These are my links for September 22nd through September 25th: Miniature Pearl: Causal Inference in Statistics: An Overview”, forthcoming in Statistics Surveys 3 (2009): 96–146 – This review presents empirical researchers with recent advances in causal inference, and stresses the paradigmatic shifts that must be undertaken in moving from traditional statistical analysis to causal analysis of multivariate data. Special emphasis is placed on the assumptions that underly all causal inferences, the languages used in formulating those assumptions, the conditional nature of all causal and counterfactual claims, and the methods that have been developed for the assessment of such claims. These […]
Yearly Archives: 2009
56 posts
Water has been found on the moon! A few figures I quickly calculated: The moon‘s surface area is 3.793 × 10^7 km.  Scraping off a few millimeters of soil that contain water would yield 75,860 cubic meters of soil containing 1 liter of water each. So the theoretical upper yield (assuming no other water on the moon) is 75,860 liters, which is about 20,040 gallons of water.   For context, this would fill a little over 3% of a standard 164×82 ft Olympic pool. According to How Stuff Works, it costs about $50,000 per pound to get stuff to the moon. […]
These are my links for September 14th through September 22nd: Philosophy Now | Daniel Dennett: Autobiography (Part 1) – What makes a philosopher? In the first of a two-part mini-epic, Daniel C. Dennett contemplates a life of the mind – his own. Part 1: The pre-professional years. Philosopher’s Annual – Our goal is to select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year—an attempt as simple to state as it is admittedly impossible to fulfill. Against a background of twenty-four volumes in hard copy, the Annual is now available entirely online. Revolutions: Interactive stock visualizations with R – Jeroen […]
These are my links for September 8th through September 14th: Jaakko Hintikka, Past, present and future of set theory | PhilPapers – What one can say about the past, present and future of set theory depends on what one expects or at least hopes set theory will accomplish…I begin with a quote from the inaugural lecture in 1903 of my mathematical grandfather, the internationally known Finnish mathematician Ernst Lindelöf. The subject of his lecture was – guess what – Cantor’s set theory. In his conclusion, Lindelöf says of Cantor’s results: For mathematics they have lent new tools and opened up […]
These are my links for September 1st through September 8th: How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? – NYTimes.com – What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here? As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized […]
These are my links for August 24th through August 27th: Andrew Wayne & Michal Arciszewski, Emergence in physics | PhilPapers – This paper begins by tracing interest in emergence in physics to the work of condensed matter physicist Philip Anderson. It provides a selective introduction to contemporary philosophical approaches to emergence. It surveys two exciting areas of current work that give good reason to re-evaluate our views about emergence in physics. One area focuses on physical systems wherein fundamental theories appear to break down. The other area is the quantum-to-classical transition, where some have claimed that a complete explanation of […]