Archive for May, 2010
I said a few vague words on the All Things Considered piece about the Dorfman protocol for syphilis screening, which is an early example of the exploitation of sparsity to improve signal detection. Jeffrey Shallit follows up with a really nice explanation of the method at his blog. Good stuff in the comments, too, especially [...]
Filed under: economics, math | 2 Comments
Tags: compressed sensing, dorfman, gareth mccaughan, jeffrey shallit, pooling, sparsity, statistics, syphilis, wired
Malcolm Gladwell wrote: It doesn’t take much imagination to see how risk homeostasis applies to NASA and the space shuttle. In one frequently quoted phrase, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize- winning physicist who served on the Challenger commission, said that at NASA decision-making was “a kind of Russian roulette.” When the O-rings began to have [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, economics, math, philosophy | 6 Comments
Tags: bayes, challenger, feynman, probability, richard feynman, risk, russian roulette, space shuttle
Robert Siegel said my name
I was on All Things Considered today, talking a bit about compressed sensing. They let me tell the syphillis story that didn’t fit in the Wired article. The radio broadcast has come and gone, but you can still hear it at NPR’s website. Laura Balzano made the audio demo; for more explanation and more cool [...]
Filed under: computers, math, writing | 1 Comment
Tags: compressed sensing, npr, radio, wired
2010 food cart update
May is here and the carts are out! Plenty of newcomers on Library Mall. Athens is justifying its victory in the citywide food cart contest, serving first-rate gyros with french fries in the sandwich, and a solid spanikopita too. And on Tuesdays and Wednesdays we now have Ingrid’s Lunch Box, once chosen by Bon Appetit [...]
Filed under: food, madison | 5 Comments
Tags: africana, athens, food carts, gyros, ingrid's lunchbox, king of falafel
Post-colonial agriculture
I didn’t know that lots of commercial crops are pollinated by giant trucked-in hives of honeybees. I also didn’t know that these hives are being decimated by Colony Collapse Disorder, which is Science for “the hive’s empty except for the queen, there’s no dead bees around, we basically don’t know what’s going on.” UW researchers [...]
Filed under: commerce, food, madison | Leave a Comment
Tags: bees, colony collapse disorder, cranberries, leaf-cutter bee, uw, wisconsin
I gave a talk at East HS yesterday about “not getting fooled by probability,” in which I talked about the Diana Sylvester murder case, discussed previously on the blog as an example of the prosecutor’s fallacy. While getting ready for the talk I came across this post about the case by Penn State law professor [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, math, news, politics | 12 Comments
Tags: bayes, david kaye, law, probability, prosecutor's fallacy
Rush Hour, Jr.
OK, so a black toddler and a Chinese toddler stumble on an international drug-trafficking ring — no, actually, this is a game I just bought for CJ, a kid’s version of Nob Yoshigahara‘s classic game Rush Hour. The object here is to get the small white truck to the edge of the board (the top [...]
Filed under: children, cj, math | 7 Comments
Tags: combinatorics, configuration spaces, games, geometry, matthew kahle, persi diaconis, puzzles, random graphs, rush hour
I have an ideological commitment to a somewhat unpopular theory of prose fiction: that features like “character”, “plot,” and “setting” are epiphenomena that arise after the fact, more or less by accident; that writers write sentences, then go back and see what characters, plot, and setting the sentences add up to, then revise the sentences [...]
Filed under: books, language, writing | 1 Comment
Tags: a fan's notes, fudge, gary lutz, prose, sam lipsyte, sentences, the ask, the sentence is a lonely place
If I Had a Hifi
Nada Surf just released a covers album called “If I Had a Hifi” which, strangely and disappointingly, doesn’t include a cover of the Spare Snare song of the same title. I couldn’t find that track available freely on the web, so here’s the even better “As A Matter of Fact.” Jan Burnett used to play [...]
Filed under: music, offhand | Leave a Comment
Tags: as a matter of fact, lo-fi, rock of scotland, spare snare
As I’ve mentioned before, the number of squarefree monic polynomials of degree n in F_q[t] is exactly q^n – q^{n-1}. I explained in the earlier post how to interpret this fact in terms of the cohomology of the braid group. But one can also ask whether this identity has a motivic interpretation. Namely: let U [...]
Filed under: math | 7 Comments
Tags: algebraic geometry, motives, polynomials, puzzles
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