Mathematics posts
- October 3, 2011
- 12:20 PM
- 303 views
Catch an "Astrotweeter" with Truthy
by Neurobonkers in Neurobonkers
A research group at the University of Indiana has developed a program called Truthy that allows anyone to track cases of “astrotweeting”. Any search term can be entered into Truthy and the program will scan the Twitter API and build a model of how the search term originated. ... Read more »
Ratkiewicz,J. Conover,M. Meiss,M. Gonçalves,B. Patil,S. Flammini,A. Menczer, F. (2011) Truthy: Mapping the Spread of Astroturf in Microblog Streams. World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). . info:/
- October 3, 2011
- 07:20 AM
- 952 views
Scientists successfully reconstruct the mind’s eye for the first time as a video output
by Neurobonkers in Neurobonkers
fMRI used to create a video output based on a dictionary created by showing participants 7200s of random colour video.... Read more »
Nishimoto S, Vu AT, Naselaris T, Benjamini Y, Yu B, & Gallant JL. (2011) Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies. Current biology : CB. PMID: 21945275
- September 11, 2011
- 01:49 PM
- 427 views
Neuroscience Fails Stats 101?
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
According to a new paper, a full half of neuroscience papers that try to do a (very simple) statistical comparison are getting it wrong: Erroneous analyses of interactions in neuroscience: a problem of significance.Here's the problem. Suppose you want to know whether a certain 'treatment' has an affect on a certain variable. The treatment could be a drug, an environmental change, a genetic variant, whatever. The target population could be animals, humans, brain cells, or anything else.So you giv........ Read more »
Nieuwenhuis S, Forstmann BU, & Wagenmakers EJ. (2011) Erroneous analyses of interactions in neuroscience: a problem of significance. Nature neuroscience, 14(9), 1105-7. PMID: 21878926
- August 29, 2011
- 11:17 PM
- 986 views
Did chaos theory kill the climatology star?
by csoeder in Topologic Oceans
Last time, we saw that some mathematical systems are so sensitive to initial conditions that even very small uncertainties in their initial state can snowball, causing even very similar states to evolve very differently. The equations describing fluid turbulence are examples of such a system; Lorenz’s discovery of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions ended hopes [...]... Read more »
Easterling, D., & Wehner, M. (2009) Is the climate warming or cooling?. Geophysical Research Letters, 36(8). DOI: 10.1029/2009GL037810
Lorenz, Edward N. (1963) Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 20(2). info:/
- August 24, 2011
- 10:03 PM
- 540 views
Workplace stress: Opposites attract
by Vivek Venkataraman in sciencebyte
Highly stressed people at the workplace are individually surrounded by less stressed people and vice-versa... Read more »
Watanabe, J., Akitomi, T., Ara, K., & Yano, K. (2011) Antiferromagnetic character of workplace stress. Physical Review E, 84(1). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.84.017101
- August 18, 2011
- 10:00 AM
- 567 views
Mathematics, Cities, and Brains: What Can A Highway Engineer Learn From A Neuroscientist?
by Jason Goldman in The Thoughtful Animal
Lots of networks have been compared to urban systems. Remember when the internet was referred to as the information superhighway? And high school biology teachers have been comparing the workings of cells to city operations for decades. To what extent, though, might a brain be like a city?... Read more »
Changizi, M., & Destefano, M. (2009) Common scaling laws for city highway systems and the mammalian neocortex. Complexity. DOI: 10.1002/cplx.20288
- August 14, 2011
- 10:46 PM
- 502 views
Kim's the name
by Vivek Venkataraman in sciencebyte
Statistical study of the distribution of Korean family names... Read more »
Baek, S., Minnhagen, P., & Kim, B. (2011) The ten thousand Kims. New Journal of Physics, 13(7), 73036. DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/13/7/073036
- August 8, 2011
- 12:28 PM
- 1,290 views
“Anything But Country”: What Factor Analysis Reveals About Our Tastes for Tunes. [Guest Post at Scientific American]
by Melanie Tannenbaum in PsySociety
When asked to indicate their favorite type of music, plenty of people say they like “anything but country.” Is this really accurate? Why do rock music fans also tend to like punk and heavy metal? And why on earth would … Continue reading →... Read more »
Rentfrow PJ, Goldberg LR, & Levitin DJ. (2011) The structure of musical preferences: a five-factor model. Journal of personality and social psychology, 100(6), 1139-57. PMID: 21299309
- August 8, 2011
- 12:13 AM
- 847 views
Crop circle hoax and science
by Arunn in nOnoScience (a.k.a. Unruled Notebook)
Crop circles have been popular ever since hoaxes were, and should remain more popular than any of your G+ circles. It is one more (here is another) of those instances — unlike downright crap like Quan-dumb Table or Nano Art — where Art is created out of crafted and conjured up Science. Interestingly, over decades, [...]... Read more »
Haselhoff, E. (2001) Opinions and comments on Levengood WC, Talbott NP (1999) Dispersion of energies in worldwide crop formations. Physiol Plant 105: 615-624. Physiologia Plantarum, 111(1), 123-124. DOI: 10.1034/j.1399-3054.2001.1110116.x
- August 2, 2011
- 07:58 AM
- 850 views
The Life-Spans of Empires
by Samuel Arbesman in arbesman.net
I recently published my first history article. Titled The Life-Spans of Empires, it’s published in the delightfully-named journal Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. Using a fun dataset I unearthed from some articles in the Nineteen Seventies, I explore the lifespans of empires, and their similarities to other complex systems: The collapse [...]... Read more »
Samuel Arbesman. (2011) The Life-Spans of Empires. Historical Methods, 44(3), 127-129. info:/10.1080/01615440.2011.577733
- July 30, 2011
- 01:31 PM
- 1,045 views
The Dershowitz/Falkovich proof of the Extended Church-Turing Thesis
by Aaron Sterling in Nanoexplanations
In a previous post, I considered a proof of the Church-Turing Thesis that Dershowitz and Gurevich published in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic in 2008. It is safe to say that the proof is controversial — not because it is … Continue reading →... Read more »
Nachum Dershowitz, & Evgenia Falkovich. (2011) A Formalization and Proof of the Extended Church-Turing Thesis. International Workshop on the Development of Computational Models. info:/
- July 25, 2011
- 12:58 AM
- 857 views
The Quantum Telegraph
by Graham Morehead in A Mad Hemorrhage
Description of a superluminal communication device... Read more »
Ghirardi, G., Rimini, A., & Weber, T. (1980) A general argument against superluminal transmission through the quantum mechanical measurement process. Lettere al Nuovo Cimento, 27(10), 293-298. DOI: 10.1007/BF02817189
- July 22, 2011
- 10:43 AM
- 1,187 views
Light Logic for 'Light'-ning Fast Computers
by Paige Brown in From The Lab Bench
For some time now, the idea of building light-based devices to supplement semiconductor-based computing has attracted the interest of researchers and computer engineers alike. Why? Because, as eloquently put in a 2007 issue of Scientific American, "Light is a wonderful medium for carrying information."... Read more »
Wei H, Wang Z, Tian X, Käll M, & Xu H. (2011) Cascaded logic gates in nanophotonic plasmon networks. Nature communications, 387. PMID: 21750541
Wei H, Li Z, Tian X, Wang Z, Cong F, Liu N, Zhang S, Nordlander P, Halas NJ, & Xu H. (2011) Quantum dot-based local field imaging reveals plasmon-based interferometric logic in silver nanowire networks. Nano letters, 11(2), 471-5. PMID: 21182282
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- July 4, 2011
- 01:23 PM
- 1,080 views
A mathematical proof of the Church-Turing Thesis?
by Aaron Sterling in Nanoexplanations
The Church-Turing Thesis lies at the junction between computer science, mathematics, physics and philosophy. The Thesis essentially states that everything computable in the “real world” is exactly what is computable within our accepted mathematical abstractions of computation, such as Turing machines. … Continue reading →... Read more »
Nachum Dershowitz, & Yuri Gurevich. (2008) A Natural Axiomatization of Computability and Proof of Church's Thesis. The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. DOI: 10.2178/bsl/1231081370
- July 1, 2011
- 11:38 PM
- 513 views
Thermodynamics and Poker
by csoeder in Topologic Oceans
There is a comapnion article which discusses this project’s role in decentralized community and citizen science at ArkFab. You can find the current paper here. A while back, I got the idea to investigate how the entropy of a poker tournament evolves with time. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of how ‘spread out’ energy [...]... Read more »
Clément Sire. (2007) Universal statistical properties of poker tournaments. J. Stat. Mech. (2007) P08013. arXiv: physics/0703122v3
Annila, Arto. (2009) Economies Evolve by Energy Dispersal. Entropy, 11(4), 606-633. DOI: 10.3390/e11040606
- July 1, 2011
- 08:50 PM
- 1,042 views
Q&A's with a Science Journalist: 'It's All Relativity'
by Paige Brown in From The Lab Bench
This week I am interviewing Louise Ogden, a science blogger on our own community blog Student Voices, which is hosted on Scitable by Nature Education. Louise also has her own science blog, It’s All Relativity, where she talks about space missions, climate change, exoplanets, solar eclipses, and much more! Louise is currently finishing up her Masters project at City University in London, which will earn her an (exciting!) degree in science journalism.... Read more »
Alison Wright. (2010) High-energy physics: Top of the class . Nature Physics, 6(644). info:/10.1038/nphys1783
- June 27, 2011
- 04:41 PM
- 1,057 views
Jungle Geometry: Who Needs Euclid?
by Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish
At some point in your teenage years, you probably kept a compass and straightedge in your backpack, learned the ways to prove two triangles are congruent, and knew what a secant was. It all had a taste of the classical about it: Euclid, Archimedes and Pythagoras had figured everything out and passed it down to us. But geometry may be more democratic than it seems. As a group of native Amazonians showed, you don't need to go to school to explain Euclid.French researcher Veronique Izard and h........ Read more »
Izard, V., Pica, P., Spelke, E., & Dehaene, S. (2011) From the Cover: Flexible intuitions of Euclidean geometry in an Amazonian indigene group. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(24), 9782-9787. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016686108
- June 26, 2011
- 03:54 PM
- 922 views
STOC 2011: Infinitary Ramsey Theory yields a complexity dichotomy theorem for CSPs over graphs
by Aaron Sterling in Nanoexplanations
In this post, I will discuss Schaefer’s Theorem for Graphs by Bodirsky and Pinsker, which Michael Pinsker presented at STOC 2011. I love the main proof technique of this paper: start with a finite object, blow it up to an … Continue reading →... Read more »
Manuel Bodirsky, & Michael Pinsker. (2011) Schaefer's Theorem for Graphs. Proceedings of 43rd Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing. info:/
- June 23, 2011
- 06:06 PM
- 1,433 views
Happy 99th Birthday, Alan Turing
by Jon Wilkins in Lost in Transcription
So, today (June 23, 2011) marks the 99th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, British supergenius who played a critical role in winning World War II and is one of the founding fathers of computer science.
He was also gay, which was illegal Britain at the time. In 1952 he was prosecuted under the same law that had sent Oscar Wilde to gaol. He chose to undergo chemical castration (in the form of treatment with feminizing hormones) as an alternative to prison.
In 1954 he committed suicide in ........ Read more »
Turing, A. M. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433-460. info:/
- June 20, 2011
- 05:30 AM
- 1,275 views
Obesity's contagious, or is it? A sober second look at obesity and social networks.
by Yoni Freedhoff in Weighty Matters
Right off the top let me say I'm not well versed enough in statistics to know who's right.On one side of the fence are the findings of Christakis and Fowler, famously published in the New England Journal of Medicine that posited obesity is socially contagious. Non-statistically, their paper didn't sit right with me, but as far as stats go, I'm no maven.On the other side of the fence is a new paper published by Russel Lyons who posits that Christakis' and Fowler's work is a great example of stat........ Read more »
Lyons, R. (2011) The Spread of Evidence-Poor Medicine via Flawed Social-Network Analysis. Statistics, Politics, and Policy, 2(1). DOI: 10.2202/2151-7509.1024
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