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# Posts

### March 05, 2014

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William Oughtred born on the 5th March 1575, who Newton regarded along with Christopher Wren and John Wallis as one of the three best seventeenth-century English mathematicians, was the epitome of the so-called English School of Mathematics. The English School … Continue reading →
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Guest post by Nick Gurski.
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Last month a history professor sent me a note regarding plagiarism at Arizona State University: Matthew Whitaker, who had received an expedited promotion to full professor and was made Director of a new Center for the Study of Race and Democracy by Provost Elizabeth Capaldi and President Michael Crow, was charged by most of the […]The post Plagiarism, Arizona style appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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I can’t remember the details of the first scientific conference I ever went to - not even its name - but I know it was on marine conservation, in Cardiff, and that a couple of us undergrads had made the trek from Norwich with little idea what to expect. The keynote speaker was Bill Ballantine, some of whose work on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in New Zealand I’d read as research for an essay. I remember no details of his... Read more
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A while back I was talking to some math people about how credit default swaps (CDSs), by their very nature, contain risk that is generally speaking undetectable with standard risk models like Value-at-Risk (VaR). It occurred to me then that I could put it another way: that perhaps credit default swaps might have been deliberately created […]
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And here is the second day of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation gone! This time, it sounded like the “main” theme was about brains… In fact, Simon Barthelmé‘s research originated from neurosciences, while Dawn Woodard dissected a brain (via MRI) during her talk! (Note that the BIRS website currently posts Simon’s video as […]

### March 04, 2014

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“A frequent matter of debate in Bayesian inversion is the question, which of the two principle point-estimators, the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) or the conditional mean (CM) estimate is to be preferred.” An interesting topic for this arXived paper by Burger and Lucka that I (also) read in the plane to Montréal, even though I do not […]
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(scheda I.N.D.U.C.K.S.)
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Transcript Satz (Auslander-Ellis) $X$ DS ueber $S$, $x\in X$ =$\exists y \in X: x \text{ prox } y$ & uniform rekurrent [Nimm $\epsilon \in E_\min(\beta S]$, setze $y= \epsilon \cdot x \stackrel{\text{Cor.}}{\rightarrow}$ dies tut’s.] Def. $C$ dyn. zentral $:\Leftrightarrow$ …
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In this next installment of posts on the inverted calculus class, I write about how I used an updated version of the Guided Practice assignment to build the development of self-regulated learning skills into the basic everyday processes of the course.
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In algebraic geometry, we like to make statements like: “two conics meet at points”, “a degree four plane curve has bitangents”, “given four lines in three space, there are lines that meet all of them”. In each of these, we are saying that, as some parameter (the conics, the degree four curve, the lines) changes, […]
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David Hogg calls conventional statistical notation a “nomenclatural abomination”: The terminology used throughout this document enormously overloads the symbol p(). That is, we are using, in each line of this discussion, the function p() to mean something different; its meaning…Read more ›
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Thomas Basbøll pointed me to a discussion on the orgtheory blog in which Jerry Davis, the editor of a journal of business management argued that it is difficult for academic researchers to communicate with the public because “the public prefers Cheetos to a healthy salad” and when serious papers are discussed on the internet, “everyone […]The post Literal vs. rhetorical appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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In 1879, Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, published an odd little book called Euclid and his Modern Rivals (available for free at the Internet Archive). Though it takes the form of a... -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
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I heard an NPR report yesterday with Emily Steel, reporter from the Financial Times, about what kind of attributes make you worth more to advertisers. She has developed an ingenious online calculator here, which you should go play with. As you can see it cares about things like whether you’re about to have a kid […]
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This was the first day of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation and it sounded like the “main” theme was probabilistic programming, in tune with my book review posted this morning. Indeed, both Vikash Mansinghka and Frank Wood gave talks about this concept, Vikash detailing the specifics of a new programming language called Venture […]

### March 03, 2014

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In the sixth section, Polya expounds more on the value of the questions and suggestions mentioned in the previous sections. He opens the section by mentioning that kind of thinking involved in solving a problem is rather nonlinear, where an … Continue reading →
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With the Oscar’s comes talk of fashion. One of the highlights of the Oscar’s is watching the celebrities on the red carpet to see who is wearing who. Perhaps it is that she is from Kentucky (my home state) or … Continue reading →
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I started my stay in Banff with an interesting ice-climb on Cascade Mountain, just next to the Icefields Parkway exit to the town. (So we climbed the redundant Cascade Fall!) While the difficulty of the climb was much lower [grade III] than for my earlier ice-climb in Banff, it was incredibly cold (when we started, […]
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From the destruction of bridges and buildings to the foundations of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, through their uses by radios or our ears,resonance is a counter-intuitive underlying phenomenon which shapes our reality. But amazingly, they can be made amazingly visual by playing with head massagers!
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We were talking about parallelizing MCMC and I came up with what I thought was a neat idea for parallelizing MCMC (sample with fractional prior, average samples on a per-draw basis). But then I realized this approach could get the right posterior mean or right posterior variance, but not both. Then Aki told me it […]The post Running into a Stan Reference by Accident appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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Here is the Press release for the workshop: The Banff International Research Station will host the “Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation” workshop from March 2nd to March 7th, 2014. Computational advances are always accompanied by new challenges, due both to the growth in data processing and in the possible exploration of new models. While highly […]
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#Bikini #BikiniAtoll #fallout #ColdWar The United States was in a Cold War Nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union to build bigger and better bombs. The next series of tests over Bikini Atoll was code named Operation Castle. The first test of that series was Castle Bravo, a new design utilizing a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. It was detonated at dawn on March 1, 1954.The 15 megaton nuclear explosion far exceeded the expected yield of 4 to 8 megatons (6Mt predicted), and was about 1,000 […]
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I post (approximately) once a day and don’t plan to change that. I have enough material to post more often—for example, I could intersperse existing blog posts with summaries of my published papers or of other work that I like; and, beyond this, we currently have a one-to-two-month backlog of posts—but I’m afraid that if […]The post What is the appropriate time scale for blogging—the day or the week? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, […]
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Mon: What is the appropriate time scale for blogging—the day or the week? Tues: Literal vs. rhetorical Wed: Plagiarism, Arizona style Thurs: How much time (if any) should we spend criticizing research that’s fraudulent, crappy, or just plain pointless? Fri: What if I were to stop publishing in journals? Sat: Disagreeing to disagreeThe post On deck this week appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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Self-regulated learning is a principle that describes learning behavior initiated, managed, and assessed by the learners themselves. In this post I describe what self-regulated learning looks like and why it was the basis behind the flipped-classroom calculus course I taught in 2013.
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In the last week of August 2014 (25 to 29), the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen will be hosting TWO co-located summer schools with a common theme, Epistemology and Cognition. One of them will focus on contemporary debates on these topics, while the other will adopt a historical perspective. Below is is the lineup of keynote speakers (common to both summer schools) and tutorials for each of them, and additional information on the events can be found here (notice that the […]
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Here’s a nice quip from Luke Gorrie on Twitter: Monads are hard because there are so many bad monad tutorials getting in the way of finally finding Wadler’s nice paper. Here’s the paper by Philip Wadler that I expect Luke…Read more ›
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I am back from Berkeley where I attended a couple of hours of conversations about MOOCs last Friday up at MSRI. It was a panel discussion given mostly by math and stats people who themselves run MOOCs, and I was wondering if the people who are involved have a better sense of the side effects […]
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Throughout this post, we will work only at the formal level of analysis, ignoring issues of convergence of integrals, justifying differentiation under the integral sign, and so forth. (Rigorous justification of the conservation laws and other identities arising from the formal manipulations below can usually be established in an a posteriori fashion once the identities […]