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# Posts

### October 23, 2014

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Re: Dick Lipton & Ken Regan • (1) • (2) Putting all thought of the Frankl Conjecture out of our minds for the moment, let’s return to the proposition in Example 1 and work through its differential analysis from scratch. Example … Continue reading →
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September 2014: Error Statistics Philosophy Blog Table of Contents  Compiled by Jean A. Miller (9/30) Letter from George (Barnard) (9/27) Should a “Fictionfactory” peepshow be barred from a festival on “Truth and Reality”? Diederik Stapel says no (rejected post) (9/23) G.A. Barnard: The Bayesian “catch-all” factor: probability vs likelihood (9/21) Statistical Theater of the Absurd: “Stat on a […]

### October 21, 2014

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I’ve become fascinated with Gregory Chaitin’s exploration of randomness in computing and his impulse to bring these observations to bear on physical, mathematical, and biological theories. His work inevitably addresses epistemological questions – what it means to know, to comprehend – and leads him to move (as he says in a recent paper) in the [...]
Editor's Pick

### October 19, 2014

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The following is from Nathan Schachtman’s legal blog, with various comments and added emphases (by me). He will try to reply to comments/queries. “Courts Can and Must Acknowledge Multiple Comparisons in Statistical Analyses” Nathan Schachtman, Esq., PC * October 14th, 2014 In excluding the proffered testimony of Dr. Anick Bérard, a Canadian perinatal epidemiologist in the […]

### October 18, 2014

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The focus of this conference is on different approaches to the foundations of mathematics. The interaction between set-theoretic and category-theoretic foundations has had significant philosophical impact, and represents a shift in attitudes towards the philosophy of mathematics. This conference will bring together leading scholars in these areas to showcase contemporary philosophical research on different approaches to the foundations of mathematics. To accomplish this, the conference has […]

### October 17, 2014

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Mathy stuff from the past week: 1)  Andrew Gelman on liberal and conservative statistics: http://andrewgelman.com/2014/10/10/conservative-liberal-comes-statistics/ and here, Gelman discusses the "statistical crisis in science" in latest edition of American Scientist: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.16259,y.2014,no.6,content.true,page.5,css.print/issue.aspx 2)  A short piece on

### October 15, 2014

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The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy invites applications for visiting fellowships for one to three months in the academic year 2015/16 (15 October 2015 to 15 February 2016 or 15 April to 15 July 2016) intended for advanced Ph.D. students (“Junior Fellowships") and postdocs or faculty (“Senior Fellowships"). Candidates should work in general philosophy of science, the philosophy of one of the special sciences, formal epistemology, or social epistemology and […]
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The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy seeks applications for a Doctoral Fellowship. The successful candidate will work on the project "The Evolution of Unpopular Norms and Bullying” (project summary below), which is funded by the German Research Council (DFG) and part of the DFG Priority Programme “New Frameworks of Rationality”. The fellowship is open for candidates with a masters degree in philosophy or a related social science. The funding is for three years, and the fellowship […]
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From Gelman’s blog: “In one of life’s horrible ironies, I wrote a paper “Why we (usually) don’t have to worry about multiple comparisons” but now I spend lots of time worrying about multiple comparisons” Posted by Andrew on 14 October 2014, 11:13 am Exhibit A: [2012] Why we (usually) don’t have to worry about multiple comparisons. […]

### October 14, 2014

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Recently treated myself to a few older books from Amazon, three of which I just want to pass along: 1)  Have mentioned Steven Strogatz's 2009 "The Calculus of Friendship" multiple times in the past (at Math-Frolic). I read a library copy quite some time ago, and always wanted my own hard copy... delighted to now have it. Recommended to teachers, students of all stripes. And if any of you think
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2014 Oct 14 Through the 1970s I gradually recovered from my early traumas with Fortran and with the aid of more symbol-friendly programming languages like Lisp and Pascal began to play around again with implementing simple forms of graphical calculi … Continue reading →
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2014 Oct 09 I will continue assembling an assortment of background materials and links to other resources that I think are useful in understanding Peirce’s notion of information and how it has the potential to extend and generalize both our … Continue reading →
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May 20-22, 2015 (Wednesday to Friday)Washington University in St. LouisKeynote speakers:Tom Kelly (Princeton), Jeff Horty (University of Maryland, College Park)The Formal Epistemology Workshop will be held in connection with the 2015 meeting of the St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR), which will take place immediately before, from May 17-19, 2015.There will be conference sessions all day on May 20 & 21, and in the morning on May 22.Contributors are invited to […]

### October 13, 2014

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2014 Oct 08 “Let us now return to the information.” To coin a phrase. This time around we come to Peirce’s notion of information in a critical and recurring passage that Frederik Stjernfelt takes as the next stepping stone from … Continue reading →

### October 12, 2014

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2014 Oct 08 Re: Resources On Peircean Information Theory • (1) • (2) In trying to remember why I started this thread, I traced it back to the point when various notions of information came up in Chapter 3.3 of … Continue reading →

### October 11, 2014

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We’ve just made our first visit to a concert at Saffron Hall, less than forty minutes from Cambridge. This is a multi-purpose hall newly built as part of Saffron Walden County High School and opened at the very end of … Continue reading →
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2014 Oct 06 Some portions of a paper Susan Awbrey and I presented at a Society for Applied Learning Technology conference in 1990 may be relevant at this juncture. Exploring Research Data Interactively • Theme One • A Program of … Continue reading →

### October 10, 2014

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With this post, I finally get back to the promised sequel to “Breaking the Law (A) and (B)” from a few weeks ago. You might wish to read that one first.* Richard Royall is a statistician1 who has had a deep impact on recent philosophy of statistics by giving a neat proposal that appears to […]
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ICYM any of these: 1)  Wonderful Atlantic piece on Steven Strogatz's introductory course for those who think they hate math: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/10/teaching-math-to-people-who-think-they-hate-it/381125/ 2)  For your statistics entree this week I need only offer up this smorgasbord from William Briggs that gives links to pieces he does, or does NOT, find
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2014 Oct 06 Peircers & Others, On the subject of Peirce’s laws of information — or the semiotic theory of information — here are just a few links that come to mind for possible future reference: Information = Comprehension × … Continue reading →

### October 09, 2014

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By Catarina Dutilh NovaesAs most kids (I suspect), my daughters sometimes play ‘upside down world’, especially when I ask them something to which they should say ‘yes’, but instead they say ‘no’ and immediately regret it: ‘Upside down world!’ The upside down world game basically functions as a truth-value flipping operator: if you say yes, you mean no, and if you say no, you mean yes.My younger daughter recently came across the upside down world paradox: if someone asks you […]

### October 08, 2014

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Recently, I became intrigued with the discussions of topology that I found among architects and historians of architecture. I saw a few familiar threads running through these discussions – like the emergence and self-organizing principles of biology, together with the view that mathematics was not, primarily, a tool but more a point of view. I [...]
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The original Statistics Views interview is here: “I would like to think of myself as a scientist, who happens largely to specialise in the use of statistics”– An interview with Sir David Cox FEATURES Author: Statistics Views Date: 24 Jan 2014 Copyright: Image appears courtesy of Sir David Cox Sir David Cox is arguably one […]

### October 07, 2014

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“This book is based on two premises: one cannot understand philosophy of mathematics with understanding mathematics and one cannot understand mathematics without doing mathematics.” Thus the blurb of Stephen Pollard’s recent book A Mathematical Prelude to the Philosophy of Mathematics (Springer, … Continue reading →

### October 05, 2014

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Oh My*. (“But I can succeed as a social philosopher”) The following is from Retraction Watch. “Curtain up on second act for Dutch fraudster Stapel: College teacher” Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social psychologist and admitted data fabricator — and owner of 54 retraction notices — is now teaching at a college in the town of Tilburg [i]. According to Omroep Brabant, […]

### October 04, 2014

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But round about the castle there began to grow a hedge of thorns, which every year became higher, and at last grew close up round the castle and all over it, so that there was nothing of it to be … Continue reading →

### October 03, 2014

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This week's grabs: 1)  Someone knows the whereabouts of reclusive mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, and obtained a photo of him for use in a Heidelberg Laureate collection: http://tinyurl.com/pbojgj8 https://twitter.com/logicians/status/516375161428123648/photo/1 2)  Interesting interview with Terry Tao from early September: https://docs.google.com/document/d/

### October 02, 2014

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Inspired by Brian Weatherson’s new blogroll of “active philosophy blogs” with substantive content (where, sob, Logic Matters doesn’t get a mention — I must try harder, obviously), I thought it was more than time to update the blogroll here. So alongside … Continue reading →

### October 01, 2014

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Congratulations to Faye Flam for finally getting her article published at the Science Times at the New York Times, “The odds, continually updated” after months of reworking and editing, interviewing and reinterviewing. I’m grateful too, that one remark from me remained. Seriously I am. A few comments: The Monty Hall example is simple probability not statistics, and finding that fisherman […]
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What’s the use of getting up in the morning? Never mind that now, I’m already up. Be constructive.  Try to focus on something positive. Okay, then, what’s the use of logic? You call that focused?  Be more specific! So what’s … Continue reading →