Mathematics

Capitalism isn't perfect.  Because business, like science, is about excellence and not fairness some people are going to make more money than other people.  Some are going to be better at marketing and some are even going to cheat.

A professor in chemical engineering with no private sector experience has figured out how to redo capitalism so it works great - in a numerical model.

Many of you have probably heard about the Governator’s playing with steganography — specifically, an acrostic:

While as yet unproven, a promising theorem in particle physics states that physicists are people, too. (If you prick them—the theorem goes—they are likely to bleed, etc.) So far, the strongest support for this idea is the anecdotal evidence of Richard Feynman, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist who was almost certainly a person.

Feynman’s reputation for humanizing buffoonery included his ability to open supposedly secure safes—a skill he honed while working on the atom bomb at Los Alamos Lab during the Second World War.

As Hank explains in a recent article, when he visits a Casino he plays the Roulette. His simple strategy consists in betting on a single colour, doubling the bet every time he loses; when he wins, he starts back with the minimum bet.

I had relatives visiting from out of town and, because they had never been to Las Vegas, we took a two day, one night,  short plane trip over the mountains.   

Naturally, I won some money.   Is that because I am a mathematical genius?  No, everyone except the truly elite is going to lose money in a casino by knowing just enough probability to be dangerous while the truly stupid are going to be the foundation of any gambling town.

They say the world is changing. Let’s check that out empirically.

We might run a couple of sample surveys, to see how people’s behaviors or attitudes change between the two questionnaire mailings.  A colleague, however, suggests panel sampling.

If you want to solve big network security problems, sometimes it pays to think small - as in ants.

A concept called 'swarm intelligence' adapts quickly to changing threats and it uses 'digital ants' to wander through computer networks looking for those threats, such as computer 'worms', those  self-replicating programs designed to steal information or facilitate unauthorized use of machines. When a digital ant detects a threat, it doesn't take long for an entire army of ants to converge at that location, which also draws the attention of human operators who step in to investigate.

A new mathematical model of chronic wound healing could provide better guidance on how to tackle a major public-health problem - the estimated 6.5 million people in the USA who suffer from chronic wounds that can cause loss of limbs or even death.

Ohio State University researchers are the first to publish a mathematical model of an ischemic wound – a chronic wound that heals slowly or is in danger of never healing because it is fed by an inadequate blood supply. Ischemic wounds are a common complication of diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and other conditions that can be characterized by poor vascular health.

Not really, but Paul Krugman is laying out some criticism of economics that's in the same spirit of my recent criticisms of networks and computational biology.

"How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?":