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Posts

May 04, 2013

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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, [...]
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1:30 PM | Four Papers in Three Weeks
I wish I could write four papers in three weeks. The title just means that I submitted four papers to the arXiv in the last three weeks—somehow, after the stress of doing my taxes ended, four of my papers converged to their final state very fast. Here are the papers with [...]
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1:26 PM | Aunt Pythia’s advice – nose rings, breakups, itchy fingers, and data science
Aunt Pythia is yet again gratified to find a few new questions in her inbox this morning, but as usual, she’s running quite low. After reading and enjoying the column below, please consider making some fabricated, melodramatic dilemma up out of whole cloth and, more importantly: Please submit your fake question for Aunt Pythia at [...]
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1:17 PM | The fellowship of men whose household purchasing decisions are driven by their preschool-age daughters
Recently I was in Chicago, on the subway, and a big dude came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around, and the big dude held up his index finger, to show me that he too was wearing a Hello Kitty band-aid.
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8:53 AM | Comment on An Update on Kiera Wilmot by Tammi L. Coles
Jonah, I've posted a list of all of the school, government, and state offices involved in this case here: http://bit.ly/ZuDRYa. I posted this link and my contact information to DNLee. Perhaps you could post an express mail form here too so that people can immediately write to these folks on Kiera's behalf? There's also now a Crowd.it fundraiser started by another (angry and motivated) netizen. There's more to do!
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6:04 AM | Roberts and Speed elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society
I just found out that Gareth Roberts and Terry Speed had been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society. Congratulations to both for this prestigious recognition of their major contributions to Science! (Another Fellow elected this year is Bill Bryson, in recognition of his scientific popularisation books.) Filed under: Books, Statistics, University life Tagged: Bill [...]
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3:00 AM | Evolutionary economics and game theory
Like the agents they study, evolutionary economics is highly heterogeneous. Models are ad-hoc and serve as heuristic guides to specific problems. This is similar to theoretical biology, where evolutionary models are independent of each other. Even the general theory of inclusive fitness does not provide a non-controversial unifying framework. Although there is no single framework, [...]

Hodgson, G. & Huang, K. (2010). Evolutionary game theory and evolutionary economics: are they different species?, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 22 (2) 345-366. DOI:

Citation

May 03, 2013

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10:48 PM | NYC Data Skeptics Meetup
Rachel Schutt writes: 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 message? How is it helping or damaging people, and which people? What opportunities exist for data nerds and entrepreneurs that [...]
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7:56 PM | Comment on Social Activism Time by jonah
Thanks for your concern, Phil. As far as I know, no one knows how to contact the family at the moment. DNLee at the Scientific American blog (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/urban-scientist/2013/05/03/scientists-support-for-kiera-wilmot-solidarity4wilmot/) has set up a form for you to fill out if you want to help directly. When she knows more, she'll contact the people who fill out the form. Here's the link: […]
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7:38 PM | An Update on Kiera Wilmot
An Update on Kiera WilmotI recently posted about the plight of a teenager in Florida, Kiera Wilmot, who performed a science experiment which went badly. No one was hurt and no property was damaged, but she’s been expelled and she’s facing felony charges. The … Continue reading →The post An Update on Kiera Wilmot appeared first on The Physics Mill.
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3:13 PM | one thumb down
Very local news: Most sadly, the graft did not work out and the surgeon took my thumb off for good (or bad) yesterday night. I should now leave the hospital any day and start (a) getting back to normal & (b) undergoing intense physical therapy. At least, as Brad Carlin commented, an extra thumb is [...]
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1:53 PM | Setting aside the politics, the debate over the new health-care study reveals that we’re moving to a new high standard of statistical journalism
Pointing to this news article by Megan McArdle discussing a recent study of Medicaid recipients, Jonathan Falk writes: Forget the interpretation for a moment, and the political spin, but haven’t we reached an interesting point when a journalist says things like: When you do an RCT with more than 12,000 people in it, and your [...]
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12:34 PM | new department in IIE Transactions: Government, Public Policy, and Society
There is a new department in IIE Transactions called “Government, Public Policy, and Society” that may be of interest to some of you. The new department is in the Focused Issue on Operations Engineering and Analysis. I urge you to submit your papers to this new department. I’ve included some information about the new department here. Other new departments include [...]
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12:00 PM | Award-Winning Teachers Put Math on Hands and Heads
Many math teachers have a hands-on approach to their subject, but those hands aren’t usually covered in finger paint. Scott Goldthorp, however, sometimes teaches messy math classes. Goldthorp, a teacher at Rosa International Middle School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was the grand prize winner of the inaugural Rosenthal Prize for innovation in math teaching, [...]
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10:32 AM | What does it mean that our public square is a private place?
I just read this opinion piece written by Jillian York and published by Aljazeera.com. York discusses “How social network policies are changing speech and privacy norms” and she makes the point that there’s a big difference between our legal rights as citizens and the way Facebook has defined its policies, and by extension our “rights” inside Facebook. [...]
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8:58 AM | Comment on Social Activism Time by Phil Psilos
I'm actively looking for a way to contribute to her defense ($$$). Money talks, they say. Can you post any new information on this, please, and spread widely? Thanks!
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2:26 AM | Culture clash
I had no idea this sort of thing even existed: I’m reminded of our discussion of Charles Murray’s recent book on social divisions among Americans. Murray talked about differences between upper and lower class, but I thought he was really talking more about differences between liberals and conservatives among the elite. (More discussion here.) In [...]
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12:28 AM | Quasirandom groups and a cheap version of the Brauer-Fowler theorem
Suppose that is a finite group of even order, thus is a multiple of two. By Cauchy’s theorem, this implies that contains an involution: an element in of order two. (Indeed, if no such involution existed, then would be partitioned into doubletons together with the identity, so that would be odd, a contradiction.) Of course, [...]

May 02, 2013

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10:13 PM | Bayesian brittleness
Here is the abstract of a recently arXived paper that attracted my attention: Although it is known that Bayesian estimators may be inconsistent if the model is misspecified, it is also a popular belief that a “good” or “close” enough model should have good convergence properties. This paper shows that, contrary to popular belief, there [...]
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3:47 PM | Comment on Rock Me, Einstein — Some Questions on Special and General Relativity by jonah
I'm glad I was able to help! I simplified things a bit with the time sphere example. But, actually, you've given me an idea about how to explain this. I'm going to try and work through the actual solution in 2 dimensions as opposed to four and post on it. I think the results will be helpful. (I just need to find the time!) Thanks for reading, Eric! I'll see if I can figure out what's going wrong with the comment notification system.
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3:37 PM | Comment on Social Activism Time by jonah
Thanks, Tammi! Yes, I'm in complete agreement. If there's anything else I we can do for Kiera Wilmot, let me know, and I'll post about it!
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2:24 PM | The rise of big data, big brother
I recently read an article off the newsstand called The Rise of Big Data. It was written by Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and it was published in the May/June 2013 edition of Foreign Affairs, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). I mention this because CFR is an influential think tank, filled with powerful insiders, including people like [...]
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2:16 PM | Comment on Social Activism Time by Tammi L. Coles
Jonah, I feel the same bewildered anger. Where is the common sense and good judgment that we should have expected from our educators on this one? Calling the police was the first mistake, but to have a state attorney ask the cops to haul her off in handcuffs on felony charges was the second mistake and of more outrageous proportions. The amount of public time and money that will be squandered on this -- rather than on increasing opportunities for girls in science, for example -- boggles the […]
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1:15 PM | 7 ways to separate errors from statistics
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have been inspired by the recent Reinhardt and Rogoff debacle to list “six ways to separate lies from statistics” in economics research: 1. “Focus on how robust a finding is, meaning that different ways of looking at the evidence point to the same conclusion.” 2. Don’t confuse statistical with practical [...]
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6:04 AM | Pair programming meets group testing
I have another new preprint: Combinatorial Pair Testing: Distinguishing Workers from Slackers (with Mike Goodrich and Dan Hirschberg), arXiv:1305.0110, to appear at WADS.The story in this one is that we have students in a pair programming class, some of whom will do the work and some of whom will let their partner do all the work. But if two of the slackers get paired together, we can catch them, because then nobody does the work. So how do we choose partners for the assignments to be sure of […]
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1:56 AM | Social Activism Time
Social Activism TimeI usually don’t get preachy on this blog. However, there have been two events in the science world that have made me really angry, and I want to do something about it.   The first is this: The National Science … Continue reading →The post Social Activism Time appeared first on The Physics Mill.
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1:10 AM | The Gravitational Force of Rubbish
Imagine, for just a moment, that you were one a group of scientists that had proven the most important, the most profound, the most utterly amazing scientific discovery of all time. Where would you publish it? Maybe Nature? Science? Or maybe you'd prefer to go open-access, and go with PLOS ONE? Or more mainstream, and [...]

May 01, 2013

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10:13 PM | R for dummies
I already mentioned R for dummies a while ago on the ‘Og and never got around to read it from cover to back. Now that I am reduced to a dummy state with too much free time!, I can produce a full review of the book. R for dummies was written by two Belgian statistics [...]
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5:05 PM | Comment on Rock Me, Einstein — Some Questions on Special and General Relativity by Eric Flament
Feel free to use our conversation for another post. I'd enjoy reading it. By the way, I am clicking both check boxes below. Okay, I think I've exhausted my ability to be confused, but your answers have helped more than reading online and watching hours of lectures. And your blog has been more helpful than anything else online. The frustration I still have is based on the idea that although I can't visualize four dimensions as you allude to with the Plato's shadow thing, […]
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4:31 PM | the inefficiency of efficiency
I enjoy XKCD, and the latest comic [Link] is about something people in OR can relate to: efficiency. I actually have been known to do this from time to time. When I saw this, I thought it would be a great tool for potential graduate students. If they like this chart and have crunched similar numbers. [...]
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