“Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.” But what makes an idea “great”? Read Asimov’s entire essay here, via The MIT Technology Review.
Frank Bourassa, the world’s most prolific counterfeiter, shows you how.
Is the current legal system broken or in need of repair? Instead of an endless number of motions, costly discovery, and randomly-selected jurors, why don’t we try a different method of resolving legal disputes, one based on the Turing Test in computer science? That is, why not place the parties to a legal dispute in different rooms and allow an interrogator (or an intelligent machine) to pose a fixed number of questions directly to the parties themselves? We will identify the similarities between the Turing Test and adjudication and expand on our idea for Turing Trials in a future post …
Image Credit: Bill Sanderson/Science Photo Library/Getty Images
Can you guess what lovelyulie is for Halloween this year?
“What if we could enjoy the journey, not just the destination?” Courtesy of the Center for Process Innovation, via our friends at digg.
Why did so many would-be Roman emperors refuse to update their priors? Hat tip to Flibidi via reddit (DataIsBeautiful).
We found this fascinating romantic census of the United States via The New York Times. (Hat tip to Marginal Revolution for the pointer.) According to Hilarie Sheets of the Times, R. Luke DuBois became obsessed with the words people use to describe themselves in their online dating profiles. He joined 21 dating sites in every ZIP code in America, downloaded 19 million profiles, and algorithmically determined the most common word in each location, which he then inserted in place of the city names on his maps. “New York is ‘Now,’ Seattle is ‘Heartbreak,’ Atlanta is ‘God.’ Upper Peninsula of Michigan is dotted with ‘Masochist,’ ‘Depression,’ ‘Futile,’ ‘Rustic,’ ‘Fairytale.'”
There is a sizable scholarly literature discussing the so-called “Paradox of the Gatecrasher,” a simple thought experiment introduced many years ago by British philosopher L. Jonathan Cohen, an evidence problem designed to test the proper role of statistics in law. (For a survey of this legal literature, see footnote 8 of our latest paper “Visualizing Probabilistic Proof.”) Briefly, Wikipedia presents the gatecrasher problem as follows:
Statistical syllogisms may be used as legal evidence but it is usually believed that a legal decision should not be based solely on them. For example, in L. Jonathan Cohen‘s “gatecrasher paradox”, 499 tickets to a rodeo have been sold and 1000 people are observed in the stands. The rodeo operator sues a random attendee for non-payment of the entrance fee. The statistical syllogism:
- 501 of the 1000 attendees have not paid
- The defendant is an attendee
- Therefore, on the balance of probabilities, the defendant has not paid
is a sound one, but it is felt to be unjust to burden a defendant with membership of a class, without evidence that bears directly on the defendant.
Notice, however, that Professor Cohen’s Gatecrasher Paradox is not really a paradox in the true sense of the word. In fact, it’s not even a mildly interesting problem, if you are a good Bayesian, that is. Why not? Because the statistical syllogism above only establishes a Bayesian prior, i.e. the initial probability that a randomly-selected attendee snuck in the rodeo without paying for his or her ticket. We still have to update our prior! Accordingly, let’s assume that the randomly-selected rodeo attendee in the example above is a man (let’s call him Mr X) and that our hypothetical Bayesian inquisitor is a woman (let’s call her Miss B). After finding her Bayesian prior, Miss B, our Bayesian puzzle-solver, would also ask Mr X to produce some scrap of evidence or proof that he paid for his rodeo ticket — a receipt, a ticket stub, a witness, etc. — and our Bayesian sleuth would then update her prior in a manner consistent with the evidence, including the lack of any evidence if that were the case.
Let’s solve the case of the gatecrasher
According to Gareth Cook’s fascinating essay on the history of “infographics,” this was President’s Lincoln favorite map. Here is the opening paragraph of Mr Cook’s essay (emphasis ours):
Near the end of 1861, with the American Union crumbling, President Abraham Lincoln became obsessed with an unusual document. Nearly three feet in length, it appeared at first to be a map of the southern states. But it was covered with finely rendered shading, with the darkness of each county reflecting the number of slaves who lived there. South Carolina, the first to secede from the Union, featured a particularly dark coastline. Yet other parts of the South (like western Virginia) appeared as islands of lightness.
By the way, is the word “infographic” a useful or helpful term? Isn’t every map or image an “infographic” to a lesser or greater extent, depending on the purpose of the person who created it?
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