The most startling thing to me about the election of 2012 was how spookily accurate polls were. Social scientists in one camp want to dismiss determinism while the other camp has biology-envy but either the deterministic side got a big boost on Tuesday or the opposing sides in this election were so entrenched there was virtually no reason to vote, other than to see who had the best Get Out...
read moreNate Silver, a sports statistician, made waves when he accurately projected the results of the presidential election in 2008. So a few days go when he predicted that President Obama was 75% likely to win when polls only showed the candidates were about even, it set atwitter those people who think statistical models of polls are meaningful. They were vindicated, the age of scientific...
read moreI make fun of numerology but I kind of like it. I can like it and still make fun of it because I don't take it too seriously.Want to claim there is a mathematical secret, far beyond human intelligence, buried in religious texts? Sure, I will listen, if it's on TV and well produced. It's fun to speculate that prayers and rituals have a pattern that contains some sacred rhythm and people...
read moreWhen storage is cheap, finding data has value. A $600 hard drive can store all of the world's music so how do you find a song you like?Math can answer those mysteries, says Kaggle president and chief scientist Jeremy Howard, and in a world of information overload, people who understand making sense of data madness will be paid like rock stars - or athletes. So they are starting now.The San...
read moreNumerical models had a tough decade to start off the 2000s. A field that had shown itself to be both scientific and applied in areas like semiconductor physics was extrapolated out to cultural issues and economics and successfully predicted...nothing.A new model created by an international research group claims they can now predict which European countries are more likely to become united...
read moreNumerical models had a tough decade to start off the 2000s. A field that had shown itself to be both scientific and applied in areas like semiconductor physics was extrapolated out to cultural issues and economics and successfully predicted...nothing.A new model created by an international research group claims they can now predict which European countries are more likely to become united...
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