Posts
May 11, 2013
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10:13 PM | thumbleweed [local] news
It has been about a week since I left the hospital and went back home, trying to get back in shaper by resting, eating (to gain back some of the lost kg’s), sharing with my family and exercising… I foolishly tried to get back to the university once and ended the day as a wreck […]
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5:45 PM | Party At Ramsey’s
“Why mathematics? “ is a question that greets me on occasion from friends and acquaintances wanting to delve into a casual conversation about the subject. Many times I will start out by offering a recreational math example, such as … Continue reading →
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I mentioned last week that I wanted to focus this month on the famous Pythagorean Theorem. Since I usually reserve the second week for a "Math in the News" segment, I was looking for an example of the Pythagorean Theorem in the news.Though I couldn't find a controversial article about it, I did find a fantastic video that showed its applications to football. And it was done by the National Science Foundation in their news section, so I think it counts. Click here to see the video.My
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2:46 PM | .bzh
Just read in Le Monde today that the top-level domain .bzh had been validated yesterday. This domain is intended for all things Breton. Funny to think it succeeded before the bid for a .scot domain (that you can support here)! Filed under: Statistics Tagged: Brittany, Icann, Scotland, top-level domain
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Tom Salvesen asks, is this the worst info-graphic of the year? I say, no. Nobody really cares about these numbers. It’s an amusing feature. The alternative would not be a better display of these data, the alternative would be some photo or cartoon. They’re just having fun. I wouldn’t give it any design awards but [...]The post Actually, I have no problem with this graph appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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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, preferably combining sex with something nerdy (see below for example) and, more […]
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A couple of weeks ago, if you randomly woke me in the middle of the night and demanded to know the fundamental difference between evolution and learning as adaptive processes, I would probably respond: “how did you get into my house? and umm… I guess they are mostly the same, it is just a matter […]
Brenner, T. (1998). Can evolutionary algorithms describe learning processes?, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 8 (3) 271-283. DOI: 10.1007/s001910050064
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Ever since Stephen Toope announced the date of his resignation from the presidency of UBC, I and a few other members of the Board of Governors have been struggling with some tough questions. Should this administration stop, or at least … Continue reading →
May 10, 2013
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10:13 PM | Himalayan fight
“Today, Everest is too much of a business and there are too many heroes.” Simone Moro I was reading in Le Monde yesterday about an ugly fight occurring between a team of alpine-style climbers Ueli Steck, Simone Moro, and Jonathan Griffith) and the team of sherpas installing fixed ropes on the normal route to Everest […]
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6:07 PM | Happy Nobel Prize Winners
I stumbled upon an article, Winners Live Longer, that says:
“When 524 nominees for the Nobel Prize were examined and compared to the actual winners from 1901 to 1950, the winners lived longer by 1.4 years. Why? It seems just having won and knowing you are on top gives you a [...]
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1:13 PM | The recursion of pop-econ
Dave Berri posted the following at the Freakonomics blog: The “best” picture of 2012 was Argo. At least that’s the film that won the Oscar for best picture. According to the Oscars, the decision to give this award to Argo was made by the nearly 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts [...]The post The recursion of pop-econ appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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Senator Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) introduced a bill to create a “Science Laureate” position in the US, similar to the “Poet Laureate” (except for one obvious difference). This new honorary position would be appointed by the President from nominees recommended by the National Academy of Sciences and serve for a term of 1-2 years. Using this […]
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12:31 PM | Efficiency vs. Robustness
Something is efficient if it performs optimally under ideal circumstances. Something is robust if it performs pretty well under less than ideal circumstances. Life is full of trade-offs between efficiency and robustness. Over time, I’ve come to place more weight…Read more ›
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10:47 AM | Caroline Chen on the ABC Conjecture
I was recently interviewed by Caroline Chen, a graduate student at Columbia’s Journalism School, about the status of Mochizuki’s proof the the ABC Conjecture. I think she found me through my previous post on the subject. Anyway, her article just came out, and I like it and wanted to share it, even though I don’t […]
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5:09 AM | Leibniz Equivalence (slides)
Here are some slides for a talk on "Leibniz Equivalence" which includes some topics I've written some previous M-Phi posts about (Leibniz abstraction; the notion of abstract structure; possible worlds; the abstract/concrete distinction as modal).
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1:56 AM | Asteroids can have moons
This afternoon my postman delivered a review copy of The Space Book by Jim Bell. This is the latest book in a series that includes Cliff Pickover’s math, physics, and medical books. Like the other books in the series, The…Read more ›
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12:05 AM | Mutually odd functions
The floor of a real number x is the largest integer n ≤ x, written ⌊x⌋. The ceiling of a real number x is the smallest integer n ≥ x, written ⌈x⌉. The floor and ceiling have the following symmetric…Read more ›
May 09, 2013
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10:13 PM | wild [guest post]
My daughter, who brought me this book, wrote the following about it: Wild is a book whose title might hint at more than it truly contains. This book is the story of a young woman hiking along the PCT, the Pacific Crest Trail, a very long hiking path in America. This young woman will quickly […]
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9:15 PM | Same old same old
In an email I sent to a colleague who’s writing about lasso and Bayesian regression for R users: The one thing you might want to add, to fit with your pragmatic perspective, is to point out that these different methods are optimal under different assumptions about the data. However, these assumptions are never true (even [...]The post Same old same old appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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1:27 PM | A tale of two discussion papers
Over the years I’ve written a dozen or so journal articles that have appeared with discussions, and I’ve participated in many published discussions of others’ articles as well. I get a lot out of these article-discussion-rejoinder packages, in all three of my roles as reader, writer, and discussant. Part 1: The story of an unsuccessful [...]The post A tale of two discussion papers appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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Yesterday I wrote this short post about my concerns about the emerging field of e-discovery. As usual the comments were amazing and informative. By the end of the day yesterday I realized I needed to make a much more nuanced point here. Namely, I see a tacit choice being made, probably by judges or court-appointed […]
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We have previously discussed the importance of population structure in evolutionary game theory, and looked at the Ohtsuki-Nowak transform for analytic studies of games on one of the simplest structures — random regular graphs. However, there is another extremely simple structure to consider: a family of inviscid sets. We can think of each agent as [...]
Tarnita, C., Antal, T., Ohtsuki, H. & Nowak, M. (2009). Evolutionary dynamics in set structured populations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (21) 8601-8604. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0903019106
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[This guest post is authored by Ingrid Daubechies, who is the current president of the International Mathematical Union, and (as she describes below) is heavily involved in planning for a next-generation digital mathematical library that can go beyond the current network of preprint servers (such as the arXiv), journal web pages, article databases (such as MathSciNet), individual [...]
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[This guest post is authored by Ingrid Daubechies, who is the current president of the International Mathematical Union, and (as she describes below) is heavily involved in planning for a next-generation digital mathematical library that can go beyond the current network of preprint servers (such as the arXiv), journal web pages, article databases (such as MathSciNet), individual […]
May 08, 2013
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10:13 PM | wild
My daughter brought me this book at the hospital and I read it over the final day of my stay there. (She had ordered and read it out of a review in Elle…) As I first supposed it was about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (or PCT), I was quite eager to hear about the [...]
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Braess’ Paradox is a famous result in game theory which states that in a network where users selfishly seek to lower their travel times, the Nash equilibrium flows may increase after a new arc/road is added. Braess’ Paradox can be demonstrated physically with springs, as seen in this nifty YouTube video: When searching for information [...]
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4:31 PM | Cambridge Networks Day 2013
The beginning to 2013 has been extraordinarily hectic with new projects being rolled out, so it's quite fitting that my first post of the year nicely coincides with the network science conference organised at the University of Cambridge. As last year we were treated to an abundance of riches as speaker after speaker fired our synapses, and stimulated connections in our brain that possibly weren't there before! It's always a privilege to have the opportunity to meet scientists who truly […]
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3:00 PM | Name length and job success
The shorter your first name, the bigger the paycheck, says The Ladders, a career website. (via Quartz. This is being publicized as “each extra letter in your name costs you $3,600″. So could I get $10,800 more by going by “Mike”? Seems unlikely – and they are claiming that the effect holds up even with [...]
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1:57 PM | Of parsing and chess
Gary Marcus writes, An algorithm that is good at chess won’t help parsing sentences, and one that parses sentences likely won’t be much help playing chess. That is soooo true. I’m excellent at parsing sentences but I’m not so great at chess. And, worse than that, my chess ability seems to be declining from year [...]The post Of parsing and chess appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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1:33 PM | E-discovery and the public interest
Today I want to bring up a few observations and concerns I have about the emergence of a new field in machine learning called e-discovery. It’s the algorithmic version of discovery, so I’ll start there. Discovery is part of the process in a lawsuit where relevant documents are selected, pored over, and then handed to [...]
