📺 "Modern Family" The Escape | ABC

Watched "Modern Family" The Escape from ABC
Directed by Steven Levitan. With Ed O'Neill, Sofía Vergara, Julie Bowen, Ty Burrell. Haley meets Arvin's parents but when things don't go as planned, fate leads to an unexpected reunion with all of her ex-boyfriends. Meanwhile, the family seizes on a nursing home visit with Jay's mean sister, Becky, to settle old scores. But as Jay, Claire and Mitchell compete for her time, Phil, Cam and Gloria end up getting trapped in the home's basement with no way out.

📺 "Modern Family" Mother! | ABC

Watched "Modern Family" Mother! from ABC
Directed by Eric Dean Seaton. With Ed O'Neill, Sofía Vergara, Julie Bowen, Ty Burrell. When DeDe arrives for a surprise visit, Mitchel and Cam come to an understanding regarding her influence on their lives. Phil, Luke, Alex and Haley have bad news for Clair and compete for the right timing to tell her.
This episode was awesome in so many ways. I think it’s also the third time I’ve seen it.

Mitchell and Cam using their laptops to cover up the kitchen sign only to have it spell “M-O-M” was just awesome.

🔖 Pulling the Goalie: Hockey and Investment Implications by Clifford S. Asness, Aaron Brown | SSRN

Bookmarked Pulling the Goalie: Hockey and Investment Implications by Clifford S. Asness, Aaron Brown (SSRN)
We build a simple, but powerful and intuitive, model for when a hockey coach should pull the goalie when trailing. When the model reports that the coaches aren’t doing it nearly early enough, we then ask why, and take away some key lessons for portfolio and risk management, and business in general.

📺 "Suits" Managing Partner | USA Network

Watched "Suits" Managing Partner from USA Network
With Gabriel Macht, Rick Hoffman, Sarah Rafferty, Amanda Schull. When Harvey and Zane can't stay on the sidelines, Donna does what's best for the firm.
I have to say I don’t really miss the “Mike” lead character very much. They’ve done a good job of moving on and changing some of the dynamic and characters of the show while rejuvenating it all at the same time.

🔖 PlumX Metrics | Plum Analytics

Bookmarked PlumX Metrics (plumanalytics.com)

PlumX Metrics provide insights into the ways people interact with individual pieces of research output (articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and many more) in the online environment. Examples include, when research is mentioned in the news or is tweeted about. Collectively known as PlumX Metrics, these metrics are divided into five categories to help make sense of the huge amounts of data involved and to enable analysis by comparing like with like.

PlumX gathers and brings together appropriate research metrics for all types of scholarly research output.

We categorize metrics into 5 separate categories: Usage, Captures, Mentions, Social Media, and Citations.

🔖 [1703.04184v2] A Theory for Gender Differences in Variability by Theodore P. Hill and Sergei Tabachnikov

Bookmarked [1703.04184v2] A Theory for Gender Differences in Variability by Theodore P. Hill, Sergei Tabachnikov (arxiv.org)
A selectivity theory is proposed to help explain how one gender of a species might tend to evolve with greater variability than the other gender. Briefly, the theory says that if one sex is relatively selective, then more variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to prevail over those with lesser variability; and conversely, if one sex is relatively non-selective, then less variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to prevail over those with greater variability. This theory makes no assumptions about differences in means between the sexes, nor does it presume that one sex is selective and the other non-selective. Two mathematical models are presented: a statistical analysis using normally distributed fitness values, and a deterministic analysis using a standard system of coupled ordinary differential equations with exponentially distributed fitness levels. The theory is applied to the classical greater male variability hypothesis.

👓 Hill Statement | Ted Hill

Read Hill Statement by Ted Hill (tphill.net)
Comments on Wilkinson's and Farb's Official Statements About Hill's 9/7/18 Quillette Article: https://math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/Statement.html (accessed 9/13/18) https://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/statement (accessed 9/13/18) Allegations that Wilkinson does not deny in her statement: 1. Wilkinson asked her father to write to the Intelligencer criticizing the paper. 2. Wilkinson falsely blamed divulgence of her name on the Intelligencer. 3. Hill wrote a polite email (copied below) to Wilkinson that she never answered even though she claims she had "scientific criticisms" of the article. 4. Hill wrote a longer rebuttal to Wilkinson's father asking for more discussion. He also did not reply to Hill. 5. Even after the Intelligencer article was rescinded, Wilkinson "continued to trash both the journal and the editor-in-chief on social media". 6. Wilkinson falsely announced on Facebook that a substantially different paper had been accepted.. 7. Even after the NYJM article was deleted, Wilkinson "was threatening Facebook friends with 'unfriending' unless they severed social media ties with" [Igor Rivin, the editor who had solicited the paper].

👓 Echo Chamber Incites Online Mob to Attack Math Profs | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science | Andrew Gelman

Read Echo Chamber Incites Online Mob to Attack Math Profs by Andrew Gelman (Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science)
Trying to make sense of the story With this in mind, there were a few aspects of Hill’s blog entry that didn’t completely make sense to me. First, the research article did not seem politically objectionable to me. I could see how people with strong views on the topic of sex differences would find things to criticize in his paper, and he could well be missing some important points of the biology, and if you really tried to apply his model to data I don’t think it would work at all, so, sure, the paper’s not perfect. But as a math paper that touches on an interesting topic, it is what it is, and I was surprised there’d be a campaign to suppress it.
Not as influential in the debate as one of the referring articles led me to have believed.

📖 Read pages 146-167 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

📖 Read pages 146-167 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

👓 Additional thoughts on the Ted Hill paper | Timothy Gowers

Read Additional thoughts on the Ted Hill paper by Timothy Gowers (Gowers's Weblog)
First, I’d like to thank the large number of commenters on my previous post for keeping the discussion surprisingly calm and respectful given the topic discussed. In that spirit, and to try t…
The analysis here makes me think there might be some useful tidbits hiding in the 300+ comments of his prior article. I wish I had the time to dig back into it.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Our prehistoric ancestors were not doing higher mathematics, so we would need to think of some way that being on the spectrum could have caused a man at that time to become highly attractive to women.  

One needs to remember that it isn’t always the men that themselves need to propagate the genes directly (ie, they don’t mate with someone to hand their genes down to their progeny directly). Perhaps a man on the autism spectrum, while not necessarily attractive himself, has traits which improve the lives and fitness of the offspring of his sister’s children? Then it’s not his specific genes which are passed on as a result, but those of his sister’s which have a proportion of his genes since they both share their parent’s genes in common.
September 19, 2018 at 03:35PM

variability amongst males  

Does it need to be a mate-related thing? Why not an environmental one. I seem to recall that external temperature had a marked effect on the sexual selection within alligator populations such that a several degree change during gestation would swing the sex proportion one way or another. Could these effects of environment have caused a greater variability?

Further, what other factors may be at play? What about in sea horse populations where males carry the young? Does this make a difference?
September 19, 2018 at 03:41PM

👓 Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed? | Timothy Gowers

Read Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed? by Timothy Gowers (Gowers's Weblog)
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
I agree in large part with his assessment, and do so in part based on Ted Hill’s Quillette article and not having read the actual paper yet.

I will say that far more people have now either heard about or read Hill’s paper than would have ever otherwise been aware of it had it actually gone ahead and actually been published and kept up. This is definitely an academic case of the Barbara Streisand effect, though done somewhat in reverse.

👓 Statement by Benson Farb in response to Ted Hill’s unfounded allegations. | Benson Farb

Read Statement by Benson Farb in response to Ted Hill's unfounded allegations. by Benson Farb (math.uchicago.edu)

This statement is meant to set the record straight on the unfounded accusations of Ted Hill regarding his submission to the New York Journal of Mathematics (NYJM), where I was one of 24 editors serving under an editor-in-chief. Hill's paper raised several red flags to me and other editors, giving concern not just about the quality of the paper, but also the question of whether it underwent the usual rigorous review process. Hill's paper also looked totally inappropriate for this theoretical math journal: in addition to the paucity of math in the paper, its subject classification (given by the authors themselves) appeared in no other paper in NYJM's 24 year history, and did not fall into any of the areas of expertise of the editors of NYJM, as listed on the NYJM website.

At the request of several editors, the editor-in-chief pulled the paper temporarily on 11/9/17 so that the entire editorial board could discuss these concerns. A crucial component of such a discussion are the reports by experts judging the novelty and quality of the mathematics in Hill's paper. The editor who handled the paper was asked to share these reports with the entire board. My doubts about the paper - and the process - grew when repeated requests for the reports went unanswered. Nearly 3 months passed until the two reports were finally shared with the entire board on 2/7/18. The reports themselves were not from experts on the topic of the paper. They did not address our concerns about the substantive merit of the paper.

After these reports were shared, the entire board discussed what do. For many of us, there was no compelling evidence that Hill's paper was appropriate for NYJM. Further, the evidence that the paper had undergone rigorous scrutiny before being accepted was scant. In light of this, the board voted (by a 2-to-1 ratio) to rescind the paper. I believe that the editor-in-chief should have added a statement about why this was done, but he did not. Amie Wilkinson played no role in any deliberation of Hill's or any paper at NYJM.

I appreciate those who have taken the time to examine the record, including the University of Chicago.

Benson Farb Professor of Mathematics University of Chicago