# Posts

### September 19, 2014

+
(I was asked to write a review of Terry Parsons' Articulating Medieval Logic for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. This is what I've come up with so far. Comments welcome!)Scholars working on (Latin) medieval logic can be viewed as populating a spectrum. At one extremity are those who adopt a purely historical and textual approach to the material: they are the ones who produce the invaluable modern editions of important texts, without which the field would to a great extent simply not […]
+
There is no well defined notion for what is a large cardinal. In some contexts those are inaccessibles, in others those are critical points of elementary embeddings, and sometimes $\aleph_\omega$ is a large cardinal. But we can clearly see some various degrees of largeness by how much structure the existence of the cardinal imposes. Inaccessible […]
+
Here are a few links for your weekend reading. Wealthy Los Angeles K12 school vaccination rates are as low as Sudan’s. We have a paradox: higher overall vaccination rates and higher vulnerability due to risk caused by social networks choosing not to vaccinate. A few OR/Stat bloggers have written about FiveThirtyEight and data journalism recently. I like […]
+
Rachel Cunliffe shares this delight: Had the CNN team used an integrated statistical analysis and display system such as R Markdown, nobody would’ve needed to type in the numbers by hand, and the above embarrassment never would’ve occurred. And CNN should be embarrassed about this: it’s much worse than a simple typo, as it indicates […] The post What does CNN have in common with Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff, and Richard Tol: They all made foolish, embarrassing […]
+
Sonia Petrone announced today at BAYSM’14 that a competition was open for the design of an official ISBA tee-shirt! The deadline is October 15 and the designs are to be sent to Clara Grazian, currently at CEREMADE, Université Dauphine [that should be enough to guess her email!]. I will most certainly submit my mug design. […]
+
This Sunday there’ll be a huge march to raise awareness about climate change. It’s called the Climate Convergence, and the Alternative Banking group is going to be there. If you want to join us, come to 79th and Central Park West at 11am, in front of the Natural History Museum. We will have signs and […]
+
One of the exciting things about mathematical oncology is that thinking about cancer often forces me to leave my comfortable arm-chair and look at some actually data. No matter how much I advocate for the merits of heuristic modeling, when it comes to cancer, data-agnostic models take second stage to data-rich modeling. This close relationship […]

Gallaher, J. & Anderson, A.R. (2013). Evolution of intratumoral phenotypic heterogeneity: the role of trait inheritance., Interface Focus, 3 (4) 20130016. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0524v1

Citation

### September 18, 2014

+
Filed under: pictures, Running, Travel Tagged: Austria, Baroque architecture, Belvedere, Wien
+
This post is by Phil Price. I can’t recall when I first saw “shaming” used in its currently popular sense. I remember noting “slut shaming” and “fat shaming” but did they first become popular two years ago? Three? At any rate, “shaming” is now everywhere…and evidently it’s a very bad thing. When I first saw […] The post Shamer shaming appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
+
Infatti le teorie sono tutte molto affascinanti, ma se non vengono verificate da osservazioni o esperimenti, rimangono piacevoli ipotesi che divertono gli scienziati e gli scrittori di fantascienza.Isaac Asimovda Scivola, stella, scivola (Twinkle, Twinkle, Microwaves), su Urania 735, traduzione di Luca Serri
+
I just wanted to interrupt our scheduled stream of posts to link to a bunch of recent material from Mark Palko: At least we can all agree that ad hominem and overly general attacks are bad: A savvy critique of the way in which opposition of any sort can be dismissed as “ad hominem” attacks. […] The post Palko’s on a roll appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
+
Early morning today, following my Linz guests’ advice, I went running towards the top of Pöstlingberg, a hill 250m over Linz and the Danube river. A perfect beacon that avoiding wrong turns and extra-mileage, but still a wee climb on a steep path for the last part. The reward of the view from the top […]
+
My first memory is of my father throwing a plate of eggs at my mother’s head, like a frisbee. My mother had to duck to get out of the way, and the plate exploded on the wall behind her. His eggs hadn’t been cooked well enough, and this was his way of expressing that to […]
+
College courses often begin by trying to weaken your confidence in common sense. For example, a psychology course might start by presenting optical illusions to show that there are limits to your ability to perceive the world accurately. I’ve seen at least one physics textbook that also starts with optical illusions to emphasize the need […]
+
Jed Perl opposes Jeff Koons: The sculptures and paintings of this fifty-nine-year-old artist are so meticulously, mechanically polished and groomed that they rebuff any attempt to look at them, much less feel anything about them. But four paragraphs later: Koons knows how to capitalize on the guilty pleasure that the museumgoing public takes in all […]

### September 17, 2014

+
Here are the slides of my talk today at the BAYSM’14 conference in Vienna. Mostly an overview of some of my papers on mixtures, with the most recent stuff…Filed under: pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life Tagged: Austria, BAYSM 2014, church, mixtures, Neue Jesuitenkirche, slides, Universitätkirche, Vienna, Wien
+
Pubblicato a puntate su web, è stato successivamente raccolto in volume da Delos Books. Definito da Graham Edwards un romanzo steampunk (ma non sono completamente d'accordo), deve secondo me molto a un romanzo di grande impatto come Dune di Franck Herbert, con il quale condivide l'ambientazione: un pianeta desertico.Per muoversi e sopravvivere, però, gli esseri umani si devono affidare a navi gigantesche che solcano le dune di sabbia e con una tecnologia così sofisticata, […]
+
Filed under: Mountains, pictures, Running, University life Tagged: ABC, Austria, Boston, IFAS, JKU, JSM, Linz, model choice, Pöstlingberg, talk
+
Howard Wainer writes: What do you do to visualize uncertainty? Do you only use static methods (e.g. error bounds)? Or do you also make use of dynamic means (e.g. have the display vary over time proportional to the error, so you don’t know exactly where the top of the bar is, since it moves while […] The post What do you do to visualize uncertainty? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
+
A new position for the of Professor Of Statistics and Data Science / Director of the [newly created] Warwick Data Science Institute has been posted. To quote from the job description, “the position arises from the Department of Statistics’ commitment, in collaboration with the Warwick Mathematics Institute and the Department of Computer Science, to a […]
+
Today I want to share a puzzle that my friend Aaron Abrams told me a few days ago. I’m sure some of you have heard it before, but it’s confusing me, so I’m asking for your help. Set-up Here’s the setup. There’s an island of people, all of whom have either blue eyes or green […]
+
On Saturday, I arrived in Columbus, Ohio for the the MBI Workshop on the Ecology and Evolution of Cancer. Today, our second day started. The meeting is an exciting combination of biology-minded mathematicians and computer scientists, and math-friendly biologist and clinicians. As is typical of workshops, the speakers of the first day had an agenda […]

Baker AM, Cereser B, Melton S, Fletcher AG, Rodriguez-Justo M, Tadrous PJ, Humphries A, Elia G, McDonald SA, Wright NA & Simons BD (2014). Quantification of crypt and stem cell evolution in the normal and neoplastic human colon., Cell reports, 8 (4) 940-7. PMID: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25127143

Citation

### September 16, 2014

+
Filed under: pictures, Travel, University life Tagged: Austria, Danube, engine, Linz, plane picture
+
Guarda un po' il caso. In una discussione su Quora riguardo le possibilità di visualizzare oggetti di dimensioni superiori a 3, fa capolino Leonard Susskind, che, spero ricorderete, ho citato scrivendo un paio di cose sul principio olografico. Di Susskind viene segnalata una intervista per l'Enonomist, di cui vi traduco l'estratto più strettamente collegato con l'universo.L'universo si sta ancora espandendo? E se sì, di quanto si può espandere, ed nel caso […]
+
This came (unsolicited) in the inbox today (actually, two months ago; we’re on a delay, as you’re probably aware), subject line “From PWC – animations of CEO opinions for 2014″: Good afternoon, I wanted to see if the data my colleague David sent to you was of any interest. I have attached here additional animated […] The post They know my email but they don’t know me appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
+
Here’s what I’ve spent the last couple of days doing: alternatively reading Christian Rudder’s new book Dataclysm and proofreading a report by AAPOR which discusses the benefits, dangers, and ethics of using big data, which is mostly “found” data originally meant for some other purpose, as a replacement for public surveys, with their carefully constructed data […]
+
An interesting (?) coincidence: Le Monde weekend edition has its tourist page dedicated to Vienna! As usual, it is a list of places recommended by a local, Le Vienne de Robert Stadler, which includes Café Korb Postparkasse MAK (Museum für angewandte Kunst) Haus Wittgenstein Loos American Bar Maybe a wee bit limited a scope (albeit […]
+
(Cross-posted at NewAPPS)In December, I will be presenting at the Aesthetics in Mathematics conference in Norwich. The title of my talk is Beauty, explanation, and persuasion in mathematical proofs, and to be honest at this point there is not much more to it than the title… However, the idea I will try to develop is that many, perhaps even most, of the features we associate with beauty in mathematical proofs can be subsumed to the ideal of explanatory persuasion, which I take to be the […]
+
Unexpected shapes in smoke plumes, as photographed by Thomas Herbrich (G+)ISAAC 2014 and COCOA 2014 accepted paper lists (G+)FOCS 2014 program and best paper winners (G+)Kinetic sculpture made of wooden balls on threads, with some extensive software simulation behind its design (G+)How a 19th century math genius taught us the best way to hold a pizza slice, or, a practical application of the theorem that when a flat surface is embedded in 3d, it remains flat in at least one direction […]

### September 15, 2014

+
Today I started my new course of Statistics for our third year undergraduates. In English! A point that came as a surprise for the students but I got no complaint (so far) and they started asking questions in English during the class. The slides are “under construction” and this first chapter borrows a fair chunk […]