Archive for April, 2010
I have an op/ed in tomorrow’s Washington Post about statistical sampling and the census. It boils down to the claim that by failing to use the best statistical techniques we have to enumerate the population accurately, we’re getting the answer wrong on purpose in order to avoid getting it wrong by accident, and possibly violating [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, math, news, politics, writing | 8 Comments
Tags: census, constitution, fightiness, law, op/ed, scalia, statistics, washington post
According to the conceptual proposal released by Senators Menendez, Reid, and Schumer yesterday, the immigration reform to be taken up by Congress would require that a green card will be immediately available to foreign students with an advanced degree from a United States institution of higher education in a field of science, technology, engineering, or [...]
Filed under: academia, math, news, politics | 6 Comments
Tags: green card, hiring, immigration, visa
Quaker Steak and Lube
Another letter of the alphabet, another night out with Eating in Madison A to Z. Perfectly adequate chicken wings (though judging from what I saw around the table, their definition of “wing” is “any breaded piece of chicken longer than it is wide.”) Various hacked-open and truncated vehicles hanging from the ceiling, which delighted CJ [...]
Filed under: cj, food, madison | 3 Comments
The case of XXXXXX XXXXXX
Update: At the request of third parties, and with the agreement of the people involved, I have anonymized this post to remove the name of the people and universities involved. I don’t like to wander into controversy on the blog, but I do want to share what I know about our postdoc XXXXX’s job search [...]
Filed under: academia, ethics, math | 83 Comments
Tags: hiring, jobs
In fact, following on what I wrote about the two Farb-Leininger-Margalit theorems below, one might ask the following. Is there an absolute constant c such that, if f is a pseudo-Anosov mapping class on a genus g surface, and the f-invariant subspace of H_1(S) has dimension at least d, then log λ(f) >= c (d+1) [...]
Filed under: math | 2 Comments
Tags: dilatation, pseudo-Anosov, puzzles, topology
I spent a very enjoyable weekend learning about the dilatation of pseudo-Anosov mapping classes at a workshop organized by Jean-Luc Thiffeault and myself. The fact that a number theorist and a fluid dynamicist would organize a workshop about an area in low-dimensional topology should indicate, I hope, that the topic is of broad interest! There [...]
Filed under: math | Leave a Comment
Tags: dilatation, farb, leininger, mapping class group, mapping class groups, margalit, pseudo-Anosov, puzzles, surfaces, topology
In innings 1-6, the Orioles have scored 26 runs and allowed 37. After the 6th, the Orioles have scored 8 runs and allowed 26. Something is wrong with this team and it isn’t (just) Mike Gonzalez.
Filed under: bad statistics, baseball, orioles | 1 Comment
Tags: I shake my tiny fist, malaise
Until a minute ago I had never heard of Mizar, a project to record as much mathematics as possible in computer-readable form. The pieces of this project are published in the Journal of Formalized Mathematics. Here, for instance, is the paper “Non-negative Real Numbers, part I.” I learned about Mizar when glancing through the publicly [...]
Filed under: computers, math, nostalgia | Leave a Comment
Tags: algebraic geometry, i love the 90s, mizar, mumford, proofs, severi
Last year I blogged about a nice paper of Thomas Koberda, which shows that every pseudo-Anosov diffeomorphism of a Riemann surface X acts nontrivially on the homology of some characteristic cover of X with nilpotent Galois group. (This statement is false with “nilpotent” replaced by “abelian.”) The paper contains a question which Koberda ascribes to [...]
Filed under: math, papers | 1 Comment
Tags: dilatation, McMullen, topology
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