Information Processing
Dense nuclear matter: intuition fails!
I usually don't get into detailed physics exposition on this blog, but I thought I would make an exception with regard to the paper 0808.2987 which I recently wrote with my student David Reeb. (See earlier blog post here.) In the paper we conjectured that...
~ published: Wednesday at 08:35 ~ permalink
Dense nuclear matter
New paper! Probably too technical to go into here, but it relates to our current inability to directly simulate dense nuclear matter (QCD at nonzero baryon density). When the number of quarks and antiquarks is equal, the functional integral representation...
~ published: 08/24 at 13:24 ~ permalink
The cost of gold
What did all those medals cost China? Billions of dollars and the effort and sacrifice of countless young athletes, most of whom came nowhere near the Olympics, let alone a medal. There are an estimated 400k kids in specialized sports schools in China.WSJ...
~ published: 08/23 at 13:31 ~ permalink
Bolt is the greatest of all time
19.30 in the 200m, breaking Michael Johnson's record! Two world records, two gold medals. He led by 10m at the finish, and this time there was no show boating.I remember watching Johnson set the record in Atlanta (on television). I couldn't imagine when -...
~ published: 08/20 at 08:40 ~ permalink
Phelps, shmelps -- Bolt is the man
9.69 -- and he strolled across the finish line while beating his chest with no one even close! Bolt is 6 foot 5 and only 21 years old. I think Michael Johnson's record in the 200m is in jeopardy. Bolt is probably the greatest of all time, assuming he's cl...
~ published: 08/16 at 09:26 ~ permalink
Scifoo 2008 photos
Scifoo 2008 was tremendous fun. Thanks to all the organizers from Google, Nature and O'Reilly who made it happen. I guess I'm used to meetings with enormous concentrations of brainpower, but usually the attendees share similar backgrounds. At Scifoo the d...
~ published: 08/11 at 12:01 ~ permalink
Scifoo 2008
I'm off to the Googleplex tomorrow for Scifoo 2008, sponsored by Google, Nature and O'Reilly.Here's the Nature web page; maybe I'll show up in some of the photos. This one is from last year:With all the interesting people and talks (and Olympics going on ...
~ published: 08/07 at 16:06 ~ permalink
Strange days
William Bernstein at Efficient Frontier noted back in March that dysfunctional credit markets are exhibiting historically anomalous yield spreads. Aversion to credit risk is at almost irrational levels. Spreads are only rational if you think everything el...
~ published: 08/07 at 12:40 ~ permalink
The tidal wave from PRC
Will China's Beijing Olympics performance match their dominance of international science competitions? A reader sends the following information.Yes, yes, I know -- but are they creative? ;-)China took the gold medal in 2008 the 49th International Mathemat...
~ published: 08/05 at 19:46 ~ permalink
Judo in the WEC
Last night's 170 lb title fight had some of the most beautiful judo throws I've ever seen in MMA. We call those "high amplitude" throws: when the legs of the guy getting thrown describe a big arc. Miura ultimately lost to Condit, but the outcome...
~ published: 08/04 at 16:12 ~ permalink
LA Times: no bottom yet for housing
The article Should You Buy A House Now? runs with the figure below, which pretty much summarizes the situation. They should have printed these statistics repeatedly in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 together with patient explanations of what price to income...
~ published: 08/03 at 14:50 ~ permalink
Angry Youth: Chinese nationalism
The New Yorker has a great piece on the resurgent nationalism of young Chinese intellectuals. A couple of weeks later, I met Tang Jie at the gate of Fudan University, a top Chinese school, situated on a modern campus that radiates from a pair of thirty-st...
~ published: 08/01 at 22:30 ~ permalink
How Alpha becomes Beta
What will happen to the quants in August 2017?Andrew LoMIT and AlphaSimplexhttp://www.nyu.edu/sofie/slides/Lo.pptVia Barry Ritholtz....
~ published: 08/01 at 11:45 ~ permalink
WSJ compensation survey
The WSJ has posted some interesting compensation data which can be sorted by college and degree type. The data covers people less than 5 years out of school and more than 10 years out ("mid-career"), in all cases excluding those that earned adva...
~ published: 07/31 at 09:18 ~ permalink
Still no mark to market
Mortgage-backed assets with face value of $30.6B were just sold by Merrill for $6.7B.1) obviously, this reflects huge losses and perhaps forward looking expectations of a very high default rate on the underlying mortgages (can't tell unless I know what CD...
~ published: 07/28 at 17:14 ~ permalink
Skype backdoor
I knew it was too good to be true! As a for-profit company, Skype/EBay eventually had to cave in to spook pressure and allow for eavesdropping. In fact, the back door might have been in from the beginning.Heise online: According to reports, there may be a...
~ published: 07/26 at 13:12 ~ permalink
Asset-backed oversold? Paulson ready to get back in!
John Paulson made $15 billion for his fund ($3.7 billion for himself!) betting against subprime securities last year. Now Bloomberg reports that he's ready to get back in on the upside!I'm as dismayed as anyone else about taxpayer dollars going to bail ou...
~ published: 07/23 at 15:22 ~ permalink
The joy of gender imbalances on campus
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the social effects of gender imbalances. As we know, teenage girls are more likely than boys to have their acts together, hence make up a larger and larger percentage of those who attend college. I see this all...
~ published: 07/22 at 12:09 ~ permalink
Bay area housing market begins to crack
It's about time! See Calcuated Risk for further discussion. (Note this data covers some regions which are quite far from the bay itself.) Standard bubble wisdom: they last longer than you think is possible, then pop faster than anyone expects. I've been c...
~ published: 07/20 at 15:38 ~ permalink
Wonderlic fun
The Wonderlic is a simple intelligence test widely administered to job candidates, most famously by the NFL in its annual draft. Try this sample test and report your score in the comments :-) Note: actual test is 50 problems over 12 minutes, so ESPN is pr...
~ published: 07/18 at 14:35 ~ permalink
WSJ on income stagnation for college graduates
All examples given where incomes rose (often dramatically) are in the financial sector, and typically require relatively high IQ. The lawyer profiled below specializes in cat bonds!WSJ: For decades, the typical college graduate's wage rose well above infl...
~ published: 07/17 at 09:43 ~ permalink
War Nerd interview
If you're a fan of the War Nerd, check out this interview on Wisconsin Public Radio.On hypocrisy:"I don't live this double life, benefiting from the fact that my house is built on some other tribe's land and then pretending to regret that. I'll alway...
~ published: 07/16 at 21:54 ~ permalink
iPhone 3G
My childhood dreams of a communicator/tricorder gizmo have finally been fulfilled :-)Activation was a snap. I was lucky that one of the stores in town got a shipment of 20 black 16GB phones in this morning via FedEx. They had sold out completely over the ...
~ published: 07/14 at 18:12 ~ permalink
Foo camp 2008 coverage
Nice article and photos here (Techcrunch) and here. My sessions were "The information security industry is broken" with John Viega and Dan Kaminski, and "The technology of hand to hand fighting: MMA" :-)Techcrunch: Shangri La for geeks...
~ published: 07/14 at 13:29 ~ permalink
Beijing ballers
[I'm delayed at EUG waiting for my flight to SFO. Thank god for wifi...]Check out this awesome video about a Nike 3 on 3 basketball tournament held in the Forbidden City, called Bejing Young Masters....
~ published: 07/11 at 11:28 ~ permalink
Foo camp 2008
I'm off to foo camp tomorrow. I doubt I'll have much time to blog, although you never know......
~ published: 07/10 at 07:56 ~ permalink
Annals of psychometry: IQs of eminent scientists
I recently came across a 1950s study of eminent scientists by Harvard psychologist Anne Roe (The Making of a Scientist, published in 1952). Her study is by far the most systematic and sophisticated that I am aware of. She selected 64 eminent scientists --...
~ published: 07/07 at 10:02 ~ permalink
Notes of a Japanese soldier in the USSR
The drawings below are by Kiuchi Nobuo, a Japanese soldier captured in Manchuria, who survived capitivity in the USSR. He was transported all the way to a camp in Ukraine. His web site is fascinating -- the sketches depict beautiful Soviet women (officers...
~ published: 07/02 at 19:54 ~ permalink
Colorful quantum black holes at the LHC
New paper! What are the experimental signatures of a quantum black hole -- i.e., a black hole whose Schwarzschild radius is of order the length scale of quantum gravity? It's a long shot, but perhaps we'll see the remnants of tiny quantum black holes in t...
~ published: 06/30 at 22:34 ~ permalink
Fast times in Jamaica
Ever wonder how Jamaica, a country of 3 million people, can compete with the US and totally dominate all of Europe and Asia when it comes to the sprints? China has spent billions on a Soviet-style sports program that selects promising athletes at a young ...
~ published: 06/30 at 11:26 ~ permalink
Higher education and human capital II
I thought I'd also link to some interesting data from a paper by UT Austin economist Daniel Hamermesh, discussed here on the NYTimes Freakonomics blog. Their survey covered UT Austin alumni between the ages of 23 and 43, revealing enormous variations in a...
~ published: 06/29 at 14:15 ~ permalink
Higher education and human capital
What good is higher education? The conventional view is that, in addition to producing a well-informed citizenry, it builds important human capital and raises national productivity. But what is the evidence for these assertions? In policy debates we are t...
~ published: 06/28 at 08:51 ~ permalink
Women in the classroom
Interesting comments from Judith Warner of the Times, as she reports on a brain science workshop for journalists, held at MIT. The audience was more engaged (less intimidated?) by female lecturers. I find as well that women are less likely to try to get b...
~ published: 06/27 at 11:37 ~ permalink
What's your social status?
Calculate your social status using this tool from the NY Times. (Click on the components of class tab.) The inputs are occupation, education level, income and wealth. The tool was created to run with a week long series of articles on class in America, bac...
~ published: 06/26 at 17:41 ~ permalink
Brain drain: engineers shun defense industry
Guess where they're headed instead:NYTimes: At M.I.T., a 2007 survey showed that 28.7 percent of undergraduates were headed for work in finance, 13.7 in management consulting and just 7.5 percent in aerospace and defense. The top 10 employers included McK...
~ published: 06/24 at 20:52 ~ permalink
Darwin's savages
Somehow I don't think he and Jared Diamond share the same view of indigenous peoples. From The Descent of Man:The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly dist...
~ published: 06/20 at 17:56 ~ permalink
Parallel universes
This BBC documentary follows Mark Everett, the rock singer son of Hugh Everett III (the discoverer of many worlds quantum mechanics) as he seeks to understand his father's legacy. Unfortunately I can only find the snippet linked to above -- does anyone ha...
~ published: 06/20 at 14:40 ~ permalink
Asian-White IQ variance from PISA results
The vexing question of average differences between groups of humans has been the subject of scrutiny for a very long time. Differences in variance or standard deviation (SD) are less well understood, but have important implications as well. This point was...
~ published: 06/17 at 19:08 ~ permalink
Neal Stephenson on wiring the world
I'd thought I'd share a link to this somewhat obscure WIRED article written in 1996 by science fiction author Neal Stephenson, about the laying of transcontinental fiber. (Warning: the article is very, very long.) Ever wonder how, exactly, your packets ge...
~ published: 06/16 at 09:11 ~ permalink
Equities vs real estate
Which is the better long term investment, equities or real estate? The conventional (but not necessarily correct!) wisdom for a long time has been real estate, although this may be changing with the current housing bust. Note here I mean property as an in...
~ published: 06/13 at 10:18 ~ permalink
On Crick and Watson
Eminent biologist Erwin Chargaff was extremely bitter about not receiving a Nobel for his important work on DNA, which contributed to Crick and Watson's discovery of the double helix. I've been paging through his strange, but occasionally brilliant, memoi...
~ published: 06/11 at 20:12 ~ permalink
More (morons?) on the Singularity
Very, very middle brow discussion of the Singularity here at the NYTimes. Yes, I mean by Kurzweil as well as others:Kurzweil: For example, I point out that the complexity of the design of the brain is at least 100 million times simpler than it appears bec...
~ published: 06/10 at 13:17 ~ permalink
Confessions of a car dealer
Ever wonder what's behind the horrible experience of buying a car at a dealership? What the negotiation looks like from the other side?There's a great podcast up on Econtalk, in which Russ Roberts (econ prof at George Mason) interviews a sales manager at ...
~ published: 06/10 at 12:54 ~ permalink
To have, and have not
This NYTimes article starkly illustrates the gap between rich and poor in India. It depicts a gated high-rise community with its own water, power, security and health systems, surrounded by slums from which are drawn the 2.2 servants per affluent occupan...
~ published: 06/09 at 20:49 ~ permalink
MacKenzie on the credit crisis
Edinburgh sociology professor Donald MacKenzie wrote what I feel is the best history (so far) of modern finance and derivatives. In this article in the London Review of Books, he tackles the current credit crisis. Highly recommended.On Gaussian copula (co...
~ published: 06/08 at 18:33 ~ permalink
Obamanomics
If this article by John Cassidy in the New York Review of Books is any guide, Obama's grasp of economics may be orders of magnitude deeper than that of John McCain. A long exposure to the market-obsessed Chicago School has probably made him at least famil...
~ published: 06/08 at 08:48 ~ permalink
The Singularity, AI and IEEE
An entire special issue of IEEE Spectrum has been devoted to the Singularity, with contributions from people like Vernor Vinge, Rodney Brooks, Gordon Moore and Douglas Hofstader. I'm confident it won't happen in my lifetime. I don't even think a machine w...
~ published: 06/05 at 19:37 ~ permalink
IIT uber alles?
I recently came across this interesting web site maintained by Kamal Sinha, an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Bombay alum who has worked at Mitsubishi in Japan and in Silicon Valley. It has been widely claimed (e.g., CBS Sixty Minutes) that IITs are...
~ published: 06/02 at 20:00 ~ permalink
Back and jetlagged!
Sorry for the lack of posts -- I am digging out after returning from Paris.Here are some sports links I found of interest :-)Ulitmate fighting on CBS tonight -- first time on a national broadcast network! Kimbo Slice, one of the headliners, rose to fame t...
~ published: 05/31 at 16:59 ~ permalink