Bookmarks for January 28th through February 1st

These are my links for January 28th through February 1st:

  • Keeping computers from ending science’s reproducibility – In recent years, scientists may have inadvertently given up on a key component of the scientific method: reproducibility. That’s an argument that’s being advanced by a number of people who have been tracking our increasing reliance on computational methods in all areas of science. An apparently simple computerized analysis may now involve a complex pipeline of software tools; reproducing it will require version control for both software and data, along with careful documentation of the precise parameters used at every step. Some researchers are now getting concerned that their peers simply aren’t up to the challenge, and we need to start providing the legal and software tools to make it easier for them.
  • The Document Which Was Formerly Called The MIT Guide to Lockpicking – I am told that the university which has its’ name associated with this document would prefer not to. Fine. I will now no longer refer to it as The MIT Guide To Lockpicking or The MIT Lockpicking Guide. Truth be told, I am a member of the Bavarian Illuminati and I wrote it myself shortly after I instigated Watergate and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I hereby absolve a certain highly respectable university in Massachusets from any and all responsibility for this document.
  • Game Theory – Game theory is a fascinating subject….there is a vast area of economic games, and the related political games, The competition between firms, the conflict between management and labor, the fight to get bills through congress, the power of the judiciary, war and peace negotiations between countries, and so on, all provide examples of games in action. There are also psychological games played on a personal level, where the weapons are words, and the payoffs are good or bad feelings, Berne (1964). There are biological games, the competition between species, where natural selection can be modeled as a game played between genes, Smith (1982). There is a connection between game theory and the mathematical areas of logic and computer science. One may view theoretical statistics as a two person game in which nature takes the role of one of the players, as in Blackwell and Girshick (1954) and Ferguson (1968).

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