How easy is it to fix an NFL game?

Posted on October 25, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Match fixing has occurred in soccer leagues around the world, so why should the NFL (or college football, for that matter) be any different? In fact, according to this devious report by Brian “The-Fix-Is-In” Touhy, it is much easier to “fix” or tamper with a North American football game than you might think. From a potential fixer’s point of view, the main problem for the fixer is finding a place where to place one’s bet, or in the words of Mr Tuohy: Continue reading →

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All proof is probabilistic

Posted on October 24, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

That is the premise of our latest paper “Visualizing Probabilistic Proof.” (We’ve blogged about this paper before, but the latest draft of our paper is available on SSRN here and will be published in an upcoming volume of The Washington University Jurisprudence Review. By the way, our paper is full of diagrams and is “only” 37 pages long, which is short by law review standards!) In brief, in our probabilistic proof paper, we try to solve the Blue Bus Problem, a hypothetical puzzle often presented by law professors when they teach Evidence. Unlike most treatments of the Blue Bus Problem, however, our solution uses Bayesian methods. In a future post, we will talk about a related problem known as the Gatecrasher Paradox.

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Law, Probability | Tagged | 5 Comments

Annals of recursion

Posted on October 24, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol
The students in my textbook are holding the textbook they are modeling for

Hat tip: LargeCoinPurse, via reddit.

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Infinite regress, bias, and the Coase theorem

Posted on October 23, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

In their paper “Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict,” Adam Waytz, Liane Young and Jeremy Ginge appear to extend the logic of the Coase Theorem into the domain of politics. Specifically, Waytz, Young, and Ginge study the problem of “motive attribution asymmetry,” i.e., the belief that people who disagree with you have motives that are bad. Among other things, they found that “offering Democrats and Republicans financial incentives for accuracy in evaluating the opposing party can mitigate this bias …” This is an exciting and promising research agenda, but if we can pay people to be less biased, couldn’t we also pay people to be more biased as well? Consider, in addition, this hypothetical scenario, courtesy of Sandeep Baliga (emphasis by us): Continue reading →

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Chess piece survival rates

Posted on October 22, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Someone on digg posted a variant of this question on Quora: “What are the chances of survival of individual chess pieces on average.” In reply, Oliver Brennan, a chess aficionado and computer programmer, posted this answer:

image

Image credit: Oliver Brennan

Update (25 Oct. 2014): The excellent Ada Swanson interprets this probabilistic chess board as follows (emphasis ours):

The kings have the highest survival rate … because they can’t be taken. Rooks also tend to be hardy because they spend a lot of time at the back of the board and are generally more active in endgames. The knights and central pawns have the lowest survival rates. Many popular openings involve d and e pawns undertaking suicide missions, which are sometimes counter-attacked with c pawns. The wing pawns have a higher survival rate, prompting one forum user to comment …, “If you can’t be the king, be the little guy hiding in the corner.”

Posted in Probability, Questions Rarely Asked | Tagged , | 20 Comments

But can it solve Bayesian equations?

Posted on October 22, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Pocket Calculator, Meet the “PhotoMath” App: Complements or Substitutes?

Posted in Web/Tech | Tagged | 2 Comments

Multiple Comparisons and the Law

Posted on October 21, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Deborah Mayo recently reblogged and commented on Nathan Schachtman’s blog post titled “Courts Can and Must Acknowledge Multiple Comparisons in Statistical Analyses.” (Mr Schachtman is not only a lawyer; he is also a lecturer at Columbia Law School and an expert on scientific evidence.) Moreover, because Mr Schachtman’s blog post and Dr Mayo’s comments on Schachtman’s post touch on an area we care about — the role of probability theory in law — we are re-reblogging both items below and shall comment on them in a future post.

Update (22 October 2014): We read Schachtman’s post on the multiple testing problem in law (see below), and we also read Dr Mayo’s comments to his post (ditto), and we were left scratching our heads. We’re not sure where they disagree. After all, isn’t it true that “data trolling” is bad science? And, if so, shouldn’t trial judges retain the discretion to exclude expert testimony based on multiple comparisons?

Mayo's avatarError Statistics Philosophy

NAS-3 .

The following is from Nathan Schachtman’s legal blog, with various comments and added emphases (by me). He will try to reply to comments/queries.

“Courts Can and Must Acknowledge Multiple Comparisons in Statistical Analyses”

Nathan Schachtman, Esq., PC * October 14th, 2014

In excluding the proffered testimony of Dr. Anick Bérard, a Canadian perinatal epidemiologist in the Université de Montréal, the Zoloft MDL trial court discussed several methodological shortcomings and failures, including Bérard’s reliance upon claims of statistical significance from studies that conducted dozens and hundreds of multiple comparisons.[i] The Zoloft MDL court was not the first court to recognize the problem of over-interpreting the putative statistical significance of results that were one among many statistical tests in a single study. The court was, however, among a fairly small group of judges who have shown the needed statistical acumen in looking beyond the reported p-value or…

View original post 2,543 more words

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Martian Monday

Posted on October 20, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

We like drmickhead’s comment: “The fact that we have robots on another planet that will be photographing this event makes [us] inordinately happy.“

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“The possibility of a general theory of emergency”

Posted on October 19, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

That is the subtitle of this fascinating paper — the full title of the paper is “Exception and Necessity: The Possibility of a General Theory of Emergency” — written by our colleague William Vazquez-Irizarry, a law professor at the University of Puerto Rico. In his paper, Professor Vazquez-Irizarry compares and contrasts the state of exception doctrine in public law with the doctrine of necessity in private law and develops a “general theory of emergency” common to both areas of law. The idea of a general theory of emergency is intriguing and original, but there is no reference in this paper to the work of Ronald Coase or John Rawls. That is, what would happen if rulers and the ruled could bargain with each other, either ex ante behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance or ex post (assuming, of course, zero transaction costs)? In either case, what rules or principles would we agree to for dealing with public and private emergencies? Would the rules for private emergencies be the same as the ones for public emergencies?

This is just a test …

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John Suh is not a lawyer

Posted on October 18, 2014 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

He is, however, a graduate of the Harvard Business School and the CEO of LegalZoom. So, will new business models like LegalZoom and new technologies like Watson Debater make lawyers and law firms obsolete? We’ve just read Susan Beck’s excellent report “Emerging Technology Shapes Future of Law.” Among the things in her report that caught our attention was this particular passage (edited for clarity): Continue reading →

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