Physicians Versus Physicists

At lunch today, there was some confusion on whether one of my colleagues was a physician or a physicist (he's the latter). My contribution went along the following lines:

'Both medicine and physics include operations, but many more of them are reversible in physics.'

[The gist and important specific words are accurate; this is not the exact sentence construction.]

Expense Claims and Fortune-Cookie Fortunes

Hmmm.... I should start including fortunate-cookie fortunes (as easter eggs) with the mounds of receipts that go with my expense-claim forms.

Maybe something like "Confucius says switching to per diem will bring good luck."

The Exploding Whale

Is this video the one that brought down UGCS when I was a frosh at Caltech?

This website has a rather comprehensive account of the exploding whale, anniversaries of the event, and information about some of the key players in the event (or at least in its broadcast).

A Terse Summary of My Feelings on Research-Project Supervision

Here is a terse summary of my philosophy on the projects that I supervise:

Question on assessment form: "Did the student complete the agreed upon work by the end of Hilary Term?"

My answer: "I don’t understand this question. Sorry. Projects end when you run out of time."


When it comes to publishing papers, this is qualified with things like "or you get bored or we decide it's time to work on something else", etc. But projects don't end. You run out of time, run out of money, get bored, decide to move on, need to get a job, etc. But there is always something else that one could do.

Roll for Charisma!

No, really: Roll for charisma!

Our Work on Modeling of Bipolar Individuals in The Guardian

The title of the entry basically already says everything, but Marc Abrahams (of Ig Nobel Prizes fame) has written an article about our work on modeling bipolar individuals in The Guardian. An excerpt of the blurb also appears in the Improbable Research blog.

The peanut gallery is skewering us. (Well, there is a mixture of coherent opinions that happen to be different from mine --- which I respect, as one could then have an intelligent discussion with such people about the merits or lack thereof of our research --- and then people who are just either trolling or being vitriolic.) I still need to learn not to read the comments section when one of my articles makes the press. Inevitably, those comments are not going to improve my mood.

In case you were wondering, if you look in the papers that have cited our paper (even though there are not many such papers), you will see that some of our ideas have helped subsequent work, that there is now more scientific evidence that the toy model that we cooked up does seem to capture some things (a similar model has now been derived mechanistically drawing from biochemical considerations), etc. The idea is that one can start with a toy model as a perspective to try to get at the simplest possible mechanisms and use such things --- in combination with clinical data to estimate parameters in such simplistic models --- to really try to get somewhere. This is a complementary way to "Big Data" approaches, and I think that trying to use simple (and even extremely simplistic) models can guide experiments, clinical studies, and so on. Our work on its own cannot do this, as we didn't use real data (which we didn't have), but modelling can inform clinical studies (and experimental studies more generally), and data from such studies can be incorporated into simple models to really try to get somewhere. Our paper is one extremely small stone in this endeavor, but I do believe that it is genuinely a stone.

Somewhere, In a New Mexico Desert...

Oh, wow. The legend is actually true!

You want to see me include a lot of exclamation points and mean it? Well, now you get to! Now this is AWESOME!!!!

P.S. I actually beat that game. It was painful. Because of control glitches and other glitches, you keep getting stuck in a damn well. And it takes more than 30 minutes of real time each time to get the damn alien out of the well. And the game just sucked in general as well. There is a good reason that these cartridges were buried.

Update: A desert, not a "dessert". Please excuse the typo in the original title.

MRI Scans of Produce

Here are some MRI scans of produce. Just because.

Baseball's Borders

This visualization of Major League Baseball's borders (in terms of which team is "the team" for different geographic areas) has been circulating online. I like its depiction of baseball rivalries.

The first thing I noticed is how much more area the Giants occupy than the Dodgers. However, I really want to see how the visualizations looks when one uses a cartogram to normalize based on population size.

(Tip of the cap to Tom Maccarone [who sent it to me most recently], Jennifer Victor, and others.)

Semester Program: Dynamics of Biologically Inspired Networks" (Spring 2016)

Our Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) semester program on the mathematics of biologically inspired networks is now officially online.

Mark your calendars!

"Top Theoretical Physicists, R&B Singers Meet To Debate Meaning Of Forever"

Well, The Onion has just produced another big win. My choice "quote" comes from Ed Witten:

"This assertion then raises a problem of even greater complexity: how to adequately measure the depths of one’s love, a task we now know is impossible thanks to groundbreaking work by a research collective from Caltech and Motown Records."

"However, as for the commonly held assertion that forever is tonight, even a cursory knowledge of quantum mechanics suffices to prove this notion false," Witten added.

Nevermore!

Apparently, ravens keep track of the rank order of other ravens in dominance hierarchies.

We need to add a citation to this paper in our revision of our own work related to dominance hierarchies, if for no other reason than to be able to make Edgar Allan Poe jokes in our presentations.

Albert Pujols Hits 500th Career Homerun

Albert Pujols just hit his 500th career homerun. Very nice!

Here are Major League Baseball's all-time homerun leaders. ESPN's story on Pujols's milestone is on this page.

Awesome Pictures of Snails

Yup, you read that correctly: here are some awesome pictures of snails.

The Eyes Have It

Here are some very cool pictures of animal eyes.

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

Showing Students Where To Look

This is what I try to do when I teach, but I feel like the way we have things organized at Oxford and the frequent, persistent questions trying to get ultra-precise statements of what is "examinable" run counter to what I think is the best philosophy for how to teach. And the rules of the game that this university has established simply encourages (and, arguably, demands it in practice) such nonsense. So. Damn. Frustrating.

A Shotgun Approach to Calculating π

Here is a literal(!) shotgun approach for calculating an approximate value for π. I approve! (I think...)

Now let me quote from the arXiv paper (which is called "A Ballistic Monte Carlo Approximation of π"): "We compute a Monte Carlo approximation of {\pi} using importance sampling with shots coming out of a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun as the proposal distribution."

Chickens and Baseball

In the 1950s, some psychologists taught a chicken to only eat when it hit safely in a toy version of baseball.

San Diego Chicken, ear your heart out!

(Tip of the cap to whoever does Facebook posts for MLB.)

Update (4/22/14): Here is what the Improbable Research Blog has to say about chickens and baseball.

Advertising Win

I love this advertisement that IFLS posted.

"We've Always Done It This Way"

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment in this IFLS post.

It says that the most dangerous phrase in the English language is "We've Always Done It This Way". Every damn person in Oxford should take note of this. This place is guilty of such nonsense beyond belief.

My best answer to a particularly egregious one in a Mathematical Institute committee meeting went something along the lines of an immediate ripost of "Then we'll finally be correcting a longstanding inadequacy."

(And I have found several situations where, unsurprisingly, the "always" turned out only to be a couple of years --- including the example above.)

"Prey Switching with a Linear Preference Trade-Off"

For the third day in a row, one of my papers has appeared in final published form. Here are the details.

Title: Prey Switching with a Linear Preference Trade-Off

Authors: Sofia H. Piltz, Mason A. Porter, and Philip K. Maini


Abstract: In ecology, prey switching refers to a predator’s adaptive change of habitat or diet in response to prey abundance. In this paper, we study piecewise-smooth models of predator-prey interactions with a linear trade-off in a predator’s prey preference. We consider optimally foraging predators and derive a model for a 1 predator-2 prey interaction with a tilted switching manifold between the two sides of discontinuous vector fields. We show that the 1 predator-2 prey system undergoes a novel adding-sliding-like (center to two-part periodic orbit; "C2PO") bifurcation in which the prey ratio transitions from constant to time-dependent. Farther away from the bifurcation point, the period of the oscillating prey ratio doubles, which suggests a possible cascade to chaos. We compare our model predictions with data on freshwater plankton, and we successfully capture the periodicity in the ratio between the predator’s preferred and alternative prey types. Our study suggests that it is useful to investigate prey ratio as a possible indicator of how population dynamics can be influenced by ecosystem diversity.


P.S. Check out the name we introduced for the new bifurcation that we discovered.

"Dynamics on Modular Networks with Heterogeneous Correlations"

Another one of my papers came out in final form today. (That's two days in a row, and there is a third that will be out imminently.) Here are the details.

Title: Dynamics on Modular Networks with Heterogeneous Correlations

Authors: Sergey Melnik, Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha, and James P. Gleeson


Abstract: We develop a new ensemble of modular random graphs in which degree-degree correlations can be different in each module, and the inter-module connections are defined by the joint degree-degree distribution of nodes for each pair of modules. We present an analytical approach that allows one to analyze several types of binary dynamics operating on such networks, and we illustrate our approach using bond percolation, site percolation, and the Watts threshold model. The new network ensemble generalizes existing models (e.g., the well-known configuration model and Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi networks) by allowing a heterogeneous distribution of degree- degree correlations across modules, which is important for the consideration of nonidentical interactingnetworks.


The basic idea is that we have developed a new random-graph ensemble that allows one to consider heterogeneous levels of homophily (which, in this paper, we use as degree homophily) in different parts of a network. You can also relate this to metapopulations in biology. We examine some simple dynamical processes on such ensembles.

The Hotter Institute of Technology

Caltech is apparently now the hotter institute of technology, according to a new prank by Caltech students during MIT's prefrosh weekend this year. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Heather Dean.)

Update (4/17/14): the California Tech has an article about how things went down.

"Convergence Time towards Periodic Orbits in Discrete Dynamical Systems"

One of my papers was published in final form today. Here are the details.

Title: Convergence Time towards Periodic Orbits in Discrete Dynamical Systems

Authors: Jesús San Martín and Mason A. Porter


Abstract: We investigate the convergence towards periodic orbits in discrete dynamical systems. We examine the probability that a randomly chosen point converges to a particular neighborhood of a periodic orbit in a fixed number of iterations, and we use linearized equations to examine the evolution near that neighborhood. The underlying idea is that points of stable periodic orbit are associated with intervals. We state and prove a theorem that details what regions of phase space are mapped into these intervals (once they are known) and how many iterations are required to get there. We also construct algorithms that allow our theoretical results to be implemented successfully in practice.

"Bird Flocks Shatter on Impact"

Research shows (technically, "suggests") that bird flocks shatter on impact. That is all.

(By the way, the reason it is "suggests" is because these are numerical simulations.)

(Tip of the cap to whoever posts for Physics Today on Facebook.)

What Happens in the Bay Area Stays in the Bay Area (Spring 2014 Edition)

I am up obscenely early for my travel to the Bay Area. I'll be hanging out with my peeps and also giving a talk in the Stanford Networks Forum. Bring it on!

Monopoly Streets in Real Life

Here are what the streets in Monopoly (in the Atlantic City version, which is the original distributed version) look like in real life.

(Tip of the cap to Shahram Shokrian.)

Tales From the ArXiv: A Violent Sci-Fi Novel or Mathematical Physics?

The title of this paper amuses me greatly. It is called "Killing tensors, Warped Products and The Orthogonal Separation of The Hamilton-Jacobi Equation". Stay tuned for our exciting conclusion!

"Looking for Tom Lehrer"

I'm still in the middle of this new article about Tom Lehrer, but clearly I need to pass this along.

The article has some neat stuff in it --- take a look, for example, at who he hung out with in college.

(Tip of the cap to Steve Strogatz.)

"The Competitive Foursome"

The so-called Competitive Foursome work some magic with the strings and piano, and they provide some laughs as well. Very, very cool!

(Tip of the cap to Alan Champneys.)

An Eigencheese Sandwich

This spectral graph theory workshop is clearly getting to me: a few minutes ago, "egg and cheese sandwich" sounded like "eigencheese sandwich" to me.

Awards for Top Relievers Named After Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman

Major League Baseball has instituted a new award for top relievers. The one for the American League is named after Mariano Rivera, and the one in the National League is named after Trevor Hoffman. I approve!

Update: Rob Neyer has written an interesting piece describing the history of awards for Major League relievers.

Darth Pooh

In case you were curious about what Winnie the Pooh might sound like as a Sith lord, wonder no further. I present to you... Darth Pooh.

(Tip of the cap to Michael Woods.)

Honeybee Sting Pain as a Function of Body Location

In case you are wondering, here is a new paper that concerns the pain of honeybee stings as a function of body location.

I love the section on author contributions: Michael L. Smith conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper, and was the experimental subject.

Ouch! (For SCIENCE!!)

Also, if you have have access to the website, you might also want to read about Stuperspace. (The authors have Caltech affiliations...)

(Tip of the cap to Ioannis Kourakis.)

2014 Dodgers "Proudly Sponsored" by a Cemetery

I am listening to the Dodger game because the EPSN brodcast has resulted in a national blackout (grrr....), so I can't watch the game on my computer.

And I just heard a promo that the 2014 Dodgers are "proudly sponsored by Forest Lawn Memorial Park" (a local cemetery).

That was the straight line; you provide the joke.

Chiiiipwiiiiiiiiiiich!

The clarion call in the title of this entry refers to the delicious dessert known as a Chipwich, which sadly no longer exists in its original form.

I almost bought a Chipwich variant at CVS, but it's just not the same when (1) it is not as good as the original and (2) it isn't thrown in the general direction of your head at a high speed. (Many of the substitutes are really good, and I am sure that this one is just fine --- even though I don't think it had any chocolate chips stuck to the side --- but the mood of the moment was for the original version.) According to the Wikipedia page, the particular variant that I saw today appears to be the reason that the original Chipwich doesn't exist anymore.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with particular bits of Caltech --- or at least Lloyd House --- history from the mid to late 1990s, Chipwiches are also the reason that I sometimes brought a baseball glove with me to Lloyd House dinners on Friday nights (and why I sat with my back to the wall on those nights, if I could possibly help it). Frozen chipwiches chucked at high speed hurt a lot if they manage to hit you. But with a baseball glove and one side protected, I was well prepared.

By the way, the clarion call was sometimes pronounced more like "Chiiiiiiiiiiipwiiich".

Funky Animal Defense Mechanisms

IFLS has an interesting article about funky animal defense mechanisms. Take a look!

Videos of Two of My Talks

In February 2013, I gave a talk on Cascades and Social Influence on Networks at Cornell University. I was giving the Center for Applied Mathematics colloquium (i.e., the colloquium in the program from which I got my PhD). This was my first visit to Cornell since I graduated in 2002. During the past few days, I gave updated versions of this talk at Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia.

In December 2011, I gave a plenary talk on Social Structure of Facebook Networks at a conference in Henley.


Enjoy!

Fooling Around in April

This entry from CafePress is a big win. (Tip of the hat to Heather Dean.)

In a Facebook post, Tears For Fears announced a new collaboration with Kid Rock.

As usual, there are also some appropriate papers on the arXiv. I noticed one on my own that just isn't funny, so I'm ignoring it. But Kevin Hickerson and Physics Today found A Necro-Biological Explanation for the Fermi Paradox, which has been submitted for publication in The Necronomicon.

My former colleague Lew Lefton from Georgia Tech was on the receiving end of a joke this year. (Tip of the cap to the School of Physics at Georgia Tech.)

For those with some time on their hands, there is the Google Maps Pokemon Challenge.

The Guardian also included a report about a curious and symmetry-breaking outcome of Scottish independence. (Tip of the cap to Cecilia Mascolo.)

Here is a summary of fake products from a few tech companies. (Tip of the hat to Sham Kakade.)

The White House got into the action with a President's Council on Beards. (Tip of the cap to whoever posts for MLB on Facebook.)

Depeche Mode has an April Fool's Day prank with new t-shirt designs with lyrics on them, but this joke was really lame.

Update (4/04/14): I'm posting this belatedly, but here is a summary of some of the April Fools Day pranks from various tech companies and some others. I like the one from CERN. :)

Update (4/04/14): NPR's prank was brilliant. (Tip of the cap to Lada Adamic.)

"Male Spiders Can Detect Female Promiscuity"

This article, about how certain male spiders can detect female "promiscuity", is really neat.

I Think They Found Her

In news from Iceland, a woman accidentally joined a search party who was looking for her.

(Tip of the cap to Very Demotivational.)

Life Imitates Spaceballs: "Mowing the Ocean"

The first thing that "mowing the ocean" made me think of was "combing the desert". Life imitates Spaceballs.

The Party Meets Up at the Storm Crow Tavern

I met up with the rest of my party at the Storm Crow Tavern. We started out as classless, but we eventually got some class and one person got up to 10th level.

Nobody decided to roll a d20 for a random shot from the bar, because a critical failure could be deadly.

And, despite the temptation, nobody ordered the Mac and Cheese of Cthulhu with the non-Euclidean chicken chunks (which online appear to be called Eldritch chicken chunks, but they were non-Euclidean in the hard copy). And that was even with the giant Cthulhu starting down at us from above our table.

The Onion Wins. Again.

Tomorrow and Monday I am giving talks about cascades and social influence on networks, and (thanks to The Onion) I just picked up a new slide for the introduction. Sweet!

What Happens in Vancouver Stays in Vancouver (2014 Edition)

I am at the Providence way too early in the morning to start my trek to Vancouver. I'll be staying with and hanging out with friends. While there, I'll also giving talks at Simon Fraser University (Friday) and University of British Columbia (Monday).

My Haircut is the One That Should be Required!

Well, here is a nice foil.

Now I want to be in charge of a country just so I can force people to get my haircut!

"Let The Mystery Be"

One of the songs I have been enjoying the past few months is this absolutely lovely live cover of "Let the Mystery Be" by 10000 Maniacs and David Byrne. (I heard this cover version first. The original is good too --- I just bought it today --- but this cover is fantastic.)

Yakov Sinai Wins Abel Prize

We've got a win for the home team (aka: dynamical systems) today: Yakov ("Yasha") Sinai has won the Abel Prize!

This is richly deserved. And if you look at this last page and know my academic interests, you'll see many subjects that are near and dear to my heart --- like dynamical systems, billiards, chaos, etc.

A few years ago, I tried to get Yasha interested in the two-particle billiards on which I have worked a bit with Bunimovich and a couple of students. He brought up some very good ideas, obviously, but he didn't seem super interested in the problem.

Also, as far as mathematical lineage goes, this one is a big win for the home team in a very large sense (well beyond dynamical systems). Besides having worked on billiard problems, there is pretty direct lineage: my official postdoc mentor at Georgia Tech was Leonid ("Lyonia") Bunimovich, who was a PhD student of Sinai.

Update: Here is the blurb in Nature News.


Update (4/10/14): There is now an article about Sinai's Abel Prize in The Daily Princetonian. I love Lyonia's quote in the article (because it's typical Lyonia): "I was waiting for this event already for some years."

Baseball Tonight Dream Team

Well, it looks like Ozzie Guillen is joining the Baseball Tonight crew. Now I'm going to need to find out when Ozzie is on just for comic relief.

Man, it's really too bad that Rob Dibble no longer works for ESPN. (I know, he hasn't worked for them for a decade.)

I want to see a Steiner-Ozzie-Dibble broadcast.

Urbane Maps

Wow, the website Map Urbane is really cool. It crowdsources what people are writing about places and uses that to label places on maps instead of the names on places.

It was created by a recent Cornell alum, who posted his take on the Cornell campus today. I love the line "It's all about using the right formula" near the T & AM building. (May the T & AM department rest in peace.) I think that is one of Andy Ruina's lines!

There's some really cool stuff in here. The map for Los Angeles is meh, but the urbane map for Seoul is really damn funny when the words are translated into English. Boston has some amusing stuff, and I am sure that many of the others do as well.

(Tip of the cap to Cornell Alumni Association.)

The Continuum-Mechanical Properties of Styrofoam and Peking Duck

Well, I evidently have not yet been domesticated.

I think the most "impressive" part of my masterpiece is that some of the styrofoam actually managed to fuse to the metal grating and harden rather significantly. (And I left all of my peeps who are continuum-mechanics experts back in Oxford... I have a problem for you to study!) I was warming up some Peking duck and brown rice in this toaster oven (or whatever it is called), and the oil and fat from the duck seems to be what helped fuse the bits of styrofoam to the metal grating.

The only word for this is "awesome".

Matlab Does Super Mario (Again)

If you are a reader of my blog, you might have noticed previous posts about listening to a theme song from Super Mario Brothers, playing Risk, and playing Tetris on Matlab.

Well, you can also try your hand at playing a short demo of World 1-1 (sort of) of Super Mario Brothers on Matlab. Sweet!

(Tip of the cap to whoever posts for Matlab on Facebook.)

The Mathematical Rainbow Connection

Kermit the Frog should be very proud of graph theorists.

Rock Tribute String Quartet

The Tribute String Quartet plays some very familiar songs, such as this one (hint: best. music video. ever.) I approve!

(Tip of the cap to whoever posts for A-Ha on Facebook.)

"Density-based and Transport-based Core-Periphery Structures in Networks"

One of my papers came out in final form today. Here is the key information about it.


Title: Density-based and Transport-based Core-Periphery Structures in Networks

Authors: Sang Hoon Lee, Mihai Cucuringu, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: Networks often possess mesoscale structures, and studying them can yield insights into both structure and function. It is most common to study community structure, but numerous other types of mesoscale structures also exist. In this paper, we examine core-periphery structures based on both density and transport. In such structures, core network components are well-connected both among themselves and to peripheral components, which are not well-connected to anything. We examine core-periphery structures in a wide range of examples of transportation, social, and financial networks—including road networks in large urban areas, a rabbit warren, a dolphin social network, a European interbank network, and a migration network between counties in the United States. We illustrate that a recently developed transport-based notion of node coreness is very useful for characterizing transportation networks. We also generalize this notion to examine core versus peripheral edges, and we show that the resulting diagnostic is also useful for transportation networks. To examine the properties of transportation networks further, we develop a family of generative models of roadlike networks. We illustrate the effect of the dimensionality of the embedding space on transportation networks, and we demonstrate that the correlations between different measures of coreness can be very different for different types of networks.


P.S. Check out the rabbit-warren network!

What's the Difference, Anyway?

Well that explains why the song on I was listening to "on my computer" (so my head thought) wasn't changing when I pressed the advanced button --- it turns out that the song was coming from my iPod.

Similarly, my "debit card" that wasn't working properly for specific things a few days ago turned out to be a credit card instead. My head just wasn't screwed on straight.

I think I need sleep. :)

Spring is Here

Well, spring is here. I think I will head over to the park...

Philosophers Define Boredom

Well, it's 2014, and philosophers have finally managed to define "boredom". I think this might be worth an Ig Nobel. It certainly has the quality of first making me laugh and then making me think.

(Tip of the cap to Thomas Kroedel.)

"You Don't Want to Go There."

Overheard in the elevator: "You don't want to go there." --- referring to floor 11 (where the mathematicians are) and filled with much fear and trepidation, and also a bit of disdain.

The two of us in the elevator destined for floor 11 stayed quiet. Sometimes it's not even worth starting.

University "Burger Joint" Conversations

Here's some very old-school humor...

Spending a couple days near Brown has made me think of the old college stereotype bit in this link (because I now have a better understanding of where Brown's came from).

I last read this when I was still an undergraduate student at Caltech in the mid-late 1990s (and when such things were still typically passed around by e-mail).

And the Caltech one is also spot-on. :)

Gotta' Catch 'Em All!

Somehow, the Pokémon theme song --- among other Easter Eggs --- has shown up among the mathematics subjects that our students are studying.

I guess one (or more?) of our students wanted to see how long it would take for us to notice. I was on College leave this past term, so I know I hadn't checked that website in a while... These Easter Eggs could have been here for months, for all I know.

Not that I would ever be involved in a prank involving Pokémon... (Tip of the cap to Quentin Miller.)

I Don't Need Counseling

No Really. Despite what some searches using Google Maps in Oxford might indicate.

My neurogenetics doctoral student sent that picture to me a few days ago. She wrote the following: When I search for 'mason alexander porter oxford’ on google maps they direct me to counselling in Oxford. See attached screenshot. You don’t need to pay for counselling. You know I’m a psychologist.

I love my students. They're awesome sometimes!

Ig Nobel Show from Friday

Stevyn Colgan has written a wrap up of the Ig Nobel show two days ago. I was one of the performers. Alas, despite the description, I have not actually won an Ig Nobel prize. :(

If a video shows up later, I'll post it. In the meantime, go to 39:00 in this video of the entire 2012 Ig Nobel show at Imperial College if you want to see me give my 5-minute comedic presentation on cow synchronization.

Words of Wisdom

My words of wisdom for the day: "You don't need to be in love with a problem, but you should at least be willing to have a one-night stand."

(I said this in the context of somebody working on a PhD.)

What Happens in Providence Stays in Providence

I'm on my way to the airport to go to Providence, where I will be in residence at ICERM for most of the next month (though I'll be out of town for a week) as a Research Fellow in their semester program on Network Science and Graph Algorithms.

This is Improbable Too

I didn't realize this before last night's Ig Nobel show (in which I performed), but our work on cow synchrony made not only the new Improbable Research book but also its cover.

Now all I need is an actual Ig Nobel Prize to go with it...

Additionally, here is a video of an Ig Nobel show in which I performed in 2012. I am introduced and start discussing cow synchronization at about 39:00 in the video.

Congratulations to Dr. Martin Gould!

My Ph.D. student Martin Gould passed his dissertation defense (aka "viva") today, and it looks like he might not have to make any corrections at all. Thus far, Martin and I have coauthored a review article on limit order books, and several additional papers are in preparation. Martin's thesis was about limit order books. The Examiners were Doyne Farmer (internal) and Rama Cont (external).

CONGRATULATIONS, Dr. Gould!

Another New Journal on Network Science

I am on the inaugural editorial board of IEEE Transactions of Network Science and Engineering, which is a new network-science journal on the engineering side.

Indeed, I am part of what seems like a small army of current and former Caltech CDS, EE, and AMa/ACM/CMS people on the editorial board.

It's really cool that the engineers seem to like the work that I am doing! This journal is very much more on the side of 'it is important to be domain-specific' rather than trying to be too universal. As many of you know, this philosophy resonates very strongly with my approach.

Hyperbolic Crocheting

It is very likely I have posted about this before (or about similar things such as the crocheted approximation to the Lorenz attractor), but Daina Taimina show pictures of her hyperbolic crocheting (in the mathematical sense, of course) on her blog.

(Tip of the cap to Wojciech Bazant.)

Twenty Jokes for Intellectuals

I have seen many of these geeky jokes before, but some of them are new to me. My favorite one is number 5.

(Tip of the cap to Meredith Alden.)

The Onion Presents: 10 Worst Bar Mitzvahs

The Onion brings us the 10 worst Bar Mitzvahs of all time.

My favorite is number 6: Mar. 25, 1995, Stamford, CT: Aaron Wechsler fucked up the V’ahavta big time, and couldn’t pull it together for the Avot and Gevurot.

Mathematics in the Snow

These mathematical snow patterns are really awesome!

(Tip of the cap to Alan Champneys.)

Switching the Order of Sums and Integrals

I forgot to report one of my quotes from earlier this term: "... where I have switched the order of summation and integration without justifying it because I am an applied mathematician and we sometimes just do that sort of thing."

Buckaroo Banzai and the Art of Writing Papers

I'm especially proud of the following advice that I gave to one of my undergraduate students this afternoon: "You don't want to write a paper that's like the movie Buckaroo Banzai --- which ends before the punchline occurs."

Then I had to explain the movie.

P.S. Don't watch this movie. (It does have one or two amusing lines, but it's best to just get those and not see the whole movie.)

Clarification: Technically, I only did a short-short version of an explanation of the movie --- I mostly just explained that it was bad and hinted that it was a cult classic --- because there's no way to understand it anyway.

RIP Frank Jobe (1925–2014)

Dr. Frank Jobe, who pioneered "Tommy John surgery" and thereby saved the careers of hundreds of baseball players (especially pitchers, and starting with Tommy John himself), has died at the age of 88. He revolutionized baseball.

Photos from the Past

Here are 40 photographs from the past. Many of them are very interesting. My favorite picture by far of this selection is number 11.

(Tip of the cap to John Meacham. As he points out, some of these pictures were originally in color.)

Ground Quidditch

The first person interviewed in this BBC story about real-life quidditch is our very own Somerville undergrad mathematician Brigitte Stenhouse.

Pattern-Forming Pufferfish

OK, pattern-formation-ophiles: Here is an "underwater crop circle" that was created by a single pufferfish. [What? Were you thinking about the pattern on the surface of its body or something when I brought this up? :)] An example of such a geometric structure was studied in this paper, so I hope some of the pattern-formation experts find it enticing.

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

Reducing the P-value One Submission to Nature at a Time

I really dig this doodle from Twisted Doodles.

Curiously, this is suspiciously close to my policy on submitting my papers to Nature. I'm just trying to reduce the p-value. Isn't that what all the good scientists do?

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

Signs That it's Late Friday Afternoon and You're Exhausted: Number $x$ in a Continuing Series

Signs that it's late Friday afternoon and that you're exhausted (number $x$ in a continuing series): When you're giving a problem class and it's 5:35 pm and you're utterly convinced that you have gone overtime on the class that ends at 6pm, because you think it's after 6pm and the fact that the clock blatantly says "5:35" (though in analog) just doesn't faze you or register in any way.

And also number $x+1$: And also when you say you're going to erase the whiteboard as a courtesy to people who are using the room tomorrow morning ... which is in fact nobody because tomorrow is Saturday.

The legend continues...

Name of the Day: Socrates Brito

I was watching some of the Dodger game tonight (once I was done with yet another meeting to work on the 'multilayer networks' review article), and I noticed that the Diamondbacks have a minor league player with the delightful name of Socrates Brito.

I really hope that Socrates Brito makes the majors just because I am eager to enjoy the clever headlines that I am sure will result.

(It's not close to as cool as the 'Hu's on first' jokes from when Chin Lung Hu reached first base safely, but it will be good nonetheless.)

Geometric Sandcastles

For your visual and mathematical enjoyment, here are some nice geometric sandcastles.

(Tip of the cap to MoMath: The Museum of Mathematics.)

Famous Last Words: Circa 2006

I wrote the following comment on Arcane Gazebo's blog at 1:13 am on 29 August 2006:

"I’ve been meaning to join Facebook for a while — if for no other reason I have their data and it’s probably relevant to my analysis to actually try the site. I’ll drop you a line when I get around to joining. (Facebook gets more traffic than google, by the way. Or it did as of some time in 2005. I assume it still does.)

I am in MySpace, Orkut, and LinkedIn, but I don’t use any of them. I’ll log in when somebody requests me as a friend, but basically don’t use it. I get lots of friend-request spam from Orkut. I need to log in to change the preferences to not e-mail me when I get a new friend request.

Do you actually end up doing any social networking through these sites? (I can see their use as gloried phonebooks, but I’m curious if you use them for more than that.)

I was also thinking Facebook might be particularly useful for web-stalking. :)"



Famous last words --- uttered 2 days before I joined Facebook.

(By the way, my LinkedIn use is the same as it was then. I haven't logged into Orkut in years, and I think I logged into MySpace once or twice in the last few years because I was curious what the site looked like these days --- or maybe just for shits and giggles.)

Coral is Beautiful!

Take a look at these absolutely gorgeous pictures of coral! Wow!

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

RIP Harold Ramis (1944–2014)

Harold Ramis, who is best known for his role as Egon Spengler in the Ghostbusters movies, died today after being ill for several years.

I hadn't realized this, but he also wrote/directed Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, and Analyze This. That's some seriously high-quality work!

In his honor, it's worth pointing out that sometimes you need to cross the streams.

(Tip of the cap to Scott Porter.)

Land of Confusion

Among my more brilliant placeholder notes for my coauthors is "and I agree that it's confusing in a confusing way". Yes, definitely.

"Core-Periphery Structure in Networks"

Our theory paper on core-periphery structure in networks, which we first posted on the arXiv in February 2012, is finally out in its official published form. Here are the details about the paper, which poses the problem of algorithmic detection of core-periphery structure in a particularly nice way.


Title: Core-Periphery Structure in Networks

Authors: M. Puck Rombach, Mason A. Porter, James H. Fowler, and Peter J. Mucha

Abstract: Intermediate-scale (or "meso-scale") structures in networks have received considerable attention, as the algorithmic detection of such structures makes it possible to discover network features that are not apparent either at the local scale of nodes and edges or at the global scale of summary statistics. Numerous types of meso-scale structures can occur in networks, but investigations of such features have focused predominantly on the identification and study of community structure. In this paper, we develop a new method to investigate the meso-scale feature known as core-periphery structure, which entails identifying densely connected core nodes and sparsely connected peripheral nodes. In contrast to communities, the nodes in a core are also reasonably well connected to those in a network’s periphery. Our new method of computing core-periphery structure can identify multiple cores in a network and takes into account different possible core structures. We illustrate the differences between our method and several existing methods for identifying which nodes belong to a core, and we use our technique to examine core-periphery structure in examples of friendship, collaboration, transportation, and voting networks.

Lord Charles: Public Enemy No. 1

The Dodgers' Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in Major League Baseball.

As David Schoenfield writes, check out how batters did against Kershaw's curveball last year: "Batters hit .096 against it in 2013, with zero extra-base hits, zero walks and 80 strikeouts."

Holy shit! Now that's awesome.

Mathematical Symbolism

Claim: The terms "spiritually similar" and "morally equivalent" really need mathematical symbols to go with them.

Bank of Somerville: 10 Pound Denomination

Sometimes, strange things happen in our Somerville mathematics presentations --- like seeing currency from the Bank of Somerville with my picture on the 10-pound note and my colleague Quentin Miller's picture on the 20-pound note. (The reason I am on the smaller denomination is probably because I am a cheap date.)

(Thanks to Andrew MacFarlane for drawing these, and thanks to both him and Tim Camfield for an excellent presentation on paradoxes.)

Data Visualization from the Annals of History

A new exhibit at the British Library is paying tribute to scientific diagrams from the annals of history. That sounds way cool. I hope I get a chance to go.

The exhibition called Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight, opens tomorrow and closes on 26 May 2014.

This article also reminds me of Katy Börner's Atlas of Science, which I reviewed for the journal Science a few years ago.

(Tip of the cap to Iain MacMillan.)

The Lost Slumgullions of English

Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin for thus slumgullion of language in the New York Times. Enjoy!

RIP Gerald Whitham (1927–2014)

Well, another one of the old guard from Caltech applied mathematics is gone. I found out earlier today that Gerald Whitham died on January 26th. Gerald was one of the pre-eminent early scholars in the study of nonlinear waves, which are near and dear to my heart.

I took Gerald's class AMa 98 when I was at Caltech --- that iteration of AMa 98 was the last class that he ever taught --- and that was the class that introduced me to solitons (so Whitham is the guy who showed me my first soliton). As many of you know, I have had a lot of fun in my career thinking about solitary waves (and, to a lesser extent, solitons). You can find one of those by-hand calculations in my scholarpedia entry on solitons (and related phenomena).

I was Gerald Whitham's last undergraduate advisee. This was in the sense of signing my cards so that I could take my classes --- we never worked on research together, though obviously some of his research interests rubbed off on me. He retired after my sophomore year (or at least rarely ever showed up to campus after that ... this page claims that he retired in 1998, but I think it was technically 1996), and my advisor was then switched over from Whitham to Oscar Bruno. Whenever I saw Whitham to get my card signed, he would inevitably complain about how the math department kept switching back and forth for the organization of the Math 107, 108, and 109 trifecta. (These switches occurred every decade or so, as far as I can tell. When it existed, Math 107 was a general introduction to analysis and topology, and then 108ab was analysis and 109ab was geometry. In the other form, 108abc was analysis and 109abc was geometry, where I believe that Math 107 was more or less the same as Math 108a.)

Update (2/22/14): Pasadena Star-News had an obituary for Whitham about a week ago.

Game Soundtrack: A Violin Rendition of Super Mario Brothers in Real Time

Some people are so talented that they can play the Super Mario Brothers soundtrack (overground, underground, and underwater --- and the sounds for things like coins, character death, super shrooms, etc) in real time while somebody else is playing the game. Now that is impressive!

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Nobody Wants Your @!#?@! ing Sheep

Sometimes, games can "destroy friendships". Especially when sheep are involved.

(Tip of the cap to Garth Patterson.)

Well Played, Google

I wholeheartedly approve of today's Google Doodle.

Outsourcing

Yup, maybe Wile E. Coyote should have done that.

ASCII Art and its Ancestors

I mostly just looked at the pictures --- with only occasional forays into the accompanying text (partly because I am damn tired and have some other text that I want to read before I crash completely and partly because I think the pictures themselves are the best part) --- but this article on ASCII art and its ancestors is way cool. I enjoy both the art itself and the notion that people worked really hard to create it with whatever computational (or typing) medium that was available. Very nice!

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Update (2/07/14): Tom Prescott has sent me a link to an ASCIImation page.

"Best". Figure. Ever.

Check out Figure 15b of this new paper on community detection in directed networks.

RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967–2014)

Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his apartment today (apparently of a heroin overdose). Hoffman was an excellent actor, and it was a virtual requirement for an indie film to include him in at least some role. (According to a rumor spread in Laemmle Theatres, some Congressman once tried to even get that made into a law.)