In 2012, the enthusiasm for poll averaging reached a fever pitch. Very few people were critical of it and instead talked about how science had taken over predictive politics. (1)I was critical of the accuracy and swam against the tide of those in media gushing about the new frontier opened up by New York Times statistical pundit Nate Silver and others, which posited that we could now predict...
read moreThey're data mining our children, notes Politico writer Stephanie Simon. She is talking about education technology startup Knewton and their use of data analytics to find out how kids think. They want to be able to predict who will struggle with fractions next week.Exciting, right? Obviously this can be misused and the fact that its potential problems (if they can forecast it, they can...
read moreI understand why someone living in the city might get a slice of pizza - they don't want to carry a box of pizza back to the office, and there is something nice about sitting down and having a quick bite.But I have never understood why anyone buys a medium pizza, much less a small. If you understand what a circle is, and you understand what a dollar is, it makes no sense.First, the dollar. The...
read moreNJIT math professor Bruce Bukiet wrote an article here on his Markov process predictions for the baseball playoffs. That wasn't something new, he is in his 13th season of doing just that, often to maddening success.How did he do this time? The Pirates didn't advance, the Cardinals are now facing the Dodgers, but otherwise he nailed it, with the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers getting...
read moreNJIT math professor Bruce Bukiet wrote an article here on his Markov process predictions for the baseball playoffs. That wasn't something new, he is in his 13th season of doing just that, often to maddening success.How did he do this time? The Pirates didn't advance, the Cardinals are now facing the Dodgers, but otherwise he nailed it, with the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers getting...
read moreWe all love paradoxes, those seemingly consistent logical brain-teasers where we sort out what can and should and might and must happen and that invariably lead to self-contradictory arguments.If you are like me and my friends, there is nothing you enjoy more than sitting around during half-time of the Steelers game and arguing over Maxwell's Demon - the many ways to violate the Second Law of...
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