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What do you do when your industry is shifting under your feet? Taking the lead with radical steps is one strategy. The New York Times did just that this afternoon when it announced that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981, 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour.
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Different meanings of Bayesian statistics – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science1. Surprising results from conditional probability. For example, if you test positive for a disease with a 1% prevalence rate, and the test is 95% effective, that you probably don't have the disease.
2. Bayesian data analysis as a way to solve statistical problems. For example, the classic partial-pooling examples of Lindley, Novick, Efron, Morris, Rubin, etc.
3. Bayesian inference as a way to include prior information in statistical analysis.
4. Bayes or Bayes-like rules for decision analysis and inference in computer science, for example identifying spam.
5. Bayesian inference as coherent reasoning, following the principles of Von Neumann, Keynes, Savage, etc.
6. [added at Larry's suggestion; see comments] Bayesian inference as a method of coming up with classical statistical estimators. -
"A new startup company is in the works at the University of Washington, based on inexpensive, portable solar cells that could go far beyond the standard rooftop model. Conventional solar cells are made from expensive silicon, but the UW group, led by materials science and engineering professor Alex Jen, has come up with a way to harness solar energy using thin polymer film–akin to really thin cling wrap"
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"Yes, they were real. No, they didn't carry malaria. And they definitely didn't qualify as a swarm. But they sure did get a lot of attention.
That's the word from a reliable source after the Microsoft chairman set the tech world, ahem, abuzz by opening a jar of mosquitos at the TED conference today — reportedly telling the crowd that not only poor people should experience the problem. We made a few calls and found out that the jar contained a relatively modest collection of mosquitoes: more than a few, but probably fewer than ten." -
Governor Chris Gregoire | How would you balance Washington’s budget?Eliminating the budget shortfall without raising taxes is difficult. It requires balancing what we need with what we value. What would you keep? What would you cut?
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As Comet Lulin moves into the northern sky in mid February to rise around midnight, it should at least be spotted by comet watchers with binoculars and a good sky chart. Tracking observations indicate that the comet officially designated C/2007 N3 (Lulin) has now swung by the Sun and is approaching Earth on a trajectory that will bring it within half the Earth-Sun distance in late February.
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SciRate Page For 0902.0402In this work we describe how a single artificial multi-level Cooper Pair Box molecule, interacting with a superconducting microwave coplanar waveguide resonator, when suitably driven, can generate extremely large optical nonlinearities at microwave frequencies, with no associated absorption.
The World is Such a Wonderful Place
The view from my plane window this afternoon (thank you United Airlines for making me take this Delta Airlines flight):
Check out those lenticular clouds!
One of my fondest memories was on a trip with my father to the Sacramento in a small plane, and on the trip back falling asleep and waking up with spectacular Mt. Shasta right, and I mean right, outside the window.
Long Live Monkey
When dog meets plastic monkey:
Some Upcoming Talks
Some upcoming talks for those in Albuquerque or Ann Arbor (so many A’s!):
- Feb 5, 5pm, University of New Mexico Center for Advanced Studies Seminars: The Symmetry Conjecture
- Feb 6, 4:00 pm, University of New Mexico Physics and Astronomy Colloquium: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer
- Feb 9, 4pm, University of Michigan Seminar: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer.
links for 2009-02-04
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the discovery of an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star in the constellation of Monoceros, at a distance of about 450 light years.
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"We document widespread changes to the historical I/B/E/S analyst stock recommendations database. Across seven I/B/E/S downloads, obtained between 2000 and 2007, we find that between 6,580 (1.6%) and 97,582 (21.7%) of matched observations are different from one download to the next. The changes include alterations of recommendations, additions and deletions of records, and removal of analyst names." Got clean data?
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"When they analyzed these data-200 million of them-in exactly the same fashion that Bachelier had analyzed data almost a century earlier, they made a startling discovery. The pdf of price changes was not Gaussian plus outliers, as previously believed. Rather, all the data-including data previously termed outliers-conformed to a single pdf encompassing both everyday fluctuations and “once in a century” fluctuations. Instead of a Gaussian or some correction to a Gaussian, they found a power law pdf with exponent -4, a sufficiently large exponent that the difference from a Gaussian is not huge"
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"In a paper appearing in Physical Review A, Panos Aliferis, who is at the IBM Watson Research Center, and John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology, rigorously establish a lower bound for the fault-tolerance threshold for one of Knill’s constructions that has relatively small overhead requirements. Their results indicate that fault-tolerant computation should definitely be possible with this scheme, if the error probability per logical operation does not exceed 0.1%."
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"One intriguing idea getting shuttled around President Obama’s inner circle could end up pouring significant cash into the innovation hubs of Seattle and Boston. This idea, hatched at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., calls for building a national network of two dozen or more centers of excellence in cleantech R&D, with annual budgets of as much as $200 million from competitive research grants, to jumpstart innovation in alternative energy."
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"As we reported last week, Woodman is the Microsoft solutions adviser who got a tattoo of the company's unofficial "Blue Monster" logo last year, only to find himself among the 1,400 people laid off by the company Jan. 22. Some Microsoft critics commenting on our post and on BoingBoing questioned Woodman's judgment for getting the tattoo.
Here's the remarkable part: In a follow-up post, Woodman not only speaks glowingly about Microsoft but he goes out of his way to defend the past actions that helped shape its reputation. " -
Singularity University. Preparing Humanity For Accelerating Technolgical ChangeVia Roseblog. The name is not for me, but I'm all for crazy universities
links for 2009-02-03
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"Paul Goldberg is looking for permanent faculty members (plural again) for a new Economics and Computation group in Liverpool. Economics is becoming the new quantum." If only this implied golden-ness about quantum were true
Teleportation Between Separately Trapped Matter Qubits
Lots of news about the Chris Monroe’s group teleporting between ions in different traps.
Continue reading “Teleportation Between Separately Trapped Matter Qubits”
Quantum Open Notebook
Sir Tobias Osborne of the Quantum Boolean Functions has made the plunge and is trying out open notebook science: Tobias J. Osborne’s Research Notes.
Continue reading “Quantum Open Notebook”
Paper Reviewing Ratio
A long time ago, in a blog far far away, I ran a small poll about paper refereeing. The poll asked “What is your ratio of reviewed to submitted manuscripts?”. The results were
- >=6 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 7 votes (8 percent)
- 5 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 3 votes (4 percent)
- 4 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 9 votes (10 percent)
- 3 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 12 votes (14 percent)
- 2 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 13 votes (15 percent)
- 1 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 20 votes (24 percent)
- 1 reviewed for every 2 submitted: 6 votes (7 percent)
- 1 reviewed for every 3 submitted: 5 votes (6 percent)
- 1 reviewed for every 4 submitted: 2 votes (2 percent)
- 1 reviewed for every 5 submitted: 0 votes (0 percent)
- 1 reviewed for every >=6 submitted: 7 votes (8 percent)
This works out to an average 2.2 papers reviewed for every one submitted.
But the question I didn’t ask is what should your ratio of reviewed (refereed) to submitted be?