In David Spiegelhalter’s excellent programme on risk, Tails You Win: The Science of Chance, we heard about the classic case of Michael Fish failing to predict the 1987 hurricane, and about the difficulty of predicting such events. Another area where precise prediction is extremely difficult is earthquakes. Today the BBC are reporting that “six Italian…
Aperiodcast – 21/10/2012
Here’s another episode of our irregular podcast about what’s been happening on the site. This time, we talked about: Advances in pure nonsense Robert Schneider, Mathematical Musician/Musical Mathematician #MTT2K: Teachers critique Khan Academy Surds: what are they good for? Calculus of the Nervous System The new fonts on the site Christian’s new Aperiodical Round Up…
Math/Maths 117: Did Darwin’s Finches do Relatively Prime?
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released. A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: Martin Gardner’s Birthday; Relatively Prime; Marriage as a Nobel-winning Economic Problem; Women in Wikipedia Edit-a-thon; Relatively Prime; Did Darwin’s Finches Do Math?; Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical…
Complexity analysis approach to tackling drug cartels
New Scientist reports on a new complexity analysis approach to Mexican drug cartels. Pointing out that removing the leader of a cartel is often cited as a major victory in the war on drugs, the article says that in fact more minor players with key connections might be more useful targets. The article explains that…
Two years in: getstats
Yesterday the Royal Statistical Society/Nuffield Foundation collaboration getstats celebrated its second birthday. Those of us with long enough memories might recall that getstats, a 10-year statistical literacy campaign, was launched with great fanfare at 8:10pm on World Statistics Day, 20th October 2010 (20:10 20.10.2010). Then-President David Hand was quoted at the time saying Numbers are…
Urgent review of Government calculations underway
According to an article behind the Times paywall which I haven’t read, an “urgent review is under way into the reliability of some of the Government’s most crucial calculations in the wake of the West Coast Main Line shambles“. The part of the article above the paywall reports that checks for ensuring the accuracy of…
Foreign Office gives Bletchley Park £480,000 and announces GCHQ apprenticeships
Having neglected the home of wartime codebreaking since it packed up and left with the end of hostilities, it looks like the Foreign Office is Turing over a new leaf – Foreign Secretary William Hague paid a visit to Bletchley Park on Thursday to make a couple of announcements that will please both amateur and more…