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A biography about magician-turned-mathematician (probabilist) Persi Diaconis as well as a look at his experiments to understand the bias of a coin flip.

Great article. Everything I've been saying about Diaconis I learned through oral tradition. It's good to know I was pretty much right on.

Funny, after reading the article I concluded that you must've either read this article or a similar biographical sketch. Diaconis must be some legend! One of my favorite parts was that he was a bit 'rough' at one point. Gives the rest of us some hope!

Michael A. M. Lerner talks with the man who is putting the "science" back in political science.

This is for those who wondered what a degree in math can get!

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore - sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.

Although I did not enter the debate, I remember the Marilyn vos Savant vs. the mathematicians episode. I was in high school at the time. Marilyn's solution is sound, and her tactics are indeed wise: to people who disagreed with her explanation, she suggested they simply experiment and see what they find. So both the Bayesian and frequency models of probability are brought into play here. Persi Diaconis, the carnival card shark turned Harvard mathematics professor who I mentioned in class, is also quoted in this article. The Marilyn vs. the Mathematicians rematch did not turn out so well for her. When Wiles and Taylor finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem, she pronounced it phony because she didn't understand it. The mathematical consensus remains that the proof is good.

Yikes! A 45% chance of some kind of cancer. Not good news for those of us over 30.

NY Times article about bridge and probability

Unfortunately, the rest of the column is full of bridge jargon and I don't play. This is like NASCAR for nerds.

Unless you're really interested in all the pictures of license plates, scroll down to "County coding" to see the mathematically relevant part. Ask yourself: how many license plates can be generating in the scheme used from 1963 to 2008? How many can be generated in the new scheme?

A gallery of Indiana license plates and description of the various coding schemes used.

Not so much relevant to probability but a nice story and it mentions an NYU professor.

When baseball dubbed shortstop Harold Reese "Pee Wee" and first basemen Fred Merkle "Bonehead," they probably weren't trying to lengthen the players' lives. But according to researchers at Wayne State University, major-league players who have nicknames live 2½ years longer, on average, than those without them. The nickname findings are part of the wide-ranging and often arcane academic research that deals with the national pastime. In another study, we learn that players whose first or last name begins with "K" strike out more than those without "K" initials. And in case you were wondering, research finds Democrats support the designated-hitter rule more than Republicans.

the initial K effect really gets me, probably because the human tendency to try and explain it does not work. The original paper is here and contains an additional study which found that "students whose names began with 'C' or 'D' earned lower GPAs than students whose names began with 'A' or 'B.'" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=946249 Here is some criticism of the study. http://sabermetricresearch.blogspot.com/2007/11/k-study-for-real_26.html http://skepstat.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-i-am-javascript-master.html