Robert Wald reviews the 2010 book Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory, and Reality, based on meetings at Oxford and at the Perimeter Institute, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Everett's paper.A central issue in the Everett interpretation is the status of the `Born rule', which asserts that, for state ψ, the probability of obtaining a particular outcome of a measurement is ||Pψ||2, where P is the projection operator onto the eigensubspace associated with the measurement outcome. In traditional interpretations, the Born rule is simply postulated...
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Sunday, 29 January 2012
Megan McCardle on her 10 year reunion at Chicago's Booth School of Business.The Atlantic: ... For my summer 2000 internship at Merrill Lynch, I chose the technology-banking group despite having watched the March 2000 NASDAQ crash from the lobby of Merrill’s auditorium, where we were supposed to be undergoing orientation. Ignoring the helpless, angry flapping of the HR staff, a bunch of us spent the afternoon telling nervous jokes and watching the eerie flicker that billions of dollars give off when they evaporate on live TV.Predictably, the technology-banking...
Thursday, 26 January 2012
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
I found this econtalk podcast very interesting. The comments are also good.We Americans are very lucky to have inherited a high trust society from our forebears. How much longer will it last?Econtalk: David Rose of the University of Missouri, St. Louis and the author of The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the book and the role morality plays in prosperity. Rose argues that morality plays a crucial role in prosperity and economic development. Knowing that the people you trade with have a principled...
Friday, 20 January 2012
Good manufacturing jobs that remain in the US will require significant skills, such as the ability to run capital intensive equipment. Unfortunately, most of the population lacks the requisite abilities. This Atlantic article does a good job of contrasting the future prospects of two young workers at a plant that makes fuel injectors. What percentage of the US manufacturing workforce is capable of doing Luke's job, even after (free) retraining?Making It in AmericaIn the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about...
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Gracie Breakdown of UFC 142, leading off with the Rousimar Palhares heel hook finish.Back in the day when grappling and BJJ were still fringe activities, I often had to travel to strange clubs to find training. It was intimidating to visit a new school where I didn't know anyone, even more so to spar with people who could easily injure me. The one submission I was most afraid of was the heel hook. The two serious injuries I sustained in years of training were from a straight armbar (juji gatame) and a heel hook, which sprained the tendons around...
Monday, 16 January 2012
I previously recommended the podcast New Books in History, hosted by University of Iowa historian Marshall Poe. I noticed recently that the format has been adopted by professor podcasters in other fields, including Sociology, Philosophy, Policy Studies, Military History, etc. For example, here are the podcasts from New Books in East Asian Studies.I found the interview with Michael Keevak on his recent book (below) quite interesting. It is amusing that Native Americans are "red", whereas E. Asians are "yellow". Keevak notes that European travelers...
Sunday, 15 January 2012
From internet sensation to SNL last night. Call me crazy, but Video Games is a great song and could become part of the indie pop canon -- check out all the covers on YouTube that have appeared just in the last few months. One critic writes: ... the music video "flits between surrendering to romance and depression, moving with the elegant wastefulness of the kind of day drunk that's a true privilege of the beautiful, idle clas...
Friday, 13 January 2012
This very interesting study had access to comprehensive data ranging from Duke admissions office evaluations of applicants, to students' intended majors and subsequent shifts, to grades awarded and student composition (including abilities!) for each course offered at Duke. Interesting factoid: 40% of fathers of White students at Duke have doctorates.For similar studies (although not emphasizing ethnicity) using U Oregon data, see Data mining the University , Psychometric thresholds for physics and mathematics.What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis...
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Watch The Progress of Genetics From the 1930s to Today - Ep. 514 on PBS. See more from University Place.Excellent colloquium by James Crow (who passed away recently) emphasizing the importance and ubiquity of additive genetic variance. See earlier post -- the paper linked there covers similar material.@28 min, Nagylaki came to population genetics after doing his PhD under Feynman at Caltech! Here is his tour de force result, mentioned by Crow in the talk. Interested physicists, see also he...
Monday, 9 January 2012
The mystery of missing heritability: Genetic interactions create phantom heritabilityOr Zuk, Eliana Hechter, Shamil R. Sunyaev, and Eric S. LanderHuman genetics has been haunted by the mystery of “missing heritability” of common traits. Although studies have discovered >1,200 variants associated with common diseases and traits, these variants typically appear to explain only a minority of the heritability. The proportion of heritability explained...
Thursday, 5 January 2012
The NYTimes ran a nice profile of Broad Institute director Eric Lander a few days ago.Interestingly, the article emphasizes several factors aside from his formidable intellect that are responsible for his success as a scientist: curiosity, openness, extraversion, ambition, drive ...NYTimes: ... He was so good that he was chosen for the American team in the 1974 Mathematics Olympiad. To prepare, the team spent a summer training at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.This was the first time the United States had entered the competition, and...
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
A colleague recommended this beautifully written Quora answer concerning the nature of mathematical thinking. I recommend reading it in its entirety.The particularly "abstract" or "technical" parts of many other subjects seem quite accessible because they boil down to maths you already know. You generally feel confident about your ability to learn most quantitative ideas and techniques. A theoretical physicist friend likes to say, only partly in jest, that there should be books titled "______ for Mathematicians", where _____ is something generally...
Sunday, 1 January 2012
This recent paper gives a sense of the current state of the art in quantitative genetics. Height is one of the easiest phenotypes to measure, so almost every medical (disease) GWAS provides some additional data -- IIRC, about 200k pheno/geno-type pairs are available for analysis. With a few hundred associated variants detected (depending on how one defines the discovery threshold), one can start to construct predictors like the Weighted Allele Score...
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