David Ortiz Elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame!

The Baseball Hall of Fame results were announced today, and David Ortiz is the only person who was elected by the writers this year. As usual, you can see all of the ballots that have been made public so far at this website. You can also see a discussion of winners and losers from this year's results.

Two of the era committees elected several Hall of Famers last month.

This year, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa were all in their 10th and final years of eligibility. Clems and Bonds crept up to 65% of the vote, but that's still below the 75% that is needed for induction. Schilling, given his repeated crap, lost many votes. With Clemens, Bonds, Schilling, and Ortiz no longer on the ballot next year and few newcomers of note joining the ballot, holdover Scott Rolen (who went up to around 63% of the vote this year) will likely be elected in 2023 (yay!). Newcomer Carlos Beltrán is the only new person on the ballot next year with any chance. The weak ballot will help him, but we'll see how the Astros cheating scandal affects his vote total. Todd Helton and Billy Wagner finally surpassed 50% of the vote this year, and I expect Todd Helton to make another big jump next year. Both merit election, but it it may take some time for Wagner and I think that Helton is more likely to be elected in 2024 than in 2023. Andruw Jones surpassed 40%, so he's also trending upward. Support for Omar Vizquel tanked because of his shenanigans, and he doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame anyway. Jimmy Rollins and Alex Rodriguez were the only other newcomers to the ballot besides David Ortiz to get at least 5% of the vote.

We will see how the era committees deal with Bonds, Clemens, and Schilling. They'll get into the Hall eventually (as they should, even with their horseshit), but it may take a while.

Update (1/26/22): Also see the voting round-up from Jay Jaffe.

Update (1/27/22): Here is Jay Jaffe's candidate-by-candidate breakdown of the 2022 voting.

Update (1/31/22): Here is Jay Jaffe's five-year outlook of the Hall of Fame balloting in the writers' ballot.

"A Multilayer Network Model of the Coevolution of the Spread of a Disease and Competing Opinions"

A new paper of mine just came out in final form. Here are some details.

Title: A Multilayer Network Model of the Coevolution of the Spread of a Disease and Competing Opinions

Authors: Kaiyan Peng, Zheng Lu, Vanessa Lin, Michael R. Lindstrom, Christian Parkinson, Chuntian Wang, Andrea L. Bertozzi, Mason A. Porter

Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicting opinions on physical distancing swept across social media, affecting both human behavior and the spread of COVID-19. Inspired by such phenomena, we construct a two-layer multiplex network for the coupled spread of a disease and conflicting opinions. We model each process as a contagion. On one layer, we consider the concurrent evolution of two opinions — pro-physical-distancing and anti-physical-distancing — that compete with each other and have mutual immunity to each other. The disease evolves on the other layer, and individuals are less likely (respectively, more likely) to become infected when they adopt the pro-physical-distancing (respectively, anti-physical-distancing) opinion. We develop approximations of mean-field type by generalizing monolayer pair approximations to multilayer networks; these approximations agree well with Monte Carlo simulations for a broad range of parameters and several network structures. Through numerical simulations, we illustrate the influence of opinion dynamics on the spread of the disease from complex interactions both between the two conflicting opinions and between the opinions and the disease. We find that lengthening the duration that individuals hold an opinion may help suppress disease transmission, and we demonstrate that increasing the cross-layer correlations or intra-layer correlations of node degrees may lead to fewer individuals becoming infected with the disease.

The `PrickRank' Algorithm

One way to gather information is to purposely write an incorrect 'factual' statement on social media.

People love to correct others (often obnoxiously, but at least one acquires info).

Google has PageRank, and social-media platforms like Twitter have this `PrickRank algorithm'.

(This monicker is destined to become a classic, just like FIPO.)

The Donkey Kong Visual Illusion

This visual illusion ought to be called the "Donkey Kong Illusion"

Horizontally aligned rows appear to tilt alternately. pic.twitter.com/80pfmXPql6

— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) January 9, 2022

"A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs"

A new paper of mine just came out in final form. Here are some details about it.

Title: A Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Hypergraphs

Authors: Abigail Hickok, Yacoub Kureh, Heather Z. Brooks, Michelle Feng, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: People's opinions evolve with time as they interact with their friends, family, colleagues, and others. In the study of opinion dynamics on networks, one often encodes interactions between people in the form of dyadic relationships, but many social interactions in real life are polyadic (i.e., they involve three or more people). In this paper, we extend an asynchronous bounded-confidence model (BCM) on graphs, in which nodes are connected pairwise by edges, to an asynchronous BCM on hypergraphs, in which arbitrarily many nodes can be connected by a single hyperedge. We show that our hypergraph BCM converges to consensus for a wide range of initial conditions for the opinions of the nodes, including for nonuniform and asymmetric initial opinion distributions. We also show that, under suitable conditions, echo chambers can form on hypergraphs with community structure. We demonstrate that the opinions of nodes can sometimes jump from one opinion cluster to another in a single time step; this phenomenon (which we call ``opinion jumping") is not possible in standard dyadic BCMs. Additionally, we observe a phase transition in the convergence time of our BCM on a complete hypergraph when the variance $\sigma^2$ of the initial opinion distribution equals the confidence bound $c$. We prove that the convergence time grows at least exponentially fast with the number of nodes when $\sigma^2 > c$ and the initial opinions are normally distributed. Therefore, to determine the convergence properties of our hypergraph BCM when the variance and the number of hyperedges are both large, it is necessary to use analytical methods instead of relying only on Monte Carlo simulations.

RIP Betty White (1922–2021)

Iconic actress Betty White died today at age 99. January 17 was going to be her 100th birthday. You can read a lot about her on her Wikipedia page.

"Epidemic Thresholds of Infectious Diseases on Tie-Decay Networks"

Another paper of mine has just been published in final form. (Technically, one could say that it's almost in final form; the issue number has been determined, but its stamp is not yet on the .pdf file as I write this blog entry because some other articles from the same issue haven't yet been published.) Here are some details.

Title: "Epidemic Thresholds of Infectious Diseases on Tie-Decay Networks"

Authors: Qinyi Chen and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: In the study of infectious diseases on networks, researchers calculate epidemic thresholds to help forecast whether or not a disease will eventually infect a large fraction of a population. Because network structure typically changes with time, which fundamentally influences the dynamics of spreading processes and in turn affects epidemic thresholds for disease propagation, it is important to examine epidemic thresholds in models of disease spread on temporal networks. Most existing studies of epidemic thresholds in temporal networks have focused on models in discrete time, but most real-world networked systems evolve continuously with time. In our work, we encode the continuous time-dependence of networks in the evaluation of the epidemic threshold of a susceptible–infected–susceptible (SIS) process by studying an SIS model on tie-decay networks. We derive the epidemic-threshold condition of this model, and we perform numerical experiments to verify it. We also examine how different factors—the decay coefficients of the tie strengths in a network, the frequency of the interactions between the nodes in the network, and the sparsity of the underlying social network on which interactions occur—lead to decreases or increases of the critical values of the threshold and hence contribute to facilitating or impeding the spread of a disease. We thereby demonstrate how the features of tie-decay networks alter the outcome of disease spread.

"Classical and Quantum Random-Walk Centrality Measures in Multilayer Networks"

Another paper of mine just came out in final form. Here are some details about it.

Title: Classical and Quantum Random-Walk Centrality Measures in Multilayer Networks

Authors: Lucas Böttcher and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: Multilayer network analysis is a useful approach for studying networks of entities that interact with each other via multiple relationships. Classifying the importance of nodes and node-layer tuples is an important aspect of the study of multilayer networks. To do this, it is common to calculate various centrality measures, which allow one to rank nodes and node-layers according to a variety of structural features. In this paper, we formulate occupation, PageRank, betweenness, and closeness centralities in terms of node-occupation properties of different types of continuous-time classical and quantum random walks on multilayer networks. We apply our framework to a variety of synthetic and real-world multilayer networks, and we identify notable differences between classical and quantum centrality measures. Our computations give insights into the correlations between certain centralities that are based on random walks and associated centralities that are based on geodesic paths.

"Motifs for Processes on Networks"

Another paper of mine has just been published in final form. Here are some details.

Title: "Motifs for Processes on Networks"

Authors: Alice C. Schwarze and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: The study of motifs can help researchers uncover links between the structure and function of networks in biology, sociology, economics, and many other areas. Empirical studies of networks have identified feedback loops, feedforward loops, and several other small structures as "motifs" that occur frequently in real-world networks and may contribute by various mechanisms to important functions in these systems. However, these mechanisms are unknown for many of these motifs. We propose to distinguish between "structure motifs" (i.e., weakly connected graphlets) in networks and "process motifs" (which we define as structured sets of walks) on networks and consider process motifs as building blocks of processes on networks. Using steady-state covariance and steady-state correlation in a multivariate Ornstein--Uhlenbeck process on a network as examples, we demonstrate that distinguishing between structure motifs and process motifs makes it possible to gain quantitative insights into mechanisms that contribute to important functions of dynamical systems on networks.

"Finding Your Way: Shortest Paths on Networks"

Another article of mine just came out in final form. Here are some details.

Title: Finding Your Way: Shortest Paths on Networks

Authors: Teresa Rexin and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: Traveling to different destinations is a major part of our lives. We visit a variety of locations both during our daily lives and when we are on vacation. How can we find the best way to navigate from one place to another? Perhaps we can test all of the different ways of traveling between two places, but another method is to use mathematics and computation to find a shortest path between them. In this article, we discuss how to construct shortest paths and introduce Dijkstra’s algorithm to minimize the total cost of a path, where the cost may be the travel distance, the travel time, or some other quantity. We also discuss how to use shortest paths in the real world to save time and increase traveling efficiency.

Tim Kurkjian Wins 2022 BBWAA Career Excellence Award!

Congratulations to awesome baseball journalist Tim Kurkjian, who has won the 2022 BBWAA Career Excellence Award!

New Hall of Famers from Two of the Era Committees

We have some new Hall of Famers!

The Golden Days Era Committee has elected Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat, Minnie Miñoso, and Gil Hodges to the Hall of Fame. I'm glad that Oliva, Hodges, and (especially) Miñoso are finally in the Hall of Fame. However, Jim Kaat should not have made it, and fellow Golden Era candidate Dick Allen bloody well should be in the Hall of Fame. Take a look at this series of articles for discussions of each of the candidates.

The Early Baseball Era Committee has elected Bud Fowler and Buck O'Neil to the Hall of Fame. Take a look at this series of articles for discussions of each of the candidates.

You can track the regular Hall of Fame ballotting on the usual ballot tracker. I am guessing that they're going to throw a shutout for the second year in a row, but players such as Todd Helton and Scott Rolen (and some others) should make good progress towards eventual election.

Update (12/06/21): As discussed in this article, Dick Allen fell one vote short for the second time in a row. :( Maybe next time, although even then he is no longer alive to enjoy it.

What Happens in Salt Lake City Stays in Salt Lake City

I am heading off to Salt Lake City to give a talk at University of Utah!

"Nanoptera in Weakly Nonlinear Woodpile Chains and Diatomic Granular Chains"

A paper of mine was just published in final form. Here are some details.

Title: Nanoptera in Weakly Nonlinear Woodpile Chains and Diatomic Granular Chains

Authors: Guo Deng, Christopher J. Lustri, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: We study ``nanoptera," which are nonlocalized solitary waves with exponentially small but nondecaying oscillations, in two singularly perturbed Hertzian chains with precompression. These two systems are woodpile chains (which we model as systems of Hertzian particles and springs) and diatomic Hertzian chains with alternating masses. We demonstrate that nanoptera arise from the Stokes phenomenon and appear as special curves (called Stokes curves) are crossed in the complex plane. We use techniques from exponential asymptotics to obtain approximations of the oscillation amplitudes. Our analysis demonstrates that traveling-wave solutions in a singularly perturbed woodpile chain have a single Stokes curve, which generates oscillations behind the wave front. Comparing these asymptotic predictions with numerical simulations reveals that our asymptotic approximation accurately describes the nondecaying oscillatory behavior in a woodpile chain. We perform a similar analysis of a diatomic Hertzian chain, and we show that each nanopteron solution has two distinct exponentially small oscillatory contributions. We demonstrate that there exists a set of mass ratios for which these two contributions cancel to produce localized solitary waves. This result builds on prior experimental and numerical observations that there exist mass ratios that support localized solitary waves in diatomic Hertzian chains without precompression. Comparing our asymptotic and numerical results for a diatomic Hertzian chain with precompression reveals that our exponential asymptotic approach accurately predicts the oscillation amplitude for a wide range of system parameters, but it fails to identify several values of the mass ratio that correspond to localized solitary-wave solutions.

2021 Baseball Comeback Players of the Year

Baseball's comeback players of the year for 2021 have been announced. The American League winner is Trey Mancini of the Baltimore Orioles, and the National League winner is now-retired Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants.

2021 Baseball Most Valuable Player Awards

Baseball announced its 2021 Most Valueable Player Awards today as the culmination of this year's awards. Once again, the results are unsurprising. Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels was a unanimous winner in the American League (duh), and Bryce Harper of the Philadelphia Phillies won in the National League.

2021 Cy Young Awards

Major League Baseball has announced its 2021 Cy Young Awards for pitching excellence. Robbie Ray of the Toronto Blue Jays won the award in the American League, and Corbin Burnes of the Milwaukee Brewers won in the National League.

The National League race was very close; Burnes narrowly beat out Zack Wheeler of the Philadelphia Phillies and the Los Angeles Dodgers' Max Scherzer wasn't horribly far away either. Walker Buehler of the Dodgers finished 4th in the balloting.

2021 Baseball Managers of the Year

Major League Baseball has announced its 2021 Managers of the Year. The Americal League Manager of the Year is Kevin Cash of the Tampa Bay Rays, and the National League Manager of the year is Gabe Kapler of the San Fransisco Giants.

As with the Rookies of the Year, neither winner is surprising.

2021 Baseball Rookies of the Year

The 2021 Rookies of the Year were announced today. Jonathan India of the Cincinnati Reds won in the National League, and Randy Arozarena of the Tampa Bay Rays won in the American League.

Neither choice is surprising.

Some More Trips

I have had a few more short academic trips in the last couple of weeks. I spent a day at Harvey Mudd to talk to the students in Heather Zinn Brooks's class on mathematics and democracy. Then I took a trip to Michigan state to give an applied-mathematics colloquium, and now I am in San Diego State to give a mathematics colloquium.