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# Posts

### March 03, 2014

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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 […]

### March 02, 2014

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“We now think the Bayesian Programming methodology and tools are reaching maturity. The goal of this book is to present them so that anyone is able to use them. We will, of course, continue to improve tools and develop new models. However, pursuing the idea that probability is an alternative to Boolean logic, we now […]
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Enjoy this short crossword puzzle.
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Article for the LMS Newsletter on an ethical decision facing mathematicians.
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3d logic3D Logic 2: Stronghold of SageCome accennato ne Il problema dei servizi, 3d logic e 3d logic 2 sono giochi di logica dove bisogna collegare i punti dello stesso colore coprendo dei percorsi stabiliti che non si devono intrecciare, pena l'interruzione di un altro percorso. Nel caso specifico dei due giochi proposti da Alex Matveev, i punti e i percorsi si sviluppano su tre facce di un cubo, e a differenza di altri giochi del genere, non è necessario colorare tutte le superfici […]
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Every time I hear this sort of story: Morrone—listed at 48 years old, which would have made her the oldest Olympic cross-country skier of all time by seven years—didn’t even show up for the 10K women’s classic on Feb. 13, claiming injury. (She was the only one of the race’s 76 entrants who didn’t start.) […]The post What is it with Americans in Olympic ski teams from tropical countries? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and […]
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I hope that most of you have either asked yourselves this question explicitly, or at least felt a vague sense of unease about how the definitions I gave in lectures, namely and relate to things like the opposite, adjacent and hypotenuse. Using the power-series definitions, we proved several facts about trigonometric functions, such as the […]
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Many of the talks at the Conference on Meaningfulness and Learning Spaces that I recently attended concerned (surprise!) meaningfulness. The basic idea is to provide a crude filter for bad science and bad statistics by determining whether applying a formula to data could possibly make any sense. For instance, in many computer science conference program committees, we score papers on a scale from -3 to +3 (say) and then rank the papers by averaging the scores of different reviewers (possibly […]

### March 01, 2014

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“If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of […]
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Yesterday was my last day on the UBC Board of Governors, the end of an extremely rewarding six-year stint. To the faculty who elected me decisively twice for the Board and another time for the Presidential search committee, I say … Continue reading →
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Source Transcript (a)=(b) $U\in \mathfrak{U}(y)$, $R(y,U)$ synd, $S = \bigcup_{t\in F_u} t^{-1}R(y,U)$ Sei $v\in L$ =$\exists t_U: t_U^{-1} R(y,U) \in v \Rightarrow t_u \cdot v \in \widehat{R(y,U)}$ Nimm $p\in L$ Limes von \$\underbrace{ \{ t_U \cdot v: U\in …
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If you are writing some C++ code with the intent of calling it from R or even developing it into a package you might wonder whether it is better to use the pseudo random number library native to C++11 or the R standalone library. On the one hand users of your package might have an […]The post C++11 versus R Standalone Random Number Generation Performance Comparison appeared first on Lindons Log.
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In January, I did a series with some heavier mathematics, involving lots of number theory, combinatorics, and some fairly difficult manipulation. Last month, we took a little rest from this by talking a bit about casino games and optimal strategies. The mathematics we used was more probability and game theory. This month, I thought we could explore something completely different that is also extremely interesting. It is taught in school (much of the material in this post actually comes straight […]
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Filed under: pictures, Travel Tagged: Canada, James Wolfe, Louis de Montcalm, parlement, Québec
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Stephen Senn writes: For many years now I [Senn] have been making the point that obtaining a license to market a drug should carry with it the obligation to share the results with interested parties. . . . Amongst those misunderstanding the issues, are many who work in the pharmaceutical industry. A common assumption is […]The post “We are moving from an era of private data and public analyses to one of public data and private analyses. Just as we have learned to be cautious about […]
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Because this blogpost covers both mountain biking and proving theorems, it is being simultaneously published by the Mathematical Association of America in my Devlin’s Angle series.  In my post last month, I described my efforts to ride a particularly difficult stretch of a local mountain bike trail in the hills just west of Palo Alto. As promised, I […]
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Scrive Virginia Wolf, durante l'incontro tra Orlando e Nick Greene, poeta, che questi e' "forse l'ultimo" a osare "arrostire il formaggio nel gran caminetto all'italiana".E qui partono i ricordi, di domeniche mattina buie e nuvolose, con il freddo e la pioggia che cade dal cielo, tutti intorno al caminetto a riscladarsi e ad arrostire salsiccia.O magari un pezzo di formaggio, quello stagionato, il caciocavallo, magari con un pezzo di pane sul ginocchio dove poi posare il formaggio prima che si […]

### February 28, 2014

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Over the past few weeks, I read Broken Blade by Kelly McCullough, the start to a series of novels taking place in a fantasy universe and involving the same characters. As in many recent novels I read, the main character Aral Kingslayer is more an anti-hero, not very congenial and rather drawn towards booze and […]
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Quantum mechanics places a fundamental limit on the accuracy of measurements. In most circumstances, the measurement uncertainty is distributed equally between pairs of complementary properties; this leads to the 'standard quantumlimit' for measurement resolution. Using a technique known as 'squeezing', it is possible to reduce the uncertainty of one desired property below the standard quantumlimit at the expense of increasing that of the complementary one. Squeezing is already being used to […]
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The story so far:  New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece called “Professors, we need you!” in which he mourned the loss of the public intellectual of yonderyear: SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s […]
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This week I've been attending the Conference on Meaningfulness and Learning Spaces at UC Irvine, in honor of the 80th birthday of my co-author Jean-Claude Falmagne. I believe videos of the talks will eventually be online and I'll put up a link to mine when that happens.Jean-Claude himself gave a talk, in which the following cute geometric fact came up as an example: If f(x, y) is the function that computes the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle with side lengths x and y, then f obeys […]
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This is a model of a mathematical structure called a “Cantitruncated 600-cell”, colloquially known as a 4D buckyball. It took twenty people five hours to build and contains over 10,000 pieces of specialised plastic called Zometool. Such a model has never been seen in the UK before and I’m incredibly proud to have been able […]
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Filed under: pictures, Travel
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I’m in Berkeley this week, where I gave two talks (here are my slides from Monday’s talk on recommendation engines, and here are my slides from Tuesday’s talk on modeling) and I’ve been hanging out with math nerds and college friends and enjoying the amazing food and cafe scene. This is the freaking life, people. […]
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Paul Alper writes: Hi Andrew (or Andy or even Gelman [17 of them]): Go to this link and have some fun with (useless? powerful?) data mining. As the authors say, it is addictive. Paul (no other way to spell it) Alper [215 of us] I’m reminded of this discussion from 2012, “Michael’s a Republican, Susan’s […]The post Combining two of my interests appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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