This story by Clive Thompson from the NY Times Magazine examines networks and the signals that travel over them–only the network and the signals aren’t made of wires and electric impulses, the network is the social network of friends and relations and the signals are behaviors. A number of scientists have been using the mathematics of networks to analyze the impact that the behaviors of peoples’ friends and relations have on their own behaviors, and how certain behaviors sometimes get “transmited” through the network in ways startlingly like more physical networks. This article (free registration required) describes some of those scientists and their findings.
Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009
Wired magazine presents the best science visualization videos of 2009:
The Department of Energy honored 10 of this year’s best scientific visualizations with its annual SciDAC Vis Night awards, at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference (SciDAC) in June. Researchers submitted visualizations to the contest, and program participants voted on the best of the best. From earthquakes to jet flames, this gallery of videos and images show how beautiful (and descriptive) visual data can be.
All of these videos are of course essentially illustrations of mathematical models, models that are so complex that just making the individual frames of the videos requires heavy-duty mathematics and heavy-duty computational power.
Credit Card Use Is Ripe for Data Mining
Credit card companies are increasingly using statistical models to guess which of their customers are most likely to default, to not care about rate increases, to incur late fees, and things like that. This radio segment, which appeared on the daily “Marketplace” segment of American Public Radio, describes some of the issues surrounding the practice.
Math Backs Limited Profiling in Airport Screening
William Press, a computational biologist and computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, applied a statistical model for studying rare events to the problem of determining how often to select people for searches in airport screenings. This NY Times article (free registration required) by Sandra Blakeslee describes his findings.
For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics
This title of this Aug. 5, 2009 NY Times article (free registration required) says it all. I’ll include on more snippet from the article by Steve Lohr:
Statisticians … are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool. “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”
Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs
This Jan 26, 2009 Wall Street Journal article lists the best (and worst) 20 jobs in America for the previous year, as determined by Les Krantz, the author of the annual “Jobs Rated Almanac.” Krantz evaluates jobs based on environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. The best job? Mathematician! Moreover, 7 out of the top 10 are math or computer science related.
Of the Algorithms, by the Algorithms, for the Algorithms
This article in Slate describes the efforts of mathematicians to detect and combat gerrymandering. (Gerrymandering is a political trick whereby a political party in power restructures the voting districts in such a way that the party is extremely likely to remain in power.) The problem turns out to be pretty difficult, even from the mathematical standpoint of just figuring out what an “unnatural looking” district looks like.
Calculating the Geography of Crime
This article from Science News describes the work of Mike O’Leary, a mathematician at Towson University, in Maryland. O’Leary is developing a mathematical model that attempts to take information about a particular crime, information about crimes committed in that locale, and geographical information, to come up with likely locations where the crime’s perpetrator might live.
The Kidney Connection: Math Makes a Match
This TIME magazine article describes a literal marriage between math and medicine: the couple made up of transplant surgeon Dory Segev and his mathematician wife Sommer Gentry. Together, Segev and Gentry developed a new way to more efficiently match kidney donors with the more than 60,000 Americans awaiting transplants. Gentry was also interviewed by various radio, TV, and newspaper outlets.
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart
This 2008 book by Ian Ayres landed on the NY Times business bestseller list. Ayers, who has a Ph.D. in economics, is a professor at both the law and management schools at Yale University. Super Crunchers describes the many ways in which two statistical tools—random sampling and regression—are changing the ways in which corporations and government are doing business.
