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Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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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
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Bargaining and Betrayal in Breaking Bad
Last fall, we posted the abstract to our work-in-progress titled “Breaking Bad and the Natural Law Tradition.” Originally, we were going to write about the conflict between meth kingpin Walter White (alias Heisenberg) and DEA agent Hank Schrader from a … Continue reading
An offer he could not refuse (Lessons 3 & 4)
Because our business law class meets only once per week, we are combining Lessons 3 & 4 into a single lecture. As it happens, both business law lessons have something important in common: contracts. In the film “The Social Network” … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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prior probability 