Gene Stanley is a prolific and influential physicist who has been one of the biggest pioneers of interdisciplinary science of the last several decades. His H-Index is an obscene 111. I work on econophysics, which he basically invented, so I encounter his papers regularly. After seeing a few dozen of his econophysics papers, their titles [...]
Read more →A recent post on HN got me thinking (and reading) about elevator scheduling algorithms. As it turns out, this is an active area of extensive research. Manufacturers tend to use slightly different algorithms and treat them as trade secrets. But in practice, their algorithms are similar, because the theoretical optimization criteria are roughly the same: provide [...]
Read more →Android was rooted quite a while ago by a hacker who posts at c-skills.blogspot.com. Like many others, I tried out the exploit he installed to see if I could make my phone more interesting (this is something it’s now okay to admit to). This got me wondering about whether the exploit for Android is generalizable—is there [...]
Read more →I authored some work recently in which we identify an instance of potential market manipulation. Here’s the page on NECSI’s website. Here are reddit posts about it in economics, politics, math, finance, and occupywallstreet. Here’s an HN post about it. It was covered by BoingBoing, PhysOrg, ScienceNews, Technology Review, ZeroHedge, Naked Capitalism, and others.
Read more →A friend recently remarked that he hated “trendy” names like “Brody” and “Jayden.” Yahoo answers suggests not only that he has company [1][2][3], but that there are certain patterns common to trendy names that mark them as neo-praenomenisms, like the replacement of “a” with “ay” or “ae” to represent the sound /eI/ (s/Jaden/Jayden), and the [...]
Read more →The markets have been volatile recently. Various securities have experienced “mini flash crashes”: they suddenly lose a large fraction of their value, and regain it just as quickly. I wrote a piece for NECSI’s website to explain some of the market microstructure behind why flash crashes happen.
Read more →The Navy SEAL team that executed Operation Neptune’s Spear, the assault in Abbottabad last week in which Osama bin Laden was killed, has been referred to by the media as the “best of the best.” Let’s get a sense of how good they actually are.
Read more →A technique from operations research called Bayesian search was famously applied to finding vessels lost at sea by John Craven, the US Navy’s Chief Scientist for Special Projects. Given that the recent targeted killing of Osama bin Laden was the work of Navy Seals, it’s possible that directed belief networks were at some point used in [...]
Read more →