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Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Musical mortality
Check out this fascinating actuarial analysis of the life expectancy of popular musicians (broken down by musical genre) prepared by Dianna Theadora Kenny, a professor of music and psychology at the University of Sydney. According to Prof. Kenny, accidents are … Continue reading
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“Choking and Excelling at the Free Throw Line”
That is the title of this excellent empirical study by Darrell Worthy, Arthur Markman, and Todd Maddox. In case you’re wondering, their data set was comprehensive: it consisted of all free throws attempted during the last minute of all regular-season … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Probability, Sports
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Starfleet mafia?
Although we haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie yet (Star Trek Beyond), in today’s post we want to pose the following question about the fictional world of Star Trek: who pays for Starfleet? According to Wikipedia, “Starfleet is a … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Law, Science Fiction
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Strategic dating
Roy Lugasi and Hod Gerlitz co-founded a new dating app called Weepo that allows users to monitor the male-to-female ratio at a bar or nightclub. According to this fascinating report by James Covert, writing for the New York Post, “The … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Culture, Economics, Web/Tech
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Contagion theory of violence
Check out this provocative open-access paper titled Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings (Towers, et al., 2015). Here is an extended excerpt (footnotes omitted): “We fit a mathematical contagion model to the data sets, with model terms that take … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Mathematics, Probability
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Markets, the regulation of data, and the future of low-wage work
Companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber have created new markets and improved our lives by reducing search costs, but at the same time, these firms collect massive amounts of data from their users. Who owns this data, and what legal … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Law, Web/Tech
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prior probability 