# Post List

## Mathematics posts

• April 13, 2012
• 02:20 PM
• 717 views

# Space Census Finds Extra Penguins, Poop

Playing what might have been the world's most tedious game of Where's Waldo?, scientists used photos taken from space to count all the emperor penguins in Antarctica. They found more than a hundred thousand birds that hadn't been spotted before. The news may affect the penguins' fate in a warming world. Besides, what's a better surprise than extra penguins?

Researchers from several institutions, including the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, undertook the emperor penguin space census. ........ Read more »

Fretwell, P., LaRue, M., Morin, P., Kooyman, G., Wienecke, B., Ratcliffe, N., Fox, A., Fleming, A., Porter, C., & Trathan, P. (2012) An Emperor Penguin Population Estimate: The First Global, Synoptic Survey of a Species from Space. PLoS ONE, 7(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033751

• April 10, 2012
• 11:02 AM
• 656 views

# Google Searches Give Away a Country's GDP

Anytime we travel through the Internet we leave piles of data behind us, like Pigpen shedding his cloud of filth. It's too bad if you're concerned about privacy. But if you're a mathematician, that heap of dirt is more like a goldmine, and digging into it can turn up unexpected nuggets. A study of worldwide Google searches, for one thing, reveals that people in wealthier nations think less about the past.

Google collects data on what search terms people around the world are using. Researche........ Read more »

Preis, T., Moat, H., Stanley, H., & Bishop, S. (2012) Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/srep00350

• April 8, 2012
• 08:50 PM
• 636 views

# Simulations of Sand-Solid Impacts

Math and computer simulation wizzes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have just taken a nice step forward in granular simulation by approaching the problem with math heretofore not applied to dynamic granular modeling. It's really quite impressive.
Narain and Gola's work may be favorable over previous methods both due to its 1) accuracy, as well as 2) the ability to trade off quality-over-precision / precision-over-quality as an easily implemented option. Whenever c........ Read more »

Narain, R., Golas, A., & Lin, M. (2010) Free-flowing granular materials with two-way solid coupling. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 29(6), 1. DOI: 10.1145/1882261.1866195

• April 5, 2012
• 10:32 AM
• 861 views

Math can be a fun, logic puzzle for some people. But for others, doing math is a headache-inducing experience. Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have recently shown ... Read more »

Young, C.B., Wu, S.S., & Menon, V. (2012) The Neurodevelopmental Basis of Math Anxiety. Psychological Science. PMID: 22434239

• April 4, 2012
• 06:03 PM
• 303 views

# Co-Vary Or Die

I've just come across a striking example of why correcting for confounding variables in statistics might not sound exciting, but can be a matter of life and death.Imagine you're a doctor or researcher working with HIV/AIDS. You're taking a sample of blood from a HIV+ patient when you slip and, to your horror, jab yourself with a bloodied needle.What do you do?In a 1997 study, researchers Cardo et al studied hundreds of cases of this kind of accidental HIV exposure ("needlestick injuries") in med........ Read more »

• April 4, 2012
• 04:26 PM
• 632 views

# Graphing Out Loud: curves and lines

I love graphs – my eyes quickly glaze over at a table of numeric data, but a graph, used correctly, can quickly and easily tell the whole story. ‘Used correctly’ is the key phrase – for all their power, graphs are infamously easy to bungle, and when used incorrectly they can misinform – or lie [...]... Read more »

Andreas D. Hüsler, & Didier Sornette. (2011) Evidence for super-exponentially accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide growth. arXiv. arXiv: 1101.2832v3

• March 23, 2012
• 05:57 AM
• 677 views

# Johnson noise and its square root

Following my recent work on stochastic processes and quantum mechanics (see here and here), after I showed its existence with numerical computation (see here), this time I moved one step forward with an experimental setup. The idea come out from my son Giorgio. He is a teen with a lot of ideas and was of [...]... Read more »

• March 14, 2012
• 09:30 PM
• 687 views

# Sonification: Listen To The Sun / Listen To CERN's LHC

Solar storm data has recently been translated through a process called sonification into audio. CERN uses this technology too. Here are videos and explanations for both.... Read more »

Alberto de Campo, Natascha Hormann, Harald Markum, Willibald Plessas, & Bianka Sengi. (2005) Sonification of lattice data: The spectrum of the Dirac operator across the deconfinement transition. Proceedings of Science. info:other/PoS: LAT2005-152

Katharina Vogt, Robert H¨oldrich, David Pirr`o, Martin Rumori, Stefan Rossegger, Werner Riegler, & Matevˇz Tadel. (2010) A SONIC TIME PROJECTION CHAMBER. SONIFIED PARTICLE DETECTION AT CERN. International Conference on Auditory Display. info:other/ISBN: 0-9670904-3-1

• March 6, 2012
• 07:27 PM
• 1,032 views

# No fun: Philippines ranks bottom among neighbors in tourism competitiveness study

In a recent paper by Huang and Peng of the National Chiao Tung University published in the journal Tourism Management [2], they measured the tourism competitiveness of 9 neighboring countries in Asia based on six criteria...... Read more »

• February 27, 2012
• 03:33 PM
• 670 views

# Where Learning STEMs From

The need for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals has become critical in the United States.  A recent Washington Post article stated there is a shortage of qualified U.S. ... Read more »

• February 17, 2012
• 10:46 AM
• 944 views

# A Scientist’s Worst Nightmare

A detailed analysis of a new infographic dealing with the issue of falsification in scientific research.... Read more »

• February 6, 2012
• 04:00 AM
• 830 views

# 17 and sudoku clues [video] | @GrrlScientist

17 is the minimum number of clues required to give a unique sudoku solution -- but how did mathematicians prove this? ... Read more »

Gary McGuire, Bastian Tugemann, & Gilles Civario. (2012) There is no 16-Clue Sudoku: Solving the Sudoku Minimum Number of Clues Problem. ArXiv. info:/arXiv:1201.0749v1

• February 2, 2012
• 10:35 AM
• 609 views

# Numerical evidence for the square root of a Wiener process

Brownian motion is a very kind mathematical object being very keen to numerical simulations. There are a plenty of them for any platform and software so that one is able to check very rapidly the proper working of a given hypothesis. For these aims, I have found very helpful the demonstration site by Wolfram and [...]... Read more »

• January 31, 2012
• 06:04 AM
• 618 views

# Quantum mechanics and stochastic processes: Revised paper posted

After having fixed the definition of the extended Itō integral, I have posted a revised version of my paper on arXiv (see here). The idea has been described here. A full account of this story is given here. The interesting aspect from a physical standpoint is the space that is fluctuating both for a Wiener [...]... Read more »

• January 31, 2012
• 03:29 AM
• 427 views

# Voodoo Neuroscience Revisited

Two years ago, neuroscientists were shaken by the appearance of a draft paper showing that half of the published work in a particular field had fallen prey to a major statistical error.Originally called "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience", it ended up with the less snappy name of Puzzlingly high correlations in fMRI studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition. I prefer the old title.The error in question is now known variously as the "circular analysis problem", "non-independe........ Read more »

• January 26, 2012
• 12:07 PM
• 612 views

# Groups in $\beta \mathbb{N}$

Lecture notes and video to a talk on an old result by Hindman and Pym on groups in the Stone-Cech compactification of the natural numbers.... Read more »

Hindman, N., & Pym, J. (1984) Free groups and semigroups in βN. Semigroup Forum, 30(1), 177-193. DOI: 10.1007/BF02573448

• January 25, 2012
• 05:22 AM
• 594 views

# Quantum mechanics and the square root of Brownian motion

There is a very good reason why I was silent in the past days. The reason is that I was involved in one of the most difficult article to write down since I do research (and are more than twenty years now!).  This paper arose during a very successful collaboration with two colleagues of mine: [...]... Read more »

Farina, A., Giompapa, S., Graziano, A., Liburdi, A., Ravanelli, M., & Zirilli, F. (2011) Tartaglia-Pascal’s triangle: a historical perspective with applications. Signal, Image and Video Processing. DOI: 10.1007/s11760-011-0228-6

• January 24, 2012
• 02:08 AM
• 498 views

# temperature aNOMalies

If you are new to climate science, you might be wondering what, exactly, this ‘temperature anomaly’ thing is that you keep hearing about. I know I was a bit confused at first! This post explains the concept, using a real-world example. Cities tend to be warmer than their surrounding countrysides, a fact known as the [...]... Read more »

• January 20, 2012
• 10:00 AM
• 670 views

# Ian Stewart’s Mathematics of Life

This post is based on a book review I recently wrote on The Mathematics of Life, by Ian Stewart. A final version of the review will appear in a future issue of SIGACT News.  Please feel free to download a … Continue reading →... Read more »

Ian Stewart. (2011) The Mathematics of Life. Book: ISBN 0465022383. info:/

• January 17, 2012
• 09:35 AM
• 444 views

# PCa and PCoA explained

Just before Christmas I was asked to talk to our molecular biologists about multivariate analyses. I was reminded of this on Thursday afternoon, when I saw that I had to talk to them on Friday. "Ah, no problem", I thought....... Read more »

Gower, J.C. (2005) Principal Coordinates Analysis. Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. info:/10.1002/0470011815.b2a13070