of interest

Cramer’s Rule « The Unapologetic Mathematician

2009-11-17T18:19:55.434Z

Cramer’s Rule

We’re trying to invert a function which is continuously differentiable on some region . That is we know that if is a point where , then there is a ball around where is one-to-one onto some neighborhood around . Then if is a point in , we’ve got a system of equations

Mind Hacks: The Argentinian love affair with psychoanalysis

2009-11-17T17:05:00.129Z

However, since working here, I've realised that doing evidence-based empirical psychology and psychiatry is a lot more difficult in countries with limited resources.

Access to the evidence is expensive (thanks to the use of restrictive copyright and excessive pricing by scientific journals) and research is difficult when there is little free time and few funding opportunities.

However, this is much less of an issue with psychoanalysis because the major source of information is your own experience, insights and work with the patient, plus discussions in a limited set of journals.

In other words, it's much easier to fulfil the requirements of what is expected of a well-informed competent psychoanalytic practitioner than what is expected of a scientifically-oriented evidence-based psychologist.

This, I suspect, is one of the many reasons that psychoanalysis remains popular in Latin America.

YouTube - "Robert Erickson" Speech to MN Tea Party Against Amnesty

2009-11-17T04:29:18.801Z

"Robert Erickson" Speech to MN Tea Party Against Amnesty

Live-Blogging Oprah - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2009-11-17T03:42:21.368Z

4.21 pm. Oprah gives the game away: "This was in the book so I assume it was fair game." Oprah clearly agreed in advance only to ask questions from the book's own narrative.This is not journalism; it's celebrity puffery. Of course, it's Oprah.

Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Video on TE...

2009-11-17T02:24:57.170Z

At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

About Pranav Mistry

Pranav Mistry is the inventor of SixthSense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data. Full bio and more links

David Chalmers, David Manley, Ryan Wasserman (eds.) - Metametaphysics: New Es...

2009-11-16T22:44:29.901Z

Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology

David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Oxford UP, 2009, 529pp., $45.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780199546008.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Barnes, University of Leeds

The main goal of a favorable book review should be to make people who read the review want to read the book. With that in mind, this review of Metametaphysics won't be addressed to those deeply immersed in contemporary metaphysics (you know who you are). Rather, I'll try to show that even if you're not a metaphysician -- indeed, even if you're deeply suspicious of metaphysics -- Metametaphysics is interesting.

In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for ...

2009-11-16T21:13:15.908Z

In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for

11 November 2009 by Anil Ananthaswamy
Magazine issue 2734. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
For similar stories, visit the Cosmology , Quantum World and The Large Hadron Collider Topic Guides

Read full article

Continue reading page |1 |2 |3

AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Northwestern Epistemology conference, pre-APA Central » Certain Doubts

2009-11-16T14:27:51.878Z

The Philosophy Department at Northwestern will hold a one-day Epistemology conference on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus on Wednesday, February 17, 2010. The conference is free and open to the public. We especially welcome philosophers who will be in town for the Central APA meeting (Feb 17-20, 2010, Palmer House, Chicago).

The conference is organized loosely around Jennifer Lackey’s book, LEARNING FROM WORDS, and the epistemology of testimony.

"It would be as if any discussion of intercontinental navigation required a p...

2009-11-15T22:56:17.238Z

Risk aversion means many things, but in particular it is associated with attiitudes such as preferring a certain $30 to a 50/50 chance of having either $20 or $40. The standard model for this set of attitudes is to assume a nonlinear function for money. It is well known that reasonable nonlinear utility functions do not explain this sort of $20/30/40 attitude (see section 5 of this little article, for example); nonetheless the curving utility function always comes up in discussion, requiring me to waste a few minutes before going on, explaining why it doesn't explain the phenomenon.

Interview with Manin | The n-Category Café

2009-11-15T18:58:32.235Z

I wonder if those who codified the definition of a group felt as you do towards regular categories. And if they did feel there was something inventive about their work, this might be contrasted with the hunt for a particular group, such as the monster simple group, which feels much more like an act of discovery. Similarly, given all that work on the foundations of algebraic topology, hunting for Eilenberg-Mac Lane spaces would feel like discovery.

But then, given all that has happened since the nineteenth century, don’t we feel inclined to read back that work on defining groups as a kind of discovery? Invention suggests to me a greater freedom; we might have illuminated our houses by devices other than light bulbs. Given the stage of advance of contemporary mathematics, it’s hard to imagine that we might have bypassed the group concept. I suppose we might have moved straight to the groupoid concept, and then have taken as a special case connected groupoids.

I have an article coming out in the next issue of the European Mathematical Society Newsletter on this theme. This continues a series by different authors in the June 07, June 08, and December 08 editions. The second of these is by Barry Mazur.