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May 18, 2013

9:57 PM | MathsJam Conference 2013 – registration now open

As well as being an excellent monthly pub-based meeting, MathsJam also has an annual conference, which takes place every November. Registration is now open for the 2013 conference, which takes place on 2nd and 3rd November. MathsJam is an opportunity for like-minded self-confessed maths enthusiasts to get together in a pub and share stuff they like.... Read more »

5:23 PM | All Squared, Number 6: Favourite maths books (part 2)

This number of the All Squared podcast contains the final third of our interview with the inestimable David Singmaster, and then a bit from CP about his favourite book, “A treatise on practical arithmetic, with book-keeping by single entry“, by William Tinwell. The first part of the interview, and plenty of links to go with... Read more »

2:18 PM | A Question of Journalistic Ethics

In Toronto, we have a mayor whom every right-thinking person abhors, and every Right-thinking person adores. But putting his policies to one side—and why would most readers of this blog really care about them?—Rob Ford has raised some questions of personal conduct recently, including alleged: grope of an opposing (female)...

1:05 PM | something sensible on Thomas Nagel

I find the following to be a good methodological principle. If your view of the world commits you to the proposition that the dominant philosophers between (and including) Kant and Hegel were naive and unsophisticated, then YOUR ARE DOING IT WRONG. This to me is the most irritating thing about...

1:00 PM | At last a candidate Maureen Dowd can support

Jonathan Chait has a good column about President Obama's recent comments about "going Bulworth," an allusion to the 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a politician who as a result of a drunken but honest rant finds his career reinvigorated.The trouble is that these [frank] answers, while true, don’t actually help Obama. Any political scientist will tell you that the scope for possible legislation in this term is very narrow: The median House member is a very conservative Republican who represents [â€¦]

5:00 AM | 18 Maggio 1892 – Buon Compleanno, Bertrand!

C’è un aspetto triste nell’avanzare della primavera: la scomparsa del cielo notturno invernale. Almeno per quelli che vivono nella zona temperata boreale, il cielo d’inverno riserva spettacoli migliori di quanto riescano a fare le notti della bella stagione. Sirio brilla d’un azzurro irritante nel Cane Maggiore e, subito sopra di lei, Orione trionfa. Dire che [...]

3:10 AM | Tough Math of Victim Funds

Kenneth Feinberg explains his approach to deciding how to distribute funds for victims of tragedies such as the Boston Marathon bombings.

May 17, 2013

8:31 PM | New Audit Allegations Show Flawed Statistical Thinking

Some conservatives are alleging that the I.R.S. targeted not just conservative groups, but also individual conservative taxpayers. But a handful of anecdotal data points are not worth very much in a country of 300 million people.

4:15 PM | Douglas Hofstadter Is and Writes Well

What a pleasure to have him back! Just got my copy of Surfaces and Essences (which he wrote with Emmanuel Sander), which promises to be a fascinating read. (Sorry for the irritating image.) The title of this post is a zeugma—remember Ryle's "She came home in tears and a sedan...

4:00 PM | MoreOrLess: Angelina Jolie’s 87% cancer risk 17 May 2013

As Angelina Jolie announces that an 87% cancer risk has prompted her to have a double mastectomy, Tim Harford assesses the probabilities associated with the disease. Plus, has the UK been hit by a Romanian crime wave? Also in the programme: Education Secretary Michael Gove’s use of PR surveys; and why the UK’s poor growth has not had led to the high levels of unemployment that economists would expect.

3:30 PM | How does a paper get published without the alleged corresponding author knowing?

The Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering ran a retraction yesterday that’s left us scratching our heads. The paper, “Wettability-gradient-driven micropump for transporting discrete liquid drops,” was published on February 8 of this year. For a paper published in a journal run by the Institute of Physics, the retraction notice reads like a mix of Hindenburg […]

2:30 PM | Update: Microbiologists face two more retractions for Northern blot problems

We have an update on a case we reported last week involving four papers in two different journals. The Journal of Bacteriology retracted two papers by Carlos Barreiro and colleagues, in notices that referred to the fact that …identical bands for the 16S rRNA probe controls in the Northern blots were reported to correspond to […]

1:44 PM | Ben at the micro frontier

Ben Allanach is a theoretical physicist who has worked at CERN and is interested in something called supersymmetry, which predicts particles that could be dark matter and might be produced in the collisions at CERN. Watch Ben explain it all in this TEDx lecture. Ben Allanach is one of our favourite theoretical physicists. He is a professor at the University of Cambridge who has [â€¦]

1:30 PM | Liver study a twin, gets retracted

The liver is the only internal organ that can regenerate. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Egyptian researchers tried to publish the same paper about liver ischemia twice in different journals. They succeeded — for a little while, at least. The Journal of Molecular Histology is retracting the second of the articles to appear. […]

1:30 PM | "America’s Most Profitable Products"

I always worry about the methodology when I see one of these lists, but with that caveat, I still found this interesting. What especially caught my eye was how much brand drives the success of these products. Apple charges a significant premium for the logo, but it's the next three that really demonstrate the value of marketing.With Apple, it's difficult to say how much success can be attributed to brand and how much is due to superior quality (they do make good stuff) and patents. With [â€¦]

11:12 AM | Researching the unknown

Science is much stranger than fiction. It suggests that our Universe may just be one of infinitely many which constantly pop in and out of existence like bubbles in a bubble bath. There may be many more dimensions that the three we can see and our Universe is riddled with black holes at whose centres time and space tear themselves apart. Intrigued? This ongoing project will bring you the latest [â€¦]

9:34 AM | Brazilian music on Fridays: 'O malandro' (Mack the Knife)

I’m in Munich at the moment visiting the MCMP, but heading back home tonight after an European tour which included London, Prague and Munich. I like to be inspired by the places I visit for my BMoF selection (like last week with a London-inspired post), so following this principle, I...

8:56 AM | Affinity cons and the looting phase in education

Affinity cons work in large part because when people see someone with similar background and cultural signifiers, they assume other similarities: common goals, values, approaches.Movement reformers, particularly those who came in through Teach for America (and that's something you see a lot) often get sucked in by something similar. They look at someone like Michelle Rhee and the rhetoric and the resume feel familiar. They see something they recognize in the upper-middle class upbringing [â€¦]

8:30 AM | La valeur de la science

La Valeur de la Science d'Henri Poincaré a été publié chez Flammarion dans la collection « Bibliothèque de Philosophie scientifique » de Gustave Le Bon. Il s'agit d'un recueil d'articles et de préfaces, tout comme La Science et l'Hypothèse (1902). On trouvera ci-dessous les onze chapitres de ce livre, enregistrés en podcast au cours de l'année 2012. On trouve [http://www.univ-nancy2.fr/poincare/bhp/hp1905vs/index.xml] le texte en version électronique. On trouve ici ou là des copies [â€¦]

7:00 AM | 325 anni, non uno di meno

Somiglianze e differenze tra due sentenze per il terremoto dell'Aquila [Continua]

6:33 AM | 2² number theory tricks

Here are some nice number facts and tricks you can try out on your friends. They will work without understanding how, but with a little investigation you should be able to figure out how each one works. 1. All four-digit palindromic numbers are divisible by 11. This is quite easy and nice to prove. Start... Read more »

5:00 AM | La conjecture de Goldbach pour les nombres impairs

En 1742, Christian Goldbach conjecturait, dans une lettre à Leonhard Euler, que tout nombre entier est somme d'au plus trois nombres premiers. Harald Helfgott vient de prouver que c'est vrai pour les nombres impairs. - Billets des habitués

5:00 AM | Science et Méthode

Science et méthode d'Henri Poincaré, publié pour la première fois en 1908 chez Flammarion dans la collection « Bibliothèque de Philosophie scientifique » de Gustave Le Bon, est un recueil d'articles et de préfaces. On trouvera ci-dessous les quinze chapitres de ce livre, enregistrés en podcast au cours de l'année 2012. On trouve ici le texte en version électronique. On trouve ici ou là des copies électroniques d'éditions anciennes. Mais la meilleure solution est bien sûr [â€¦]

5:00 AM | La carte du marchand

Gerhard Kremer publia en 1569 la carte du monde qui a rendu son nom célèbre... - Mathématiques de la Planète Terre / Mathématiques de la planète Terre, Mathématique de la planète Terre, carrousel

May 16, 2013

9:40 PM | This Week in Number Theory

By now you’ve probably heard the announcements of two big results in number theory: Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire proved that there are infinitely many pairs of primes whose differences are under 70 million, and Harald Helfgott … Continue reading →

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