Anirban’s Angle
Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta writes:
It might well be an exercise in frivolity, but I see a common thread between Sherlock Holmes and the bootstrap. It’s randomized inference. A standard example in a statistics class is that if a coin is tossed 20 times, the 5% UMP unbiased test concludes…
Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta writes:
It is the mark of an instructed mind, said Aristotle, not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible. Delicate and classy, still, the nature of mathematics is such that quantities of intrinsic importance often cannot be evaluated in a simple…
Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta explores how citation indices are created:
Some love them, some hate them, but citation indices are heartily gobbled up by administrators in tenure and promotion decisions. It has also been argued that funding should be tied to citation history (Nicholson and Ioannidis, Nature, 2012). Adler,…
Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta writes:
A wonderful thing about tenure is that once I had it, I never had to control my irresistible urge to waste my time on the most useless of all things. The other day, a close friend said to me, “But I was almost right!”…
Contributing Editor Anirban DasGupta writes:
Perhaps it says something about human psychology that if a theoretical model for some problem makes predictions — better yet, sensational or bizarre predictions — which later come out to be true, then we take the model more seriously. But should we? After all, other…