Harvard faculty Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are two of the most respected and influential academic economists active today.
On April 16, 2013, doctoral student Thomas Herndon and professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, released the results of their analysis of two 2010 papers by Reinhard and Rogoff, papers that also provided much of the grist for their 2011 best seller Next Time Is Different. The Reinhart-Rogoff papers had analyzed economic growth rates spanning nearly two centuries, in numerous different nations, and concluded that when the ratio of
Continue reading Reliability, reproducibility and the Reinhart-Rogoff error
E.O. Wilson is truly one of the great scientists of our time. In addition to his very extensive portfolio of important and painstaking academic publications, he has won two Pulitzer prizes for general nonfiction. Wilson has fearlessly ventured into arenas such as sociobiology (applications of evolutionary biology to social behavior) and the boundary between religion and science, areas where others often fear to tread.
But Wilson is deeply mistaken when he claims that great scientific discoveries emerge from ideas without needing much training in mathematics.
For many young people who aspire to be scientists, the great bugbear is mathematics. Without
Continue reading Why E.O. Wilson is wrong
Ever since the dawn of mathematics (e.g., in ancient Greece, c. 250 BC) and decimal computation (e.g., in India, c. 200 AD), people have wondered whether the digits of the number we call pi (= 3.1415926535…) are “random.” Answering, or at least studying this question spurred mathematicians from Archimedes, who rigorously showed 223/71 < pi <22/7, and Aryabhata, who computed pi to 4 decimal digits in 499 AD, to Shanks, who computed 707 digits in 1874 (alas, only 527 were correct; the error was only found after WW2), and on through the computer age to the present day. The current
Continue reading Are the digits of pi random?
One of the present bloggers was mentioned in a San Jose Mercury News article on the usage of supercomputers in the financial world.
The article emphasizes that the massive flow of information in financial markets is not a particularly daunting challenge for modern high-performance computer systems, which can perform quadrillions of operations per second.
Some recent research has identified some volatility measures that, in retrospect, could have waved a “yellow flag” warning alerting market regulators of an incipient “flash crash,” such as the event that occurred on 6 May 2010, when the U.S. stock market plunged 9% overall over
Continue reading Supercomputers can predict stock market volatility
In a Science column, Ed Lazowska, a well-known University of Washington computer scientist, discusses the future career prospects for students studying computer science. Here are a few excerpts:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that two-thirds of all available jobs in all fields of science and engineering during this decade—in the mathematical sciences, the physical sciences, the life sciences, engineering, and the social sciences—will be in computer science. …
There was an undergraduate enrollment downturn in the past decade. This was a side effect of the tech downturn. Simultaneously, there was a graduate enrollment upturn — great undergraduates chose
Continue reading Bright prospects for careers in computing
DNA evidence in forensics
On March 18, 2013, a Florida man was found guilty of burglary and criminal damage to property, in an attempt to steal an ATM machine from a store. But the burglar had dropped his hat, and subsequent analysis of DNA in the hat matched that of a suspect. Based on this evidence, the jury quickly reached a guilty verdict.
DNA evidence works the other way too. On January 30, 2013, a former Akron, Ohio police captain, who had been convicted of murdering his wife in 1997, was cleared of the crime and released from prison, because
Continue reading Criminology, sports drug testing and evolution
The saga of Hiroo Onoda
March 2013 is the 39th anniversary of a curious milestone of 20th century military history: On March 9, 1974, nearly 29 years after World War II supposedly ended with the Japanese surrender, Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese holdout, turned over his sword and rifle to his commanding officer and ceased his para-military campaign on Lubang Island in the Philippine Islands.
Onoda had landed on Lubang Island in December 1944, where he was given orders to do all that he could to disrupt Allied activities on the island, but under no circumstances was he to surrender
Continue reading The last Japanese WWII holdout: A lesson for creationists
|
|