Archive for the ‘ Math ’ Category
Shortly after the Giants fantastic defeat of the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI (I was a little disappointed that Eli, Coughlin and the Vince Lombardi Trophy all got off the parade route early and the views of City Hall were obstructed by construction trailers, but Steve Weatherford was awesome as always) a friend asked me [ READ MORE ]
A new study, reported in the New York Times, tracked population movements in post-earthquake Haiti using cell phone data. The article grabbed my attention because one of the authors, Richard Garfield (whom I have done numerous projects with and who has his own Wikipedia entry!), had told me about this very study just a few [ READ MORE ]
The FBI has put out a public request for help cracking a code. The code above was found in the pants of a murder victim over 10 years ago. Despite some of the best code breakers in the world give it a shot, they have not been able to break the code. I wonder if [ READ MORE ]
As mentioned earlier, yesterday was Pi Day so a bunch of statisticians and other such nerds celebrated at the new(ish) Artichoke Basille near the High Line. We had three pies: the signature Artichoke, the Margherita and the Anchovy, which was delicious but only some of us ate. And of course we had our custom cake [ READ MORE ]
Happy Pi Day everybody! I’ll be out celebrating with the rest of the NYC Data Mafia eating pizza and devouring the above Pi Cake, custom baked by Chrissie Cook. Today is also Albert Einstein’s birthday so there are plenty of reasons to have fun. The cake below was my first ever Pi Cake in what is sure [ READ MORE ]
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that even with all the concern around gerrymandering that in reality the upcoming redistricting probably won’t have much affect on upcoming elections. Gary King is mentioned as having written a paper “that helped demonstrate the relative impotence of partisan redistricting” yet “he favors the efforts to create a statistical [ READ MORE ]
Temple professor John Allen Paulos has an article in the New York Times that got Slashdotted today suggesting people be wary of all the metrics that fill our daily lives. His first contention is whether assumptions about categorization are correct. This is certainly important, but hopefully qualified statisticians, social scientists, doctors, etc. . .are making these decisions [ READ MORE ]
Steven Strogatz is writing a column for the New York Times where he discusses math, starting with basic concepts and working his way up to the complex and cerebral. I, and a lot of people, love his column. However, last week’s piece on probability was not received so well by the statistics community., particularly on Andy [ READ MORE ]
I don’t mean to shamelessly self-promote here, but I wanted to note that the Slice story on my pizza paper (pdf) has also been picked up by NBC New York’s food blog, Feast, and by Revolution Computing’s blog. For people who don’t know, Revolution Computing optimizes R, the language used by a large number of statisticians for [ READ MORE ]
This article from the New York Times about grilock in New York is from two nights ago, but I think it’s worth a glance. The article is a great look at how slowly cars move. I especially like the line, “Weekday traffic in the district moved at an average of 9.5 miles per hour — about [ READ MORE ]