CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-06-19 09:45:19 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 12 +1s)

Come at me bro!

Just destroyed my email inbox! On to a winning day... 

Working through some teaching prep today.

#comeatmebro  

2013-06-19 07:43:27 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

"Want to quit my PhD"

Quite an intense question over at +OR Exchange!...

Although this is on an Operational Research / Management Science site I'm sure the concerns raised are relevant to many fields.

" Once I transitioned from having to do mostly classes to doing mostly research, I've disliked my PhD. Considering quitting is common, but I would guess that I've thought about quitting around 5 times a week for several years."

"Hell, I'd take a job as a barback."

(Seen via +Bo Jensen on twitter...)

2013-06-18 19:15:44 (3 comments, 3 reshares, 16 +1s)

2013-06-16 17:42:24 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 15 +1s)

I'm working on making https://cloud.sagemath.com work on my Nexus 4 and iPad right now...

2013-06-16 11:12:03 (10 comments, 4 reshares, 14 +1s)

Blog post: Why and how I post my teaching resources publicly online.

Just written a post discussing the thought process behind why I post all my teaching resources online. I understand why some might not like to but I think I gain a lot from doing it...

#education   #openeducation   #openeducationalresources  

2013-06-15 16:22:59 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Here it is at last: the Selected Papers Network.   Given that social networks already exist, all we need for truly open scientific communication is a convention on a consistent set of tags and IDs for discussing papers.  Christopher Lee has developed software that makes this work.  Try it out!  

What's cool about this system is that it's federated.  Instead of “locking up” your comments within its own website—the “walled garden” strategy followed by many other services—it explicitly shares these data in a way that people not on the Selected Papers Network can easily see. Any other service can see and use them too!

2013-06-15 14:00:05 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

First Woman In Space Honored By Flying Female Astronaut

2013-06-14 17:43:50 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

Just on my way back from +Greenwich University having completed the first half of my external examination duties. Now to work on some teaching prep :)

#outoftheofficedesk

2013-06-13 18:41:10 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Room service ordered... Settling down for a bunch of work I need to get done.

#outoftheofficedesk

2013-06-13 14:05:30 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

On my way to London where I'm fulfilling some external examination duties for +Greenwich University...

#outoftheofficedesk

2013-06-12 20:47:05 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

"I could possibly get addicted to this over the summer!"

Just had a cool email from a +Cardiff Maths MSc OR/Stats student who is discovering and using +Python on a project this summer. I think he likes it...

2013-06-12 18:20:23 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

Some pictures from our fine soccer match this afternoon.

The staff team managed to somehow win 1-0... (The reason mainly being +Chris Rowlatt who was ridiculous in goal).

2013-06-12 11:53:19 (6 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

The world's largest database of cancer patients is being set up in England in an attempt to revolutionise care, Public Health England has announced.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22870352

2013-06-12 07:46:14 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

A bunch of interesting things going on today.

First of all my last bit of marking with a project viva, then a meeting with my #pcutl  group (+Philip Anderson and others) to talk about some initial analysis of a questionnaire we have sent out to students from the school of engineering and mathematics regarding attitudes towards formative assessment.

Finally, in the pm I'm playing in a staff v students soccer game which should be a laugh.

2013-06-11 21:41:33 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Dear College Instructors,

+ron taylor (Berry College), +Matthew Leingang (NYU), and I (Northern Arizona University) are interested in how college instructors utilize social media. In particular, we are curious how teachers interact with their current and past students on Facebook and Google+. The intent is to summarize the results in a short article that will likely be submitted to MAA FOCUS (http://www.maa.org/pubs/focus.html). We would be thrilled if you would take a few minutes to complete our short survey.

Link to survey: http://goo.gl/O5nuU

Please pass along.  Thanks!

Dana, Matthew, and Ron

2013-06-11 17:18:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

An Analysis of the Decathlon Scoring System

(Should Eaton have got Bronze rather than Gold at London 2012?...)

Congratulations to David Welsh, my undergraduate project student (co-supervised with Janet Williams), who gave a great performance at yesterday's project viva and submitted a really nice dissertation. The first part of his work examined Decathlon Scoring Systems (he went on to apply the concepts with the Welsh Rugby Union for a standardised scoring system on player performance in training across Wales).

It was a fascinating project and I've highlighted a few of the key messages below (see also associated images).

- The decathlon scoring system was first introduced in 1912. The scoring tables have not been updated for the last 30 years!

- There is no apparent documentation to justify the equations/parameters... more »

2013-06-11 12:43:15 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Anna Nagurney interviewed on "How Closing Roads Can Make Traffic Flow Smoother" http://ow.ly/lUMYN

2013-06-11 13:15:17 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

Price of Anarchy in Public Services

+Paul Harper and my paper with the above title is now on the web (published in EJOR so it's behind a paywall, please get in touch if anyone would like to have a read).

http://goo.gl/b70UO

This paper uses routing #gametheory  to take a look at the effect of selfish behaviour with respect to congestion on things like hospital waiting lines.

When I have a moment I'll write a blog post about it and/or do a screencast of the talk I've given a couple of times on the subject.

Really happy to have this paper published as it was one of my first bits of work in #orms  and #healthcare . Also nice to be able to cite +Sage Mathematical Software System which was used for some of the computations :)

2013-06-11 06:57:06 (21 comments, 1 reshares, 17 +1s)

Research Management for Dummies:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/06/10/research-management-for-dummies/

"During my PhD I was never good at managing my research data. If you ask my former PI, I’m guessing she would actually tell you I was pretty bad. So much so, that she had an emergency lab book meeting with the rest of my group upon seeing mine when l was leaving."

#phdchat #lablife

2013-06-10 17:01:59 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Theory meets practice in my new blog post on how I used the Secretary Problem to successfully sell my house: http://punkrockor.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/the-secretary-problem-is-a-useful-model-for-selling-a-house/

2013-06-10 07:12:32 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

My last bits of marking are in sight! I've got 3 undergraduate project vivas this week which I'm looking forward to.

I've got a bunch of meetings this am including 1 with +Paul Harper and the 3 undergraduates who will be designing outreach activities with schools, +Greenwich University (with +Noel-Ann Bradshaw) and the OR society (with +Louise Orpin). This afternoon I'm in 1 of the vivas I mentioned above and a couple more meetings. Hoping to make progress on some teaching prep in the middle of it all :D

#stem   #mathoutreach  

2013-06-09 16:38:51 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

William Stein was in a video call. #hangoutsonair

2013-06-09 16:06:59 (5 comments, 4 reshares, 6 +1s)

Comparing timing of Recursive and Iterative Algorithms for binary search and factorial

A couple of weeks ago I wrote some code to generate a bunch of data look at how much slower simple recursive algorithms are (I'm teaching recursion in an upcoming course to #mathematics  students).

I can't really conclude much from what I did on the binary search but the factorial seems to indicate that as the size of the task increases the relative gap in performance seems to decrease. As I say in the blog post, I know there's nothing revolutionary here but it was a nice bit of fun...

All the data, scripts etc... can be found at this github repo: http://goo.gl/dmbOF

#sciencesunday   #mathed   #computerscience  

2013-06-09 12:44:46 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 10 +1s)

Last night at 2am I finished the first version of realtime project collaboration for https://cloud.sagemath.com.   Try it out.  Share something with me :-)  (William Stein). 

2013-06-08 14:43:48 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 9 +1s)

Between #Bolivia# and Paraguay, a canyon as seen from the #ISS #Volare

tra Bolivia e Paraguay, un canyon visto dalla ISS...

2013-06-08 12:41:20 (9 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Students seem to get that they need to find their best tool for the job :)

Just written this 3rd post reflecting on my teaching of a new class on +SAS Software and #R . This post is very similar to the previous 2 looking at student choices and preferences between the languages.

#mathed  

2013-06-08 10:09:32 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Head of Airport Performance, Dubai Airport

A good buddy of mine with whom I studied Mathematics together as an undergraduate and was my best man at my wedding, now holds a senior position at Dubai Airport (SVP for Strategy & Development).  He is looking to hire a head of airport performance (skills in mathematical modelling/operations research).  Please do circulate to anyone who might be interested.  
#orms   #mathematics   #dubai  

2013-06-07 15:03:29 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Call for papers: Special Issue on Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation.

Submission deadline: 30 Nov 2013

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pkl/tevc2013si.html

2013-06-07 11:25:57 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Sean Gourley used big data to find a scale-free relationship in the casualty counts of insurgency attacks in the Iraq conflict. He used the power-law exponent as a "structural constant" corresponding to the cohesiveness of insurgence groups, and looked at how it varies across conflicts. Surprisingly, on-going conflicts tend to cluster around a = 2.5. Gourley suggests using this as a diagnostic for measuring the effectiveness of counter-insurgency tactics.

2013-06-06 14:23:30 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

"I'll wait and take a look at the data set"

One +Cardiff Maths MSc OR/Stats student just said that when chatting with +Izabela Komenda (her main supervisor) about what statistical software package she should use for her data analysis in her upcoming project.

This was a small victory for me as it's the main thing I'd have hoped they learnt in a recent course I taught on +SAS Software and #R ... 

2013-06-05 16:04:43 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 21 +1s)

Just had this awesome T-shirt given to me by +Izabela Komenda with a very very nice pen and a bound copy of her thesis (Izabella defended her thesis a couple of weeks ago).

#newfavoritetshirt  

+Zoe Prytherch and I are getting some "pre-wedding" photos done with our photographer on Friday and were earlier chatting about what to wear. My decision is a very easy one (if it gets approved by the committee...).

#gametheory  

2013-06-05 10:07:15 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

"Bottom line? Student evaluations are of questionable value."

Interesting discussion going on on this re-share of a post by +Robert Jacobson by +Dana Ernst. Comment on the original post (comments disabled on this one).

#highered  

2013-06-04 08:00:59 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 13 +1s)

Doing some work out in the sun (we don't get much here in Cardiff and apparently this is the last sunny day for a while...) before heading in to the office for some meetings.

#outoftheofficedesk  

2013-06-04 05:51:40 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

"There are some questions that you should never answer. This is true when you are facing justice, your angry wife, or students."

2013-06-03 21:58:46 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-06-03 21:13:18 (0 comments, 8 reshares, 8 +1s)

Taking a look at an open online list of mathematics books.

http://goo.gl/P3GVs

A couple of days ago +James Noble posted a link to a +Google Drive spreadsheet that anyone could go on and add a book with a quick description.

Really great idea and it's been nice to see the list grow and grow.

I've just written some code to take a look at the list, seeing how many people are contributing and how many authors are on there.

I also do some vary basic analysis of the uncommon words in the description and the suggested target audience. 

I've generated a website hosted using gh-pages that lists the books and gives an updated version of the analysis in the blog post: http://drvinceknight.github.io/An_online_list_of_math_books/.

#math   #mathed  

2013-06-03 18:39:13 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

How Many Stars in the Universe?

Here's my next video explainer. This time I help you count up the stars in the sky. How many stars can you see with the unaided eye or with a small telescope? How many stars in the galaxy? How many stars in the entire Universe? 

Spoiler alert... a lot.

As always,  a big thanks to +Jason Harmer for helping me create these.

2013-06-03 10:28:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

I posted a link to a blog post (not by me) the other day about Benford's law and a couple of people posted some links to other instances of Benford's law (http://goo.gl/4fGzV).

In particular +Praveen T posted a link to this page (by +Jason Long and +Bryce Thornton): http://testingbenfordslaw.com/ which has a bunch of datasets that can be tested against Benford's law. What's really cool is that the page is on github so anyone can add a data set to it! https://github.com/jasonlong/benfords-law

+David Richeson subsequently posted a link to an old post of his with a proof that powers of 2 follow Benford's law! http://goo.gl/5MaE0 (I thought this was really cool).

+Kevin Clift, +Paul Harper and +C. Sean Burns also posted links in the comments that might be of interest:

http://goo.gl/OL6RZ
http://goo.gl/3wsjQ
http://goo.gl/TRrQy

2013-06-01 14:34:48 (5 comments, 4 reshares, 9 +1s)

Benford's law and addresses

Benford's law is pretty neat: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law. It gives a distribution of first digits in numbers in real data. For example generally 30% of first digits are 1.

(Seen via +Mathblogging.org on twitter)

2013-06-01 08:24:29 (21 comments, 0 reshares, 17 +1s)

Things just got real...

Starting to work on the seating plan...

2013-05-31 12:44:31 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 22 +1s)

Congratulations to +Penny Holborn who has just been awarded her PhD.

This brings an end to a busy few weeks with a bunch of people defended their thesis :)

2013-05-31 11:16:07 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-05-31 06:27:33 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

It's extraordinary. You wait all your life for a theory of everything, and then two come along at once. This is from an interview with Will Smith and his son Jaden.

I’ve read that you believe life can be understood through patterns.

Will: I’m a student of patterns. At heart, I’m a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.

Do you think there is a single theory to everything?

Jaden: There’s definitely a theory to everything.

Will: When you find things that are tried and true for millennia, you can bet that it’s going to happen tomorrow.

Jaden: The sun coming up?

Will: The sun coming up, but even a little more. Like for Best Actor Oscars. Almost 90 percent of the time, it’s mental illness and historical figures, right?So, you can... more »

2013-05-30 21:52:50 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

SciPy will include two days of sprints after the conference.  Don't miss this chance to dive into code with core teams of your favorite packages.  Learn about their architecture and contribute to them.  Already announced sprints include Numpy, PySide, Numba and many more.  Don't know how to sprint?  We will teach you.  Finally, every sprinter is invited to a BBQ dinner on Friday night.

Bird of a Feather (BoF) sessions are informal gatherings on topics that our community wants to discuss.  Current Bofs include Women in Scientific Computing, NumFOCUS, PySide, and more. Suggestions for Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions are welcomed, including a description and possible panelists.

2013-05-30 21:22:31 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

The "learning styles" myth is as pervasive as any I encounter working with preservice teachers. I'm sending this video to my class, and if you've found yourself thinking, "I'm a visual/auditory/kinesthetic learner," you might want to watch it, too.

2013-05-30 18:39:33 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Mathematical Modelling for Healthcare

Recently we kind of 'officially' opened the hmc2 (health modelling centre cymru) modelling lab in the School of Mathematics,  +Cardiff University.  This great space / resource will be also home for 4 of the post-docs (+Izabela Komenda, +Julie Vile, Penny Holborn and Tracey England) who are all funded by the Aneurin Bevan local health board.  Really nice to see this vision turn to reality.  Our plans are to sustain and expand the mathematical modelling unit, undertaking applied research making an impact in the health service alongside the underpinning mathematical/OR theory. 

Took these photos for a work based project (practical leadership course) I'm undertaking (don't ask!...) and +Vincent Knight kindly took some of me too with the team ( and became annimated thanks to #autoawesome !) 

#mathematics   #hmc2   #... more »

2013-05-30 17:09:49 (0 comments, 5 reshares, 4 +1s)

Hi all, trying to make a collaborative list of our favourite books about mathematics and maths ed. Please add yours! Let me know of existing lists

2013-05-30 05:38:48 (33 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

New on the blag.

2013-05-29 22:56:28 (9 comments, 1 reshares, 20 +1s)

These eighth graders from a rural California school discovered a cave on Mars. They targeted both THEMIS and HiRISE images to follow up and confirm a collapse pit forming a skylight into a lava tube. Here they are presenting their results to a NASA audience.

2013-05-29 21:24:10 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 14 +1s)

Chick and I are hanging out doing some late night marking...

#markathon2013