to me. The premise of the article is that nowadays we spoil our kids, force them to do a bunch of adult-supervised after-school activities, and generally speaking hover over [...]

May 05, 2013

+

11:00 PM | Social learning dilemma

Last week, my father sent me a link to the 100 top-ranked specialties in the sciences and social sciences. The Web of Knowledge report considered 10 broad areas[1] of natural and social science, and for each one listed 10 research fronts that they consider as the key fields to watch in 2013 and are “hot [...]

Rendell L, Boyd R, Cownden D, Enquist M, Eriksson K, Feldman MW, Fogarty L, Ghirlanda S, Lillicrap T & Laland KN & (2010). Why copy others? Insights from the social learning strategies tournament., Science, 328 (5975) 208-213. PMID: 20378813

Citation

+

10:13 PM | Initializing adaptive importance sampling with Markov chains

Another paper recently arXived by Beaujean and Caldwell elaborated on our population Monte Carlo papers (Cappé et al., 2005, Douc et al., 2007, Wraith et al., 2010) to design a more thorough starting distribution. Interestingly, the authors mention the fact that PMC is an EM-type algorithm to emphasize the importance of the starting distribution, as [...]

+

8:29 PM | Newcastle MathsJam March and April 2013 Recap

Here’s another double-bill MathsJam recap; I’ve been truly awful at keeping up this year. The first thing I have written down in my notebook for March’s Newcastle MathsJam is a scribbled-upon sketch of what looks like some paths on a …

+

7:42 PM | Cleaning up science

David Hogg pointed me to this post by Gary Marcus, reviewing this skeptics’ all-star issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science that features replication culture heroes Jelte Wicherts, Hal Pashler, Arina Bones, E. J. Wagenmakers, Gregory Francis, Hal Pashler, John Ioannidis, and Uri Simonsohn. I agree with pretty much everything Marcus has to say. In addition [...]

+

5:21 PM | Ramanujan approximation for circumference of an ellipse

There’s no elementary formula for the circumference of an ellipse, but there is an elementary approximation that is extremely accurate. An ellipse has equation (x/a)² + (y/b)² = 1. If a = b, the ellipse reduces to a circle and…Read more ›

+

2:28 PM | Do what I want or do what I really want

I’m on my way out to a picnic in Central Park on this glorious Sunday morning, and I plan to write a much more thorough post in response to this New Yorker article on overparenting that my friend Chris Wiggins sent me, but today I just wanted to impart one idea I’ve developed as a [...]

+

2:11 PM | Speed-Crankery

A fun game to play with cranks is: how long does it take for the crank to contradict themselves? When you're looking at a good example of crankery, it's full of errors. But for this game, it's not enough to just find an error. What we want is for them to say something so wrong [...]

+

12:07 PM | The New York Times Book of Mathematics

This was an good idea: take a bunch of old (and some recent) news articles on developments in mathematics and related ares from the past hundred years. Fun for the math content and historical/nostalgia value. Relive the four-color theorem, Fermat, fractals, and early computing. I have too much of a technical bent to be the [...]

+

2:02 AM | One more thought on Hoover historian Niall Ferguson’s thing about Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry

We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and [...]

May 04, 2013

+

10:13 PM | hospital series

While I usually never find enough time to watch series (or even less telly!), I took advantage of those three weeks at the hospital to catch up with Game of Thrones and discovered Sherlock, thanks to Judith. As I have been reading George Martin’s epics, A Song of Ice and Fire, from the very beginning [...]

+

5:20 PM | Elasticity of the air

Text extracted from "The magician's own book, or The whole art of conjuring" (1862) by George Arnold This can be shown by a beautiful philosophical toy which may easily be constructed. Procure a glass jar, such as is here represented. Then mould three or four little figures in wax, and make them hollow within, and having each a minute opening at the heel, by which water may pass in and out. Place them in the jar, as seen in the figure, and adjust them by the quantity of water admitted to […]

+

5:07 PM | The Folk Theorem of Statistical Computing

From an email I received the other day: Things are going much better now — it’s interesting, it feels like with both of my models, parameters are slow to converge or get “stuck” and have trouble mixing when the model is somehow misspecified. See here for a statement of the folk theorem.

+

4:00 PM | Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem

This month, I decided I would focus on one of the most famous theorems in all of mathematics: The Pythagorean Theorem. Though it sounds kind of dull on the face, it has a lot of extremely interesting things within it.First, let me go over what it is. If you take a right triangle, and label the measure of its shortest side a, its middle side b, and its longest side c, then you can count on the fact that:a2 + b2 = c2 This can be used in geometry problems, like to find the longest side, or […]

+

2:52 PM | Would you consider getting your Ph.D. in 3 years or less?

Gödel had his doctorate at 23, completing all his university studies in about 5 years. In the U.S., for example, if one goes through the usual path of four years of undergraduate studies (after being admitted to a university at … Continue reading →

+

2:05 PM | Jesus historian Niall Ferguson and the improving standards of public discourse

History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports: Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, [...]

May 08, 2013

May 07, 2013

May 06, 2013

May 05, 2013

May 04, 2013

Posts with Citations

User Activity