Linear Digressions

Doing some science, and want to know if you might have found something? Or maybe you've just accomplished the scientific equivalent of going fishing and reeling in an old boot? Frequentist p-values ...

2 Sep 201517min

This machine learning algorithm beat the human champions at Jeopardy. What is... Watson?

25 Aug 201515min

Come get a little "out there" with us this week, as we use a meta-study of extrasensory perception (or ESP, often used in the same sentence as "psychics") to chat about Bayesian vs. frequentist statis...

18 Aug 201511min

Ever found yourself wasting time reading online comments from trolls? Of course you have; we've all been there (it's 4 AM but I can't turn off the computer and go to sleep--someone on the internet is...

7 Aug 201512min

Imagine a language that is mostly spoken rather than written, contains many words in other languages, and has relatively little written overlap with English. Now imagine writing a machine-learning-ba...

3 Aug 201512min

In a fun historical journey, Katie and Ben explore the history of the Manhattan Project, discuss the difficulties in modeling particle movement in atomic bombs with only punch-card computers and ingen...

6 Jul 201515min

Let's talk about randomness! Although randomness is pervasive throughout the natural world, it's surprisingly difficult to generate random numbers. And even if your numbers look random (but actually a...

19 Jun 201510min

Following up on our last episode about how experiments can be performed in political science, now we explore a high-profile case of an experiment gone wrong. An extremely high-profile paper that was...

9 Jun 201521min