2013 confirmed as Australia’s hottest year on record
Australia Rings In The New Year With Record-Breaking Heat Wave
A different weather story
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Tag Archives: politics
The dismal science becomes even more dismal at Florida State University
Billionaire’s role in hiring decisions at Florida State University raises questions
Remember this the next time someone (probably from deep right field) quotes an economist at Florida State!
Headlines ….
…. from a Mathematically Literate World. E.g.
Our World: Market Rebounds after Assurances from Fed Chair
Mathematically Literate World: Market Rebounds after Regression to the Mean
What pause?
Global Warming Since 1997 Underestimated by Half
A new study by British and Canadian researchers shows that the global temperature rise of the past 15 years has been greatly underestimated. The reason is the data gaps in the weather station network, especially in the Arctic. If you fill these data gaps using satellite measurements, the warming trend is more than doubled in the widely used HadCRUT4 data, and the much-discussed “warming pause” has virtually disappeared.
Arctic sea ice has *not* recovered, ….
Another round of climate disinformation
The death of Vladimir Komarov — Another look
I posted about this before.
Yuri Gagarin was one of the good guys in this story. Another was a KGB officer. The villains were Leonid Brezhnev and Dmitry Ustinov.
I can remember when Brezhnev and Ustinov were names known to everybody. However, younger readers may not recognize them, so I included the Wikipedia links. In the grand scheme of human history, they deserve to fall into obscurity.
SF Quote
I first read L. Sprague de Camp’s SF classic Lest Darkness Fall (written in 1939) more than 40 years ago. It still has not grown old. Tonight I ran across this passage:
More on the problems of PRISM
Thomas Bayes looks through the NSA’s “Prism”
This story has received a lot of coverage in the last few days, even extending to Jay Leno’s monologue. Understandably, there is a lot of concern about the civil liberties implications. But there is also another question, answered by Corey Chivers: How likely is the NSA PRISM program to catch a terrorist?
We don’t really know anything about how PRISM works (NSA = Never Say Anything), but with some plausible assumptions we can estimate the answer. Suppose
- If a terrorist is in the system, the probability is 99% that PRISM will flag him/her.
- An good guy has only a 1/100 chance of being flagged as potential terrorist.
- The actual number of terrorists is quite small, say 1 in 1,000,000.
Using Bayes’ rule, Chivers shows that only 1 in 10,102 of the people flagged as suspects will actually be a terrorist!
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From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 