Creative Commons
Blogs I Follow
Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Final results of the 2015 New Zealand flag referendum
The New Zealand flag referendum was decided using an instant run-off voting procedure. Under this system of preference voting, the voters rank the choices in order of preferred alternatives. Notice how voting occurs over several stages or rounds and how the choice … Continue reading
Tree time …
We converted our traditional Christmas tree into an “NFL playoffs tree” after Three Kings’ Day (we completed this makeover while the family was sleeping). Now that the Super Bowl is done, my wife wants me to take down our tree. … Continue reading
A Bayesian Model of “Making a Murderer”
In our previous posts (here and here), we revisited two of our research papers–one on range voting; the other on the Turing Test–and created alternate legal universes in which jury trials were decided using a range voting procedure or some … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Justice, Law
Leave a comment
The Turing Test and “Making a Murderer”
In our previous blog post, we applied the concept of “range voting” to jury trials. Today, we will discuss our 2012 paper “The Turing Test and the Legal Process” (published in volume 21 of the journal of Information & Communication Technology … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Law, Probability
1 Comment
Range Voting and “Making a Murderer”
Hey, what’s up? For our part, we’ve just finished watching season 1 of the amazing Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer, which shows beyond a reasonable doubt how one criminal suspect, Steven Avery, was framed (not once, but twice) by … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Law, Voting
2 Comments
“Syllabus of the month”
That is a new feature from the Open Syllabus Project, an online database of university syllabi. (What a great idea, by the way!) Last month’s featured syllabus, which is just one page long (!!!), is for Professor Kieran Healy’s graduate-level course “Social Theory Through Complaining.” (Dr Healy teaches … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
4 Comments
Different surfaces have different n-color map theorems
Via Cliff Pickover’s entertaining and educational Twitter timeline, we discovered this beautiful essay by Evelyn Lamb, a promising postdoc at the University of Utah. Dr Lamb describes the fascinating and paradoxical topology of a strange surface–the Möbius strip–a surface with … Continue reading
Posted in Mathematics
Leave a comment
Randomness and the Iowa Caucus
For reasons that are obscure to us, the State of Iowa holds the first presidential primary in the nation every four years. (Shouldn’t the first presidential primary vote be allocated at random to a different State every four years?) This … Continue reading
Posted in Politics, Probability
Leave a comment
prior probability 