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Category Archives: Current Affairs
Is Puerto Rico underpopulated?
Here is a real-time example of people “voting with their feet.” We lived in Puerto Rico from 1993 and 2009, and we can tell you that Puerto Ricans are severely overtaxed by their government, regardless of which political party is … Continue reading
Je suis Bruxelles
Posted in Current Affairs
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Classroom primary
We teach a large business law and ethics lecture (n = 750) at a research university in Central Florida, and on Monday (3.14), we conducted an informal poll (via REEF polling) to see which candidates on the Republican side our students … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Politics
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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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Bud Light for President?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAP7JGnwT1c Cheers! This lighthearted beer ad actually teaches an important lesson regarding statutory and constitutional interpretation–a fundamental lesson often lost on naive “originalists” or textualist legal scholars: a word or term of art like “party” (or “speech,” “arms,” “natural born,” … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Current Affairs, Language, Law
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Is Senator Cruz a “natural born citizen”?
(P1) Major premise: Article II of the U.S. Constitution categorically states: “No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President” (emphasis added). This proposition is thus our “major premise” or general principle of … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Language, Law
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Non-random coin toss?
How to not flip a coin What conditions must a coin toss satisfy in order for it to be truly “random,” and why isn’t this particular coin toss a “random” one … or is it? Perhaps another way of approaching … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Probability
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Tinder trailer
Questions about Tinder: How does the “Super Like” function described in the video above overcome or solve the problem of cheap talk or false signals? Also, does Tinder improve or reduce the overall level of “welfare” or “utility”–as economists define … Continue reading
Posted in Cheating, Cooperation, Culture, Current Affairs
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prior probability 