Do not eat this kit

I'm one of the laggards in returning my DNA kit. It's been sitting on my desk for months -- a miracle that my kids haven't ripped it apart by now. To volunteer, see here. It doesn't seem like a lot of saliva, but it took some work to reach the fill line. Ready to go! Unofficially, and off the record, some genotyping is going to happen in late summer. Nuff sa...

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Pikachu

My daughter made this puppet at school. Apparently it's a Pikachu -- a type of Pokemon :-)Here's the official Pikachu:...

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Prometheus

I'm really looking forward to this prequel (sort of) to Alien. It promises to reveal the secret of the space jockey :-) You'll also notice some Blade Runner influences -- Ridley Scott directed Alien, Blade Runner and now Prometheus.Trailer:Tease...

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Algo vs Algo and the Facebook IPO

Nanex research on algo vs algo activity during Facebook's IPO (via zerohedge).Do we need to impose a small random delay on all transactions, or possibly a small transaction tax? Did a Stuck Quote Prevent a Facebook Opening Day Pop?On 18-May-2012, within seconds of theopening in Facebook, we noticed an exceptional occurrence: Nasdaq quotes had higher bid prices than ask prices. This is called a cross market and occurs frequently between two different exchanges, but practically never on the same exchange (the buyer just needs to match up...

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The common app

 A short science fiction story by one of my collaborators :-)The common app Robert Scherrer   Nature 485, 540 (24 May 2012)  ... Vanessa set her drink down on the bar. “Eastern Southwest State's a perfectly good school, Anne. And if Larry doesn't get in, they have a northern branch campus that would certainly take him.” Vanessa glanced over at George. “Our Chester will be going to Harvard, just like his father.” “But what...

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Motor City airport

Sorry for the lack of posts -- I've been traveling. Here are some shots of the Westin Hotel inside the Detroit airport. My room had a great view of the runways, with amazing sound-proofing. I've visited Ann Arbor and East Lansing, but never been in the city of Detro...

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Quants at the SEC

Two years ago I was asked by someone at the Securities Exchange Commission to post a job ad for quant risk analysts. During some of my conversations with the people there, I raised the issue of high frequency trading, which wasn't yet on their radar! Hopefully it is now.This NYTimes article reports that things have improved a bit recently there. NYTimes: ... Embarrassed after missing the warning signs of the financial crisis and the Ponzi scheme of Bernard L. Madoff, the agency’s enforcement division has adopted several new — if somewhat unconventional...

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Five years of GWAS discovery

The figure and excerpt below are from Five Years of GWAS Discovery, Visscher, Brown, McCarthy, and Yang, American Journal of Human Genetics 90, 7–24, January 13, 2012. If you read the whole article, you'll see it's written in response to critics (both in the field and in the popular press) who are confused about whether genome wide association studies have been a success.Part of the perception problem is that some biologists had anticipated that...

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Eurodammerung

Kruggy joins the Euro doomers. If this plays out as below I'll be kicking myself in 6-12 months for not hedging more aggressively against it (but not like JPM ;-) ... NYTimes: Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like: 1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month. 2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany. 3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals. 3b....

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Modeling gluttony

Carson Chow in the NYTimes. Somehow I can't believe Carson didn't know what a calorie was since one of the MIT grad students he and I hung around with was always binge dieting and exercising to lose weight. The dieting guy is the only person I know who has done this: (academic science)  -->  (Wall St.)  -->  (academic science)  -->  (Wall St.)  -->  (academic science) (Notice the yo-yo pattern? ;-)NYTimes: You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity? In...

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Stanford and Silicon Valley

Ken Auletta writes in the New Yorker. I think Stanford is the only university with the long-run potential to compete with Harvard for global preeminence. NewYorker: ... If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the élites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley. When looking for engineers, Schmidt said, Google starts at Stanford. Five per cent of Google employees are Stanford graduates. The president of Stanford, John L. Hennessy, is a director of Google; he is also a director of Cisco Systems and a successful...

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Girls, Game and Sex

(Apologies to Jared Diamond ;-)If you haven't seen the new HBO show Girls, you're really missing out. Creator/writer/star Lena Dunham is a brilliant and very funny observer of 20-something hipster life (at least it seems that way to me; I'm too old to really know). If you watch the trailer above you might think that Girls is just another show about the life and romantic struggles of young women living in NYC, but the most interesting aspect is Dunham's take on male-female relations. It seems to me she understands Game:... Evolutionary psychologists...

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Entanglement and Decoherence

My preprint http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.1584v1.pdf (which appeared yesterday evening on arxiv) has already elicited a response from the brilliant and eccentric Lubos Motl. Lubos believes in the "subjective" interpretation of the quantum state, so objects to the idea of a unitarily-evolving wavefunction describing all degrees of freedom in the universe. (See here for more discussion.) I, on the other hand, am willing to consider the possibility that many worlds is correct. Here is how Lubos characterizes the disagreement: Buniy and Hsu also seem...

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Everything is Entangled

This paper will be available tomorrow at the link.http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.1584 Everything is Entangled Roman V. Buniy, Stephen D.H. Hsu We show that big bang cosmology implies a high degree of entanglement of particles in the universe. In fact, a typical particle is entangled with many particles far outside our horizon. However, the entanglement is spread nearly uniformly so that two randomly chosen particles are unlikely to be directly...

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The truth about venture capital

The excerpt below is from the Kauffman Foundation's report on venture investing. I'd like to see a similar report for hedge and private equity funds. If you believe in efficient markets and rational sophisticated investors (i.e., pension funds, endowments, the super wealthy), you have to explain why they continue to invest in underperforming asset classes and pay exorbitant fees. My explanation is that apes are not smart. Alpha is hard to detect and it's easier to believe a story (narrative sales pitch) than the numbers (esp. if the numbers are...

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NRC physics ranking by research output

I was pleasantly surprised by the recent NRC rankings of physics departments. In the research output ranking, UO did quite well. NRC uses a sophisticated statistical method that gives a range of possible outcomes. In the list below I would say MIT and Stanford deserve higher ratings, and UO is (alas) ranked higher than it deserves. Once you get beyond the top 10 or so physics departments, there are many good programs across the country, and it's...

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Exceptional Cognitive Ability: The Phenotype

Participants in the previous discussion thread may be interested in David Lubinski's paper Exceptional Cognitive Ability: The Phenotype. The individuals in this study were identified through gifted programs, and tested at the top 1% level (i.e., for their age) on at least one section (M,V) of the SAT, administered by age 13. The highest group scored above the 1 in 10,000 level. The longitudinal study reveals interesting differences in life outcomes...

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Jensen on g and genius

I found the excerpt below in the comments here. Mega Questions for Renowned Psychologist Dr._Arthur R. Jensen - Interview by Christopher Michael Langan and Dr. Gina LoSasso and members of the Mega Foundation, Mega Society East and Ultranet Question #1: Christopher Langan for the Mega Foundation: It is reported that one of this century’s greatest physicists, Nobelist Richard Feynman, had an IQ of 125 or so. Yet, a careful reading of his work reveals amazing powers of concentration and analysis…powers of thought far in excess of those...

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Theory and experiment

From the autobiography Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist. See also Alvarez quotes, and related posts. Chapter 4: I learned about the discovery of nuclear fission in the Berkeley campus barbershop one morning in late January 1939, while my hair was being cut. Buried on an inside page of the Chronicle was a story from Washington reporting Bohr's announcement that German chemists had split the uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons. I stopped the barber in mid-snip and ran all the way to the Rad Lab to spread the word. The first person...

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Risk taking and innovation: lawyers and art history majors

At least the incentives and cultural support for risk taking are better in the US than in other countries. NYTimes ... In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them. A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success....

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