# Posts

### December 15, 2014

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Palko tells a good story: One of the accepted truths of the Netflix narrative is that CEO Reed Hastings is obsessed with data and everything the company does is data driven . . . Of course, all 21st century corporations are relatively data-driven. The fact that Netflix has large data sets on customer behavior does […] The post “Now the company appears to have screwed up badly, and they’ve done it in pretty much exactly the way you would expect a company to screw up when it […]
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Durante i suoi primi passi, la relatività speciale incrociò la strada con l'elettrone e la ricerca della sua massaLa relatività speciale di Albert Einstein proponeva alcuni elementi rivoluzionari, fornendo innanzitutto una serie di strumenti matematici e di discorsi epsitemologici a supporto di una serie di osservazioni apparentemente assurde, prima fra tutte la non conservazione delle equazioni di Maxwell sotto l'azione delle trasformazioni di Galileo.Le trasformazioni di […]

Thomson J.J. (1881). XXXIII. On the electric and magnetic effects produced by the motion of electrified bodies , Philosophical Magazine Series 5, 11 (68) 229-249. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14786448108627008

Searle G.F.C. (1897). XLII. On the steady motion of an electrified ellipsoid , Philosophical Magazine Series 5, 44 (269) 329-341. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14786449708621072

Poincaré M.H. (1906). Sur la dynamique de l’électron, Rendiconti del Circolo matematico di Palermo, 21 (1) 129-175. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf03013466

Einstein, A. (1905). Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, Annalen der Physik, 322 (10) 891-921. DOI: 10.1002/andp.19053221004

Kaufmann W. (1906). Über die Konstitution des Elektrons, Annalen der Physik, 324 (3) 487-553. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/andp.19063240303

Bestelmeyer A. (1907). Spezifische Ladung und Geschwindigkeit der durch Röntgenstrahlen erzeugten Kathodenstrahlen, Annalen der Physik, 327 (3) 429-447. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/andp.19073270303

Bucherer A.H. (1909). Die experimentelle Bestätigung des Relativitätsprinzips, Annalen der Physik, 333 (3) 513-536. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/andp.19093330305

Tolman R.C. (1910). The Second Postulate of Relativity, Physical Review (Series I), 31 (1) 26-40. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/physrevseriesi.31.26

Neumann G. (1914). Die träge Masse schnell bewegter Elektronen, Annalen der Physik, 350 (20) 529-579. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/andp.19143502005

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JetBlue is changing its practices to run more like other airlines, and people are going nuts. While all other airlines save Southwest switched to charging for checked bags, JetBlue made a free bag part of its unique selling proposition What does United charge for checked bags?  $25, I think. According to Google Flights, and a […] + Mon: “Now the company appears to have screwed up badly, and they’ve done it in pretty much exactly the way you would expect a company to screw up when it doesn’t drill down into the data.” Tues: Expectation propagation as a way of life Wed: I’d like to see a preregistered replication on this one […] The post On deck this week appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. + I don’t have enough time for a full post today, but if you haven’t already, please watch Liz Warren’s speech from last Friday. She lays out the facts about Citigroup in an uncomplicated way. Surprising and refreshing coming from a politician. + In The Imitation Game: Part 2 we looked at Alan Turing’s work doing codebreaking at Bletchley Park during World War 2. In this final instalment of blog posts about the film The Imitation Game, we look at the work Turing did during the final years of his life, about pattern formation. This is based on […] + This is the last pre-publication version of my paper: Alexandre V. Borovik, Calling a spade a spade: Mathematics in the new pattern of division of labour, arXiv:1407.1954v3 [math.HO]. Abstract: The growing disconnection of the majority of population from mathematics is becoming a phenomenon that is increasingly difficult to ignore. This paper attempts to point to […] + On 15 December 1612 (os) Simon Marius, Court Mathematicus in Ansbach, became the first astronomer to record a telescopic observation of the Andromeda Nebula. The importance of this observation was that whereas other known nebulae such as the Orion Nebula, … Continue reading → + CALL FOR PAPERSWorkshop on Epistemic Justification: JustGroningen 2015August 23 to 25, 2015Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, NetherlandsInvited speakers:Clayton Littlejohn (King's College London)Erik Olsson (Lund)Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh)William Roche (Texas)Katie Steele (LSE)Sylvia Wenmackers (Leuven)We welcome submissions on all aspects of epistemic justification, and especially encourage contributions which aim to connect formal and traditional perspectives. All sessions are […] ### December 14, 2014 + Second and last day of the NIPS workshops! The collection of topics was quite broad and would have made my choosing an ordeal, except that I was invited to give a talk at the probabilistic programming workshop, solving my dilemma… The first talk by Kathleen Fisher was quite enjoyable in that it gave a conceptual […] + Erica Klarreich at Quanta on large prime gaps. What makes Paris look like Paris? Math-inspired Christmas ornaments (sadly, I don’t have a tree). Nathan Yau at FlowingData has a list of data-ish physical gift things. From the archives of the … Continue reading → + I’ve began thinking about the failure of Solovay’s theorem without the axiom of choice. Which one? The one that says that a stationary subset of a regular$\kappa$can be partitioned into$\kappa$stationary subsets. For concreteness, we can ask for this to fail for$\omega_1\$. With large cardinals, this is known to happen in […]
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In The Imitation Game: Part 1 we looked at the early work of Alan Turing about universal computing machines, the limits of what computers can do, and whether computers could ever successfully imitate human brains. In this post we look at Turing’s work doing codebreaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and the […]
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In a unit about the law of large numbers, sample size, and margins of error, I used the notorious beauty, sex, and power example: A researcher, working with a sample of size 3000, found that the children of beautiful parents were more likely to be girls, compared to the children of less-attractive parents. Can such […] The post The latest episode in my continuing effort to use non-sports analogies appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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Today we had a wonderful event at the Filmhouse cinema in Edinburgh talking about The Maths of the Imitation Game. This is the film which tells the story of mathematician Alan Turing and his work codebreaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. I’m going to admit up front: I liked the film. I’ve […]
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As probably you already know from the post New Things I am in full stressful exam period. I always get extremely stressed in this period, like something magical happens to me and I transform into a crazy stressed monster. I believe … Continue reading →
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Jonathan Falk asks what I think of this animated slideshow by Matthew Klein on “How Americans Die”: Please click on the above to see the actual slideshow, as this static image does not do it justice. What do I think? Here was my reaction: It is good, but I was thrown off by the very […] The post I like the clever way they tell the story. It’s a straightforward series of graphs but the reader has to figure out where to click and what to do, which makes the experience […]
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Filed under: pictures, Travel, University life Tagged: Atlantic ocean, Canada, clouds, dusk, Greenland, Montréal, NIPS 2014, sunset
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Un sabato mattina, nell'attesa del treno, con mio fratello abbiamo fatto un giro in libreria. Mi trovai davanti per l'ennesima volta questo libro, e non so cosa mi spinse a farlo, ma quella volta lo comprai.Una divertentissima scoperta! Un libro semplice, scorrevole e che si legge tutto d'un fiato.Le vicende si svolgono nella Dublino anni Settanta e vedono protagonista Agnes Browne e la sua famiglia. Agnes è una donna trentaquattrenne, bella, simpatica e ha un banco di frutta e verdura […]

### December 13, 2014

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The surface of a three-dimensional polyhedron is a two-dimensional space that's topologically equivalent to the sphere. By the Jordan curve theorem, every cycle of edges and vertices in this space cuts the surface into two topological disks. But the surface of a four-dimensional polytope is a three-dimensional space that's topologically equivalent to the hypersphere, or to three-dimensional Euclidean space completed by adding one point at infinity. So, just as in conventional Euclidean space, […]
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Filed under: pictures, Travel, University life Tagged: Canada, clouds, Montréal, NIPS 2014, plane picture, Soctland
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I’ve taken the posts from my defunct Symbolism blog and combined them into a couple pages on this site, one for mathematical symbols and other for all other symbols.
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Unicode often counts the same symbol (glyph) as two or more different characters. For example, Ω is U+03A9 when it represents the Greek letter omega and U+2126 when it represents Ohms, the unit of electrical resistance. Similarly, M is U+004D when it’s used as a Latin letter but U+216F when it’s used as the Roman […]
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Hype can be irritating but sometimes it’s necessary to get people’s attention (as in the example pictured above). So I think it’s important to keep these two things separate: (a) reactions (positive or negative) to the hype, and (b) attitudes about the subject of the hype. Overall, I like the idea of “data science” and […] The post Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t . . . We’re brothers of the same mind, unblind appeared first on […]
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So today was the NIPS 2014 workshop, “ABC in Montréal“, which started with a fantastic talk by Juliane Liepe on some exciting applications of ABC to the migration of immune cells, with the analysis of movies involving those cells acting to heal a damaged fly wing and a cut fish tail. Quite amazing videos, really. […]
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Aunt Pythia has something in the works for you dear people, but it’s not quite ready yet, and you’ll have to wait another week. Rest assured, it will be worth it. And apologies to mathbabe.org subscribers who received an errant test post this week. In the meantime, Aunt Pythia is going to write a quick […]

### December 12, 2014

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Even though this is the fourth volume in the Peter Grant series, I did read it first [due to my leaving volume one in my office in Coventry and coming across this one in an airport bookstore in Düsseldorf], an experiment I do not advise anyone to repeat as it kills some of the magic […]
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After a much needed few weeks of recovery, I’ve found some time to post about our annual IMO workshop held this year on the topic of viruses in cancer. Our group had the challenge of learning about all of the complexities of the human microbiome and its interactions with a cancerous lesion. The human microbiome, […]

Human Microbiome Project Consortium (2012). Structure, function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome, Nature, 486 (7402) 207-214. DOI: 10.1038/nature11234

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It took a while to decide to make a post about my tutoring session, but here it is. So I have stared working in late September, beginning of October as a consultant for a company that does private tutoring. It … Continue reading →
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Basbøll points us to a column by Michael Shermer, a journalist and self-described skeptic who’s written a lot about skepticism, atheism, etc. Recently, though, Shermer wrote of an event that “shook [his] skepticism to its core”—it was a story about an old radio that didn’t work, then briefly started to work again, then stopped working. […] The post Saying things that are out of place appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social […]