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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Should exams be open book?
Is an exam just a game played between students and professors, a game in which students try to guess what will be on the exam and professors try to outwit their students? If so, what is the optimal study strategy … Continue reading
One World Movement … R.I.P.
Today’s Times reports that Garry Davis, a modern-day Quijote and “dean of the One World movement” who renounced his US citizenship in Paris on 25 May 1948, has died. The moribund One World movement poses two puzzles: why do nation-states … Continue reading
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Tagged Garry Davis, One World Movement, Open Borders, Right to Travel
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Could Watson pass the Turing Test?
Watson, a super-computer built by IBM, is capable of answering questions posed in plain English, an in 2011, Watson competed on the quiz show “Jeopardy!” and won. Assuming the Turing Test is a valid test of artificial intelligence, prior probability asks, what is the … Continue reading
Moral risk
John Danaher, a lecturer at Keele University, has a great blog called Philosophical Disquisitions. He recently wrote a very helpful review of a thought-provoking paper titled “Abortion and Moral Risk” by Dan Moller, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland. Moller’s fascinating paper and … Continue reading
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Tagged Abortion, Dan Moller, John Danaher, Moral Error, Moral Risk, Philosophy
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Is Private Bradley Manning guilty of “aiding the enemy”?
The trial of Private Bradley Manning, who has been charged by the US Government with “aiding the enemy,” is coming to an end. Although the Manning case is far more important than the Trayvon Martin case, it has received much … Continue reading
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Tagged Aiding the Enemy, Bradley Manning, Iraq War, Truth, Wikileaks
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Forget tenure? (*)
Scientific American recently published this entertaining guest blog from a tenure insider, Ms Radhika Nagpal, a newly-tenured professor at Harvard. Among other things, she advises young scholars to create a “feelgood” email folder, stay away from your emails on the week-end, and … Continue reading
Cuba Libre
Today, July 26, is a national holiday in Cuba commemorating the failed attack by a young group of revolutionaries, led by Fidel and his brother Raul, on an army barracks in the city of Santiago de Cuba on 26 July 1953. Fidel and … Continue reading
F*ck the police?
What’s the probability that you won’t get a parking ticket or moving violation this year? This value might just depend on the population of your city, the number of police where you live and work, and the traffic-ticket quota assigned … Continue reading
A-Rod versus the Yankees
Looks like the Yankees’ management made a bad bet when the re-signed star third-baseman Alex Rodriguez several years ago … There are reports that A-Rod wants to return to the Yankees’ lineup this Friday (26 July) but that Brian Cashman, the team’s General … Continue reading
Nate Silver’s new gig
Farewell New York Times … Nate Silver is joining ESPN. Here is Margaret Sullivan, the Times’s “public editor” (whatever that means), contrasting Silver’s approach to politics to that of regular or mainstream journalism: “His entire probability-based way of looking at … Continue reading
