I finally got around to reading Edwin Abbot Abbot’s Flatland: A Romance of many dimensions (thanks to Kevin Duke for the recommendation). It’s a fascinatingly odd little book: at once Victorian social commentary and mathematical phantasmagoria. At just over 100 pages, it’s well worth the 90 or minutes it will take you to read it. […]
In these times of great economic tribulation it’s almost comforting to watch marketing gurus attempt to squeeze blood from a stone:
In part, the word [recessionista] reflects the efforts of fashion and beauty publicists to spin the economic downturn as an attractive retail trend. For instance, Bourjois, a moderately priced makeup line from France, sent a […]
This article was a real eye-opener:
In broad strokes, there are three types of term paper clients. DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college. They must buy model papers simply because they do not understand what a term paper is, much less anything going on in their assignments. I don’t believe that most of […]
There’s an article about publication bias in this week’s Economist that anyone interested in academia, especially the sciences, should read. Here’s a little background.
Researchers in the sciences and social sciences almost always presents their results in terms of hypothesis tests. The procedure involves stating a conservative maintained hypothesis called the null, and attempting to reject […]
I’ve been musing quite a bit about the environment lately. For the economically-minded, it’s a classic cost-benefit analysis. For others, it takes on a strong moral dimension. The following thought experiment is my feeble attempt to isolate these concerns. I’ll be very interested to hear what the other MP bloggers think […]