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The Faulty Logic of the ‘Math Wars’
A brilliant opinion piece by ALICE CRARY and W. STEPHEN WILSON in the Opinion Pages of the New Your Times. A highlighted message: Mastering and using algorithms involves a special and important kind of thinking. Read the whole paper. It...Show More Summary
There are no fat sprinters
This post is by Phil. A little over three years ago I wrote a post about exercise and weight loss in which I described losing a fair amount of weight due to (I believe) an exercise regime, with no effort to change my diet; this contradicted the prediction of studies that had recently been released. [...]Show More Summary
Job opening! Come work with us!
Postdoctoral position in statistical modeling of social networks A full-time postdoctoral position is available beginning Fall 2014 in the research group of Tian Zheng and Andrew Gelman working on statistical analysis and modeling of social network data, in close cooperation with our experimental collaborators. Show More Summary
3SUM
Today’s exercise is a classic problem of computer science: given an array of positive and negative integers, find three that sum to zero, or indicate that no such triple exists. This is similar to the subset sum problem, which we solved in a previous exercise, but simpler because of the limit to three items. A […]
Weak identification provides partial information
Matt Selove writes: My question is about Bayesian analysis of the linear regression model. It seems to me that in some cases this approach throws out useful information. As an example, imagine you have two basketball players randomly drawn from the pool of NBA players (which provides the prior). You’d like to estimate how many [...]Show More Summary
Job opening at new “big data” consulting firm!
David Shor sends along a job announcement for Civis Analytics, which he describes as “basically Obama’s Analytics team reconstituted as a company”: Data Scientist Position Overview Data Scientists are responsible for providing the fundamental...Show More Summary
Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad
The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. I was like, whaaaaaa? I had no idea these two had any connection. In fact, though, they wrote papers together. This made me wonder what Chomsky [...]Show More Summary
Comparative linguistics, circa 1860
?? ????, ??? ??? ????? ?? ??????????? ????? ?????????? ? ????? ???? ???????? ??????, ???? ??????????? ????? ??????: ?? ??? ????? ???????? ????? ????????, ???????? ? ?????? ????????, ????? ?? ??????? ?? ??????, ???????, ??????? ?????, ??????? ??????? ??? ??????? ?????. Show More Summary
Mathematics Lecture in Gezi Park
Ali Nesin is giving a mathematics lecture in Gezi Park, Monday 10 June 2013. And more photographs from Gezi Park: http://www.policymic.com/articles/47211/taksim-square-protest-11-images-from-turkey-that-will-give-you-the-warm-fuzzie...
Quasicrystals and the Riemann Hypothesis
Freeman Dyson asserted a relation between quasicrystals and the Riemann Hypothesis. What does it amount to, actually?
Exploratory multilevel analysis when group-level variables are of importance
Steve Miller writes: Much of what I do is cross-national analyses of survey data (largely World Values Survey).... My big question pertains to (what I would call) exploratory analysis of multilevel data, especially when the group-level predictors are of theoretical importance. A lot of what I do involves analyzing cross-national survey items [...]Show More Summary
The origin of the Russian tradition in mathematics education
Surprise surprise, it appears to be Leonard Euler’s “Universal Arithmetic”, written by him in St Petersburg and published there in 1768 in Russian translation produced by his students: It clearly set out standards of quality of mathematical content and enshrined the propaedeutics principle so visible in the Russian tradition: a textbook was supposed to be a stepping […]
Do the Numbers Behind Prism Add Up?
My print column examines the math behind the National Security Agency's Prism program to collect data on personal communications. Even with much still unknown about Prism, statisticians and security experts are debating whether a data-mining...Show More Summary
The Selected Papers Network
Given that social networks already exist, all we need for truly open scientific communication is a convention on a consistent set of tags and IDs for discussing papers. Christopher Lee has developed software that makes this work.
Estimation of the Type III sums
This is the final continuation of the online reading seminar of Zhang’s paper for the polymath8 project. (There are two other continuations; this previous post, which deals with the combinatorial aspects of the second part of Zhang’s paper, and this previous post, that covers the Type I and Type II sums.) The main purpose of […]
Progress! (on the understanding of the role of randomization in Bayesian inference)
Leading theoretical statistician Larry Wassserman in 2008: Some of the greatest contributions of statistics to science involve adding additional ran- domness and leveraging that randomness. Examples are randomized experiments, permutation tests, cross-validation and data-splitting. Show More Summary
Turing chess tournament!
Daniel Murrell is organizing a run-around-the-house chess tournament in Cambridge, England, on 23 Jun 2013. Maybe Niall Ferguson will show up, given his interest in the history of mid-twentieth-century gay English heroes. The post Turing chess tournament! appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
The Digits of Pi, Again
The ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, known as ?, is constant regardless of the size of the circle; that fact has been known to mathematicians for about five thousand years; much of the history of mathematics is intertwined in the history of ?i, as approximations of the ratio have improved […]
Yet another remark on the Friedlander-Iwaniec sum
I just remembered a point I had intended to make concerning the exponential sum of Friedlander and Iwaniec that is crucial in Zhang’s work on gaps between primes, but which slipped my mind. This may present the argument in my note with Fouvry and Michel in a more enlightening way, although it does not simplify [...]
A multi-dimensional Szemer\’edi theorem for the primes via a correspondence principle
Tamar Ziegler and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our joint paper “A multi-dimensional Szemerédi theorem for the primes via a correspondence principle“. This paper is related to an earlier result of Ben Green and mine in which we established that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Actually, in that paper we proved […]
