prior probability

The Rev Thomas Bayes died on this day (17 April) in 1761. His tomb is pictured below. While you’re here, check out this biography of Bayes’s life and his major contributions to probability theory. Hat tip: @mathshistory. What will you be remembered for?

This guy! Trust us, this hilarious video is worth 9 minutes of your time. (File under “Best TED Talk ever.”)

Although the people of Puerto Rico have been debating Puerto Rico’s political status for centuries, no resolution to this deadlock is in sight. My previous work has modelled this stalemate as a war of attrition or “hawk-dove game” (2010) and as a truel or “three-person duel” (2008). My third Puerto Rico status paper, by contrast, explains how the impasse over Puerto Rico’s constitutional status can be modelled as a Condorcet cycle. In addition, this paper presents a tentative solution to this impasse: the creation of a “Bayesian ballot” in which voters would be allowed to express the relative intensity of their preferences for each status. The paper is available here via SSRN.

In presidential politics, a “swing state” refers to any State that could be won by either the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate, i.e. where the outcome is up for grabs or uncertain. The map pictured below, for example, shows the number of visits to each State by a major presidential candidate during the 2016 election campaign. Hat tip: u/Flitterquest, via Reddit.

You may have recently seen the first photo ever taken of a supermassive black hole. Very cool, right? But what you have probably not seen is the formal scientific paper (available here) describing the research methods that led to the creation of that beautiful photo. This paper, by the way, has 200 co-authors. That’s nothing, though. This other paper has over 5,000 co-authors!

This remarkable anthology of essays, which was edited by Val Ricks and published in Volume 45 of the Florida State Law Review, includes two concise contributions by yours truly: (a) “A Bayesian Analysis of the Hadley Rule” (pp. 925-928) in which I extol the virtues of Hadley v. Baxendale, a famous UK case involving a broken crankshaft, and (b) “Replevin for Rose Redux” (pp. 991-993) in which I decry the vices of Sherwood v. Walker, a famous Michigan case involving a barren cow. Your welcome!

Shout out to all first generation scholars and to Kris Harvey, who we met at the inaugural Focus on First Generation Conference held at FIU earlier this week. Ms Harvey is the curator of this helpful website designed for first generation college and graduate students. Among many other things, she shared the following fun and inspirational links with us:

1. Twitter: #firstgenproblems
2. Instagram: firstgenandjuice
3. Literary fiction: Make your home among strangers (Picador, 2016), a novel by Jennine Capo Crucet (book cover and author pictured below)

Article IV, Section 3 of the original 1787 U.S. Constitution delegates to Congress the power to admit new states into the union. Pursuant to this constitutional provision, Representative Darren Soto (pictured below) recently introduced a bill in Congress authorizing the admission of Puerto Rico as a new U.S. state. (Here is the complete text of Soto’s statehood admission bill.) Although we support statehood for Puerto Rico, we are writing this post to point out a potentially glaring omission in Soto’s bill: it does not repeal the Puerto Rican Federal Relations Act (Public Law 600), which ratifies Puerto Rico’s current constitutional status as a territory. If you wish to dig deeper into the politics and history of the island’s territorial status, check out this scholarly paper by Peter J. Fleiss titled “Puerto Rico’s Political Status under Its New Constitution.” In any case, this problem can be easily fixed with some more careful legislative drafting.