# Posts

### November 08, 2014

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Holy crap! Aunt Pythia is in love with a new knitting pattern and has just completed her first reversible “flaming hat”: And that’s all I got today, folks. Just kidding! I’m here for you guys, of course! Let’s dig in. But before I forget, please think of something titillating, reversible, and scrumptious  to ask Aunt […]
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Stratagemma 8Stratagemma 16
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A colleague writes: Following our recent ** article (on which you commented favourably . . .), are you maybe planning a blog post on this? Both ** and ** have extensively analysed the statistical methods used in the original article, and found them wanting. I would really like to see the ** article retracted, as […] The post Why I’m not posting on this topic appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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By analogy, or maybe homage, to standard game theory, when we discuss the payoffs of an evolutionary game, we usually tell the story of two prototype agents representing their respective strategies meeting at random and interacting. For my stories of yarn, knitting needles, and clandestine meetings in the dark of night, I even give these […]

Archetti, M. (2014). Evolutionary dynamics of the Warburg effect: glycolysis as a collective action problem among cancer cells., Journal of theoretical biology, 341 1-8. PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24075895

Citation

### November 07, 2014

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In the past years, I have see a construction grow and grow under my office windows in Paris-Dauphine, ruining my views of the towers of La Défense, as seen on the above picture. This huge building designed by architect Frank Gehry has now opened as the Fondation Louis Vuitton museum, exposing artworks owned by LVMH […]
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Simon Beck has been decorating the Alps with this stunning mathematical art, by running in snowshoes across freshly laid snow.  Beck, 56, went to Millfield School and studied engineering at Oxford university. In 1974 he won the British Orienteering Championships. … Continue reading →
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By “badly,” I don’t just mean unethically or immorally; I’m also including examples in this the individual scientists are not clearly violating any ethical rules but are acting in a way as to degrade, rather than increase, our understanding of the world. In the latter case I include examples such as the senders of the […] The post Scientists behaving badly appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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I’m preparing for my weekly Slate Money podcast – this week, unequal public school funding, Taylor Swift versus Spotify, and the economics of weed, which will be fun – and I keep coming back to something I mentioned last week on Slate Money when we were talking about the end of the Fed program of quantitative […]

### November 06, 2014

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This newly arXived paper by S. Golchi and D. Campbell from Vancouver (hence the above picture) considers the (quite) interesting problem of simulating from a target distribution defined by a constraint. This is a question that have bothered me for a long while as I could not come up with a satisfactory solution all those […]
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Dan Walter writes: A few years ago, in a post about Baysian statistics, you referred to a book that I wrote about a study on catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation: The Chorus of Ablationists I am writing a story on the transplant industry and am wondering about a widely cited article concerning the long term health effects of […] The post Debate over kidney transplant stats? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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This is a guest post by Becky Jaffe. It has come to my attention that I am a nerd. I take this on good authority from my students, my friends, and, as of this morning, strangers in a coffee shop. I was called a nerd three times today before 10:30 am, while I was standing […]
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Brendan Nyhan writes: I’d love to see you put some data in here that you know well and evaluate how the site handles it. The webpage in question says: Upload a data set, and the automatic statistician will attempt to describe the final column of your data in terms of the rest of the data. […] The post Just imagine if Ed Wegman got his hands on this program—it could do wonders for his research productivity! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social […]
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The wave equation is usually expressed in the form where is a function of both time and space , with being the Laplacian operator. One can generalise this equation in a number of ways, for instance by replacing the spatial domain with some other manifold and replacing the Laplacian with the Laplace-Beltrami operator or adding […]

### November 05, 2014

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Another paper addressing the estimation of the normalising constant and the wealth of available solutions just came out on arXiv, with the full title of “Target density normalization for Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms“, written by Allen Caldwell and Chang Liu. (I became aware of it by courtesy of Ewan Cameron, as it appeared in […]
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Greg Egan just showed that $\mathrm{E}_{10}$: is the lattice of $2 \times 2$ self-adjoint matrices with integral octonions as entries! Here's the proof.
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I ran across this graphic this morning on Twitter: Obviously the intended message is that scalpels are better than Swiss Army Knives. Certainly the scalpel looks simpler. But most people would rather have a Swiss Army Knife than a scalpel. Many people, myself included, own a Swiss Army Knife but not a scalpel. (I also […]
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Sander Greenland sent me this paper that he wrote with Mohammad Ali Mansournia, which discusses possible penalty functions for penalized maximum likelihood or, equivalently, possible prior distributions for Bayesian posterior mode estimation, in the context of logistic regression. Greenland and Mansournia write: We consider some questions that arise when considering alternative penalties . . . […] The post “The Firth bias correction, penalization, and weakly informative priors: A […]
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I’m off to Haiti next week, for a week, with my buddie and bandmate Jamie Kingston. I was trying to figure out what to do with the blog while I was gone, and so I asked sometimes-guest blogger Becky Jaffe to cover for me (some of you may remember her Hip Hop’s Cambrian Explosion series […]
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15th CONGRESS OF LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (CLMPS 2015)University of Helsinki, Finland, 3-8 August 2015http://clmps.helsinki.fiSubmission deadline: 30 November 2014The Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (CLMPS) is organized every four years by the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (DLMPS). The Philosophical Society of Finland, the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy the Social Sciences (TINT) and the Division […]
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The rumours are true: the editors which in 2007 resigned from the journal K-Theory have now resigned from the splinter journal they helped set up, Journal of K-Theory, to start a third journal, Annals of K-Theory. What a headache! The Journal of K-Theory was founded in 2007 after the chief editor of the journal K-Theory, Anthony Bak, fell out with its publishers,... Read more »
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As promised in my last post (link here) here are the other mathematicians we have celebrated in October. Thank you for your support during this event! It means a lot to me. 1. Pierre François Verhulst born on 28th October 1804 … Continue reading →

### November 04, 2014

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Ten days ago, Gersende Fort, Benjamin Jourdain, Tony Lelièvre, and Gabriel Stoltz arXived a study about an adaptive umbrella sampler that can be re-interpreted as a Wang-Landau algorithm, if not the most efficient version of the latter. This reminded me very much of the workshop we had all together in Edinburgh last June. And even […]
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Recently I was giving a talk at a school in London and had cause to think about sums of kth powers, because I wanted to show people the difference between unenlightening proofs and enlightening ones. (My brief was to try to give them some idea of what proofs are and why they are worth bothering […]
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After extensively blogging about the 2012 Presidential election and analytical models used to forecast the election (go here for links to some of these old posts), I decided to create a case study on Presidential election forecasting using polling data. This blog post is about this case study. I originally developed the case study for an […]
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Nell'ambito della serie di conferenze divulgative I cieli di Brera, mercoledì 12 novembre presso la Sala delle Adunanze dell'Istituto Lombardo nel Palazzo Brera in via Brera 28, Milano, Teresa Montaruli proporrà a chi vorrà andare ad ascoltara la conferenza dal titolo Guardando il cielo con occhi diversi: Avreste mai immaginato di poter guardare le stelle dal fondo del ghiaccio antartico? Di poter installare degli "occhi elettronici" alla profondità di 2 chilometri […]
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http://t.co/rYzcXWlvR0 about #FabiolaGianotti #CERN #ATLAS Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian particle physicist, a former spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, considered one of the world's biggest scientific experiments. She has been selected as the next Director-General of CERN, starting on 1 January 2016.She is the 4th italian particle physicist to became Director General at CERN after Amaldi (1952-1954), Rubbia (1989-1993) and Maiani […]
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Practicing kindness and professionalism as a professor is hard, especially when you are going on 75 minutes of sleep. Writing random notes to yourself during a class could help.
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In reaction to the recent controversy about a research project that interfered with an election in Montana, political scientist Macartan Humphreys shares some excellent ideas on how to think about ethics in social science research: Social science researchers rely on principles developed by health researchers that do not always do the work asked of them […] The post Social research is not the same as health research: Macartan Humphreys gives new guidelines for ethics in social science […]
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Another Wisconsin election day!  By the polls — and I trust the polls, absent any reason not to — incumbent governor Scott Walker is likely to squeeze by with a narrow win.  If you don’t live in Wisconsin, how much should you care about this?  A lot, says Slate’s Betsy Woodruff, who calls this race […]
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Here are a few election related links: Eva Regnier at the Naval Postgraduate School has a bootstrapping forecast model for the US Senate election. Her model uses forecasts from Simon Jackson and Drew Linzer. Information about the upcoming election (usually polling results) becomes available over time, and this information produces a sequence of probability forecasts for […]