Palko points us to this charming screed from King Abdullah University: The #NobelPrizeinPhysics2024 for Hopfield & Hinton rewards plagiarism and incorrect attribution in computer science. It’s mostly about Amari’s “Hopfield network” and the “Boltzmann Machine.” 1. The Lenz-Ising recurrent architecture with neuron-like elements was published in...

David Freedlander reports on some election forecasters. It’s a silly article, and equating Allan Lichtman with actual political scientist isn’t so fair to Alan Abramowitz, but I get it—it’s a fun feature story, not meant to be an in-depth exploration of the topic. I did want to correct this statement, though: ABC hired the former Economist modeler...

Leroy Wolins writes: Last spring a graduate student at Iowa State University required data of a particular kind in order to carry out a study for his master’s thesis. In order to obtain these data he wrote to 37 authors whose journal articles appeared in APA journals between 1959 and 1961. Of these authors, 32 replied. Twenty-one of these reported...

This is Bob. And I’d like to know the best way for us to code a bunch of models in JAX to use to evaluate parallel algorithms including normalizing flows. I’m going to dump out my current thinking, but I’m really hoping to get feedback from experts on the best way to do this without starting a flame war in the comments. Why not Stan? Ask Elizaveta!...

Just did this one in class today. Suppose you run 10 independent experiments, each has the same true effect size and each has the same standard error. Further assume that the experiments are pretty good, and the true effect size is 2 standard errors from zero. What will the p-values look like? Here’s a simulation: set.seed(123) J <- 10 ...

Supreme Court judge Samuel Alito was asked to recuse himself from cases involving the January 6, 2021, riots, following the news that an upside-down U.S. flag, which was associated with that insurrection, was hung at his house on that day. In a bit of meta-commentary, Paul Campos tells this story of Kathleen Parker, a Washington Post columnist who...