Mathematics posts
- February 23, 2011
- 12:51 PM
- 1,074 views
Cell ontologies and computer code
by David Basanta in Cancerevo: Cancer evolution
A few weeks ago I attended the 4th Cell Behavior Ontology workshop organised by James Glazier and the Biocomplexity Institute at Indiana University. The idea is that we could use ontologies to describe both computational models and experimental data...... Read more »
Hanson, B., Sugden, A., & Alberts, B. (2011) Making Data Maximally Available. Science, 331(6018), 649-649. DOI: 10.1126/science.1203354
- February 14, 2011
- 04:30 PM
- 1,307 views
Whipping up a storm
by GrrlScientist in Maniraptora
Hypothesis: beating tired racehorses with a whip stimulates them to run faster ... Read more »
Evans, D., & McGreevy, P. (2011) An Investigation of Racing Performance and Whip Use by Jockeys in Thoroughbred Races. PLoS ONE, 6(1). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015622
DEUEL, N., & LAWRENCE, L. (1988) Effects of urging by the rider on gallop stride characteristics of quarter horses. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science, 8(3), 240-243. DOI: 10.1016/S0737-0806(88)80016-9
- Psychology
- Research / Scholarship
- Biology
- Medicine
- Mathematics
- punishment
- Probability and Statistics
- Veterinary Medicine
- Behavioral Biology
- Ethics
- Animal Behaviour
- sports
- horse racing
- horseracing
- race horses
- horses
- whip use
- thoroughbreds
- stride length
- race performance
- quarter horses
- whipping
- whip rules
- February 14, 2011
- 03:56 PM
- 2,662 views
Whipping up a storm
by GrrlScientist in GrrlScientist
Hypothesis: beating tired racehorses with a whip stimulates them to run faster ... Read more »
Evans, D., & McGreevy, P. (2011) An Investigation of Racing Performance and Whip Use by Jockeys in Thoroughbred Races. PLoS ONE, 6(1). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015622
DEUEL, N., & LAWRENCE, L. (1988) Effects of urging by the rider on gallop stride characteristics of quarter horses. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science, 8(3), 240-243. DOI: 10.1016/S0737-0806(88)80016-9
- Mathematics
- Psychology
- Research / Scholarship
- Biology
- Medicine
- whip rules
- punishment
- Probability and Statistics
- Veterinary Medicine
- Behavioral Biology
- Ethics
- Animal Behaviour
- sports
- horse racing
- horseracing
- race horses
- horses
- whip use
- thoroughbreds
- stride length
- race performance
- quarter horses
- whipping
- February 9, 2011
- 03:09 PM
- 828 views
Using game theory to understand brain cancer
by David Basanta in Cancerevo: Cancer evolution
We got a paper out in Physical Biology where we explore glioblastomas using game theory. The publishers tell me that the article will be free to access for the next 30 days so here is the link to the...... Read more »
Basanta, D., Scott, J., Rockne, R., Swanson, K., & Anderson, A. (2011) The role of IDH1 mutated tumour cells in secondary glioblastomas: an evolutionary game theoretical view. Physical Biology, 8(1), 15016. DOI: 10.1088/1478-3975/8/1/015016
- February 4, 2011
- 01:24 PM
- 1,200 views
Early Complex Societies & Early Organized Religions
by Cris Campbell in Genealogy of Religion
Historians have long known that the shelf life of complex societies throughout human history has been rather limited. Archaeologists are aware of this also. But how to explain it?
In a recent (open access) paper, “Cycling in the Complexity of Early Societies,” Sergey Gavrilets and colleagues mathematically modeled early complex societies using a number of variables [...]... Read more »
Gavrilets, Sergey, Anderson, David G., & Turchin, Peter. (2010) Cycling in the Complexity of Early Societies. Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History, 1(1), 59-80. info:/http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5536t55r
- February 3, 2011
- 11:40 AM
- 1,183 views
CoalHMM analysis of the human/chimpanzee ancestor, based on the orangutan genome
by Thomas Mailund in Mailund on the Internet
I’ve been wanting to write about our paper on the orangutan genome for a while, but I’ve just been too busy so far, so a little late I finally get to it. Besides the Nature paper, where we contributed to the analysis of the two sub-species of orangutans, we have two companion papers. One is [...]... Read more »
Hobolth, A., Dutheil, J., Hawks, J., Schierup, M., & Mailund, T. (2011) Incomplete lineage sorting patterns among human, chimpanzee and orangutan suggest recent orangutan speciation and widespread selection. Genome Research. DOI: 10.1101/gr.114751.110
- January 30, 2011
- 11:44 PM
- 1,252 views
Egypt Week – Corruption and Cooperation
by Jon Wilkins in Lost in Transcription
So, our next Egypt Week feature is a theoretical paper on a topic closely related to the last post. Once again, we are interested in understanding the mechanisms that are responsible for encouraging or enforcing cooperation, thereby facilitating collective action. Last time, we talked about a paper that found that "altruistic" or "third-party" punishment is common in large-scale, complex societies, but is rare in small-scale societies, while "spiteful" punishment is universal.
Many empirical a........ Read more »
Úbeda, F., & Duéñez-Guzmán, E. (2010) POWER AND CORRUPTION. Evolution. DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2010.01194.x
- January 28, 2011
- 12:07 PM
- 1,089 views
Mathematicians and Mongeese: Peeing to Defend Territory? or Mates?
by Jon Wilkins in Lost in Transcription
So, you may have heard about Tihomir Petrov, the math professor at Cal State, Northridge who was arrested for urinating on his colleague's office door. Campus security got video footage of Petrov in the act when they set up video cameras following the discovery of "puddles of what they thought was urine."
You may be asking yourself, what the heck was this dude thinking? How should we interpret the behavior of this Homo mathematicus (not that there's anything wrong with it) specimen?
Fortunate........ Read more »
Jordan, N., Mwanguhya, F., Kyabulima, S., Rüedi, P., & Cant, M. (2010) Scent marking within and between groups of wild banded mongooses. Journal of Zoology, 280(1), 72-83. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7998.2009.00646.x
- January 27, 2011
- 07:33 AM
- 651 views
the linguistics of heaven and hell
by Chris in The Lousy Linguist
The value of pop culture data for legitimate research is being put to the test. Exactly what, if anything, can the reality show Big Brother tell us about language change over time?Voice Onset Time is a measure of how long you wait to begin vibrating your vocal folds after you release a stop consonant. Voiced stop consonants like /b/ and /d/ require two things: 1) stop all airflow from escaping the airway by closing the glottis and 2) after the air is released, begin vibrating the glottis (by usi........ Read more »
Max Ban, Peter Graf, & Morgan Sonderegge. (2011) Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system. Linguistic Society of America. info:/
- January 25, 2011
- 04:38 PM
- 967 views
This Week in the Universe: January 18th – January 24th
by S.C. Kavassalis in The Language of Bad Physics
Phenomenally beautiful math was the main highlight of this week, I’d say, although none of it for the very faint of heart.
The CMS on SUSY, Bill Unruh on simulated Hawking radiation, Ed Witten on knots, and Schenkel and Van Oystaeyen on noncommutative space(times):
High Energy Physics and Particles:
The LHC Doesn’t Need Data-Collecting Mode To Have Fun
CMS Collaboration (2011). Search for Supersymmetry in pp Collisions at 7 TeV in Events with Jets and Missing Transverse Energy arXi........ Read more »
CMS Collaboration. (2011) Search for Supersymmetry in pp Collisions at 7 TeV in Events with Jets and Missing Transverse Energy. arXiv. arXiv: 1101.1628v1
Silke Weinfurtner, Edmund W. Tedford, Matthew C. J. Penrice, William G. Unruh, & Gregory A. Lawrence. (2010) Measurement of stimulated Hawking emission in an analogue system. Phys. Rev. Lett., 106(2), 1302-1306. arXiv: 1008.1911v2
Edward Witten. (2011) Fivebranes and Knots. arXiv. arXiv: 1101.3216v1
Alexander Schenkel. (2011) Quantum Field Theory on Curved Noncommutative Spacetimes. arXiv. arXiv: 1101.3492v2
- January 20, 2011
- 03:22 PM
- 648 views
Finite formula found for partition numbers
by S.C. Kavassalis in The Language of Bad Physics
Credit: Emory and Ken Ono
So this isn’t physics*, but if you squint hard enough, you can probably make a connection. The hot topic today is Ken Ono‘s latest work on the partition function:
Ken Ono, Amanda Folsom, & Zach Kent (2011). l-adic properties of the partition function American Institute of Mathematics.
Ken Ono & Jan Bruinier (2011). AN ALGEBRAIC FORMULA FOR THE PARTITION FUNCTION American Institute of Mathematics.
A EurekAlert press release appeared today, entitled........ Read more »
Ken Ono, Amanda Folsom, & Zach Kent. (2011) l-adic properties of the partition function. American Institute of Mathematics. info:/
Folsom A, & Ono K. (2008) The spt-function of Andrews. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(51), 20152-6. PMID: 19091951
- January 15, 2011
- 10:31 PM
- 1,349 views
Does mathematical training increase our risk tolerance?
by Jason Collins in Evolving Economics
Humans are inherently risk averse. When offered a coin toss with a reward of $10,000 for heads but a loss of $10,000 for tails, most people would decline. They would likely agree to pay a significant sum to avoid the gamble, despite the expected value of the gamble being zero. When economists describe the preferences [...]... Read more »
Dehaene, S., Izard, V., Spelke, E., & Pica, P. (2008) Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures. Science, 320(5880), 1217-1220. DOI: 10.1126/science.1156540
- January 13, 2011
- 08:45 PM
- 1,081 views
Google Violates Benford's Law, Arrest Warrant Issued
by Jon Wilkins in Lost in Transcription
So, Google has already had it's Twitter account subpoenaed, and can look forward to months of molestation enhanced screening at the airport, all thanks to its brazen violation of Benford's Law.
What is this Benford's Law thing?
It is a statement that if you look at lists of numbers in empirical data, the first non-zero digit is distributed in a very specific way. At least for certain kinds of data. Specifically, if the logarithms of the numbers you are looking at are uniformly distributed, the........ Read more »
Frank Benford. (1938) The law of anomalous numbers. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 78(4), 551-572. info:other/
- December 29, 2010
- 04:44 AM
- 1,767 views
What’s the actual size of your personal social network? Some numbers
by ---a in Bodyspacesociety.eu
In 1992 Robin Dunbar proposed a rough estimate of 150. But the "Dunbar's number" pretty much doubled in 1998, when Peter Killworth suggested a mean personal network size of 290. And in 2010 that number doubled again, as Matthew Salganik came up with 610 personal. So who says 1,200?... Read more »
Bickart, K., Wright, C., Dautoff, R., Dickerson, B., & Barrett, L. (2010) Amygdala volume and social network size in humans. Nature Neuroscience. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2724
Dunbar, R. (1992) Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469-493. DOI: 10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J
Killworth, P., Johnsen, E., Bernard, H. R., Shelley, G., & McCarty, C. (1990) Estimating the size of personal networks. Social Networks, 12(4), 289-312. DOI: 10.1016/0378-8733(90)90012-X
McCormick, T., Salganik, M., & Zheng, T. (2010) How Many People Do You Know?: Efficiently Estimating Personal Network Size. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 105(489), 59-70. DOI: 10.1198/jasa.2009.ap08518
- December 26, 2010
- 10:37 AM
- 818 views
Oscar: training data, models, etc
by egonw in Chem-bla-ics
Oscar uses a Maximum Entropy Markov Model (MEMM) based on n-grams. Peter Corbett has written this up (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-S11-S4). So, it basically is statistics once more. If you really want a proper bioinformatics education, so do your PhD at a (proteo)chemometrics department.
N-grams are word parts of n characters. For example, the trigrams of acetic acid include ace, cid, tic, eti, and aci. N-grams of length four include acid, etic, and acet. The MEMM assigns weights to these n-grams, a........ Read more »
Corbett, P., & Copestake, A. (2008) Cascaded classifiers for confidence-based chemical named entity recognition. BMC Bioinformatics, 9(Suppl 11). DOI: 10.1186/1471-2105-9-S11-S4
- December 14, 2010
- 07:55 PM
- 604 views
Towards Preventing Alzheimer's Disease: A Mathematical Model
by Michael Long in Phased
A mathematical model suggests that inhibiting the immune response in the brain may be the most effective means of controlling Alzheimer's disease.... Read more »
Puri, I. K., & Li, L. (2010) Mathematical Modeling for the Pathogenesis of Alzheimer's Disease. PLoS ONE, 5(12). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015176
- December 5, 2010
- 02:00 PM
- 924 views
Acupuncture, some dodgy maths and a cracking review paper
by Lorimer Moseley in BodyInMind
I have a challenge for you. Imagine you’re in ancient China and you’ve had this idea that health and disease hang on the flow of energy through invisible energy pathways called meridians that can be manipulated by applying needles in certain specific points. How do you go about systematically validating this theory? How do you [...]... Read more »
Donald M. Marcus. (2010) Is Acupuncture for Pain a Placebo Treatment? An examination of the evidence. The Rheumatologist. info:/
- December 4, 2010
- 01:34 PM
- 775 views
Psi Skeptics: If Psychologists Find Signs of ESP, Maybe Psychologists Have a Problem
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Daryl J. Bem's experiments on psi caught the world's attention, as I posted last month, because he used standard psychology-lab methods to gather and analyze his data. Imagine what astronomers might feel if NASA announced that the Hubble space telescope had found evidence for astrology: How do you ...Read More... Read more »
Daryl J. Bem. (2011) Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. info:/10.1037/a0021524
- December 3, 2010
- 07:27 PM
- 1,219 views
Networks in the autistic brain: insights from graph theory
by Jon Brock in Cracking the Enigma
A couple of weeks ago I travelled from Sydney to a conference taking place in San Diego, California. There isn't a direct flight to San Diego so instead I had to fly via Los Angeles. Colleagues coming from Melbourne had an even more convoluted journey - they had to get a connecting flight to Sydney first before they could fly to LA. The point here is that airline routes are determined by economic pressures. There simply aren't enough people wanting to travel from Sydney or Melbourne to San Dieg........ Read more »
Pablo Barttfeld, Bruno Wicker, Sebastián Cukier, Silvana Navarta, Sergio Lew, & Mariano Sigman. (2010) A big-world network in ASD: Dynamical connectivity analysis reflects a deficit in long-range connections and an excess of short-range connections. Neuropsychologia. arXiv: 1007.5471v1
- November 22, 2010
- 01:35 PM
- 1,185 views
The Obesity Paradox Revisited
by Travis Saunders, MSc in Obesity Panacea
As Peter and I discuss frequently here at Obesity Panacea, the relationship between body weight and health is not always as neat and tidy as you might expect (For all the details, check out Peter’s 5-part series on metabolically healthy obesity). A recent paper published in the International Journal of Obesity by Drs DK Childers and David Allison examines a number of these issues, and suggests ways that they may be at least partially resolved.
In the intro to this new paper, the author........ Read more »
Childers, D., & Allison, D. (2010) The ‘obesity paradox’: a parsimonious explanation for relations among obesity, mortality rate and aging?. International Journal of Obesity, 34(8), 1231-1238. DOI: 10.1038/ijo.2010.71
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