February 11, 2017
Hopper College!
Yale University is renaming Calhoun College after Grace Murray Hopper, mathematician, computer scientist, rear admiral of the US Navy, renowned teacher, developer of COBOL and the first working code compiler, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. [more inside]
Fighting Gerrymandering with Mathematics
A 5-day summer school will be offered at Tufts University from August 7-11, 2017, with the principal purpose of training mathematicians to be expert witnesses for court cases on redistricting and gerrymandering. How gerrymandered is your congressional district, anyway? You can use geometry as a proxy: compare the perimeter of your district to the perimeter of a circle with the same area. The Washington Post suggests what non-gerrymandered districts might look like.
Previouslies, especially compactness
Measurement error and the replication crisis
Why traditional statistics are often “counterproductive to research in the human sciences” A Retraction Watch interview with Andrew Gelman. [more inside]
Dammit, I gotta pee!
Insight into how the Victorians visualised the Shakespeare world
Featuring over 3000 illustrations from four Victorian-era editions of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive allows you to browse images not only by specific plays or characters, but also by motif (like dogs). "By being able to visualize Shakespeare's plays in this way," says creator Michael John Goodman, "we can appreciate how the plays are like a hall of mirrors — they reflect certain ideas back to each other."
Tears In The Rain
Tears In The Rain is an 11 minute short film set in the Blade Runner universe, a fan-made prequel of sorts. The Creators Project has an article about it, if you like to read those sorts of things.
Enjoy dessert.
The AI threat isn't Skynet, it's the death of the middle class
“I am less concerned with Terminator scenarios,” MIT economist Andrew McAfee said on the first day at Asilomar. “If current trends continue, people are going to rise up well before the machines do.” McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s. Now, most new jobs are either at the very low end of the pay scale or the very high end. He also argued that these trends are reversible, that improved education and a greater emphasis on entrepreneurship and research can help feed new engines of growth, that economies have overcome the rise of new technologies before. But after his talk, in the hallways at Asilomar, so many of the researchers warned him that the coming revolution in AI would eliminate far more jobs far more quickly than he expected. [Wired]
Meatspace
A City Is Not a Computer This seems an obvious truth, but we need to say it loud and clear. Urban intelligence is more than information processing
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