This episode of the freakonomics podcast, on parallels between customization in schools and radio, ends with a short story about an elderly man who is introduced to Pandora while he’s on his death bed. The upshot is that the people at Pandora were able to tell the family, based on the man’s official time of [...]
Josh is right. Between him and Tyler Cowen, I’m seriously rethinking my relatively low opinion of the Star Wars series. For some reason, I had never thought of Star Wars as being India- or Nigeria-like, which makes the general approach to language (i.e., simply assuming that everyone can at least comprehend at least two or [...]
I’ve been meaning to move away from Word, and toward LaTeX, for a while now. A few weeks ago, I was just starting a new manuscript, so I thought I might as well take the plunge. Someone (I don’t remember who) told me about LyX, a ‘front end’ for LaTeX that, in theory, should make [...]
Okay, so I’m a bit more than 3 years late watching the ‘reimagined’ Battlestar Galactica series, but I just finished watching the sixth episode of the first season – ‘Litmus’ – in which an independent tribunal is convened to investigate a cylon suicide bomber. The chief source of drama in the episode is the ongoing [...]
It looks like I’ll be (at least) a week late with the promised new content. Naturally enough, since conferences are about 75% socializing and/or schmoozing and about 75% attending talks to try to locate the cutting edge of (math) psych research, I came home sleep deprived (on a statistically related note, I was recently told [...]
I’m off to the 41st Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology tomorrow. I’ll be giving a talk on three different models of decision bounds in multidimensional signal detection theory (a.k.a., General Recognition Theory, a name I have come to prefer to multidimensional SDT; more on this later). I’ve decided to travel without my [...]