# Posts

### July 14, 2014

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La banda degli invisibili è una banda di divertenti signore e signori anziani, che trascorrono il loro tempo a chiacchierare, bisticciare, leggere il giornale e commentare le notizie alla tv. Ed è proprio ascoltando le notizie che hanno questa idea: rapire Silvio Berlusconi! Ebbene sì, è proprio quello che vogliono fare!Per portare a termine l'operazione iniziano a 'fare palestra', ma in casa, perché con la loro pensione non possono permettersi certo una vera […]
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Michael Betancourt announces: The Stan Development Team is happy to announce the first Stan London Meetup, Wednesday, July 16th, 6-8 PM Bentham House, Seminar Room 4 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London, WC1H 0EG Nominally the plan is to begin with a casual introduction to Stan and then break out into discussion based on the interests of […] The post Stan London Meetup 16 July appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

### July 13, 2014

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Today, I took part in the thesis defence of Amandine Shreck at Telecom-ParisTech. I had commented a while ago on the Langevin algorithm for discontinuous targets she developed with co-authors from that school towards variable selection. The thesis also contains material on the equi-energy sampler that is worth mentioning. The algorithm relates to the Wang-Landau […]
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The event Street Numbers had his first month. Really proud of everyone that participated and happy to say that there will be other 2 months of Street Numbers. Just take photos of the numbers around you: houses, buses, cars, prices in markets, … Continue reading →
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I thought it would be fun to fit a simple model in Stan to estimate the abilities of the teams in the World Cup, then I could post everything here on the blog, the whole story of the analysis from beginning to end, showing the results of spending a couple hours on a data analysis. […] The post Stan goes to the World Cup appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

### July 12, 2014

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Alas, thrice alas, the bid we made right after the Banff workshop with Scott Schmidler, and Steve Scott for holding the next World ISBA Conference in 2016 in Banff, Canada was unsuccessful. This is a sad and unforeseen item of news as we thought Banff had a heap of enticing features as a dream location […]
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The new rules for D&D 5e (formerly known as D&D Next) are finally here: Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition: Basic Rules D&D 5e introduces a new game mechanic, advantage and disadvantage. Basic d20 Rules Usually, players roll a 20-sided die (d20) to resolve everyting from attempts at diplomacy to hitting someone with a sword. Each […] The post D&D 5e: Probabilities for Advantage and Disadvantage appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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Filed under: pictures, Travel Tagged: Charles de Gaulle, Paris suburbs, RER B, Roissy, summer, sunset, train, University of Warwick
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Nel momento in cui affermiamo che un dato numero è primo, ovvero nel momento in cui affermiamo matematicamente che $n$ è un numero primostiamo, in effetti, affermando che $n$ è un numero naturale divisibile solo per se stesso e per l'unità. Questa definizione può però essere ulteriormente ridotta come segue(1): $n$ è un numero naturale e, presi comunque due numeri naturali $h$ e $k$, se $n$ è $h \cdot k$, allora $h$ o $k$ è 1.E' […]

Quine, W. V. (1964). The Foundations of Mathematics, Scientific American, 211 (3) 112-127. DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican0964-112

Paul J. Cohen & Reuben Hersh (1967). Non-Cantorian Set Theory, Scientific American, 217 (6) 104-116. DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican1267-104

Howard DeLong (1971). Unsolved Problems in Arithmetic, Scientific American, 224 (3) 50-60. DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican0371-50

Kurt Gödel (1931). Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I, Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, 38-38 (1) 173-198. DOI: 10.1007/BF01700692

Zermelo, E. (1904). Beweis, dass jede Menge wohlgeordnet werden kann, Mathematische Annalen, 59 (4) 514-516. DOI: 10.1007/BF01445300

Kurt Gödel (1938). The Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized Continuum-Hypothesis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 (12) 556-557. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.24.12.556

Paul J. Cohen (1963). The independence of the continuum hypothesis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 50 (6) 1143-1148. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.50.6.1143

Paul J. Cohen (1964). The independence of the continuum hypothesis, II, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 51 (1) 105-110. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.51.1.105

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At MathJax we often get questions about specific examples of content / web design. Most of the time, people will show up on the MathJax User Group (the preferred choice), StackOverflow (semi-officially supported), and through our contact form on mathjax.org …
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Aunt Pythia welcomes you after one week away celebrating her middle son’s and the nation’s birthday. She’s not sure she will be able to incorporate such a topic into the Q&A so she’s jumping on the opportunity to spread the love emanating from this video (hat tip Mike Hill): It comes from this webpage entitled Putting the […]
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I noticed that there was a higher-than-usual density of arxiv preprints among the web pages I'd been bookmarking lately, so I thought maybe I'd share. The first one, especially, is very timely:From the "Brazuca" ball to Octahedral Fullerenes: Their Construction and Classification, Yuan-Jia Fan, Bih-Yaw Jin, arXiv:1406.7058, via. The classical pentagon and hexagon soccer ball pattern (introduced for the 1970 World Cup) later became even more famous as the structure of the buckminsterfullerene […]

### July 11, 2014

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I learned something in R today thanks to Le Monde mathematical puzzle: A two-player game consists in A picking a number n between 1 and 10 and B and A successively choosing and applying one of three transforms to the current value of n n=n+1, n=3n, n=4n, starting with B, until n is larger than […]
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Ya think they’ll never come up with something new, and then this comes along: Dear Dr. Gelman, I am writing to inquire about the availability of obtaining a self-funded visiting scholar position in your institution for one year. I will cover all my expenses during my visit. I have completed a M.A. at Sichuan international […] The post Hey—this is a new kind of spam! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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Here is the shameless self-promotion moment of the day: the interview with me at 3am magazine is online. I mostly talk about the contents of my book Formal Languages in Logic, and so cover a number of topics that may be of interest to M-Phi readers: the history of mathematical and logical notation, 'math infatuation', history of logic in general, and some more. Comments are welcome!
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Yesterday was the end of the first half of the Lede Program, and the students presented their projects, which were really impressive. I am hoping some of them will be willing to put them up on a WordPress site or something like that in order to showcase them and so I can brag about them […]

### July 10, 2014

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Here are our slides for the ABC [very] short course Jean-Michel and I give at ISBA 2014 in Cancún next Monday (if your browser can manage Slideshare…) Although I may switch the pictures from Iceland to Mexico, on Sunday, there will be not much change on those slides we both have previously used in previous […]
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Review up at the Boston Globe: If the feel of sand between your toes gets you thinking about Zeno’s Paradox or Pascal’s Wager, Ellenberg’s book is ideal beach reading. But even if your interests lie elsewhere, you may find it a challenging but welcome companion. at NewCity Lit: To the mathematician, math is a curious […]
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Niala Boodho on the Afternoon Shift will be interviewing Yair and me about our age-period-cohort extravaganza which became widely-known after being featured in this cool interactive graph by Amanda Cox in the New York Times. The actual paper is called The Great Society, Reagan’s revolution, and generations of presidential voting and was somewhat inspired by […] The post Chicago alert: Mister P and Stan to be interviewed on WBEZ today (Fri) 3:15pm appeared first on Statistical […]
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Today is a red-letter day for readers of The Renaissance Mathematicus; I have succeeded in cajoling, seducing, bullying, bribing, inducing, tempting, luring, sweet-talking, coaxing, coercing, enticing, beguiling[1] Harvard University’s very own Dr Melinda Baldwin into writing a guest post on … Continue reading →
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Dean Eckles points me to this cool new tool for experimentation: I [Eckles] just wanted to share that in a collaboration between Facebook and Stanford, we have a new paper out about running online field experiments. One thing this paper does is describe some of the tools we use to design, deploy, and analyze experiments, […] The post Open-source tools for running online field experiments appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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What's a good reference for 'presentations' of symmetric monoidal category?
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Warning: contains minor spoilers for The Fault in Our Stars. I recently read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, now a major motion picture that has led to theft in Amsterdam and a shortage of dry... -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
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Two of the most famous open problems in additive prime number theory are the twin prime conjecture and the binary Goldbach conjecture. They have quite similar forms: Twin prime conjecture The equation has infinitely many solutions with prime. Binary Goldbach conjecture The equation has at least one solution with prime for any given even . […]
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This M-Phi post is an idea Catarina and I hatched, after a post Catarina did a couple of weeks back at NewAPPS, "Searle on formal methods in philosophy of language", commenting on a recent interview of John Searle, where Searle comments that"what has happened in the subject I started out with, the philosophy of language, is that, roughly speaking, formal modeling has replaced insight".I commented a bit underneath Catarina's post, as this is one thing that interests me. I'm writing a more […]

### July 09, 2014

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I know that it is almost the middle of July, but believe me that the beginning of this month was a lot harder for me (not complicated, but like my free time has just been divided by 2, which was … Continue reading →
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This introduction to Bayesian Analysis, Bayes’ Rule, was written by James Stone from the University of Sheffield, who contacted CHANCE suggesting a review of his book. I thus bought it from amazon to check the contents. And write a review. First, the format of the book. It is a short paper of 127 pages, plus […]
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Filed under: pictures, Travel Tagged: Paris, Paris suburbs, plane, RER B, Roissy, sunset, train
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How many ways can you make change for a dollar? This post points to two approaches to the problem, one computational and one analytic. SICP gives a Scheme program to solve the problem: (define (count-change amount) (cc amount 5)) (define (cc amount kinds-of-coins) (cond ((= amount 0) 1) ((or (
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Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes: I’m working on building a predictive model (not causal) of the onset of diabetes mellitus using electronic medical records from a semi-panel of HMO patients. The dependent variable is blood glucose level. The unit of analysis is the patient visit to a network doctor or hospitalization in a […] The post “P.S. Is anyone working on hierarchical survival models?” appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and […]