About half of children are boys and half are girls, but that doesn’t mean that every couple is equally likely to have a boy or a girl each time they conceive a child. And evidence suggests that indeed the probability of conceiving a girl varies per couple. I will simplify …
Katherine Sayre, for The Wall Street Journal, on Las Vegas casinos squeezing out…Tags: gambling, Las Vegas, probability
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) recently published in its Notices monthly journal a long list of all the doctoral degrees conferred from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020 for mathematics and statistics. The degrees come from 242 departments in 186 universities in the U.S. I enjoy keeping a pulse …
You might’ve heard about large language models lately. They’re the “brains” behind recent…Tags: AI, language, model, Upshot
“The only use I know for a confidence interval is to have confidence in it.” — L. J. Savage Can you have confidence in a confidence interval? In practice, yes. In theory, no. If you have a 95% confidence interval for a parameter θ, can you be 95% sure that …
April 23, 2023, 6:04 p.m.
Jenka Gurfinkel discusses the appearance of the American smile in AI-generated images and…Tags: AI, bias, images, midjourney
I ran across the image below [1] when I was searching for something else, and it made me think of a few issues in data privacy. The green lights cut across the man’s body like tomographic imaging. No one of these green lines would be identifiable, but maybe the combination …
April 1, 2023, 10:19 p.m.
Cryptographic hash functions are also known as one-way functions because given an input x, one can easily compute its hashed value f(x), but it is impractical to recover x from knowing f(x). However, if we know that x comes from a small universe of possible values, our one-way function can …
March 29, 2023, 11:06 a.m.
Continuing an analysis of IRS records, Robert Faturechi and Ellis Simani for ProPublica…Tags: investments, IRS, ProPublica, wealth
March 22, 2023, 7:47 a.m.
The NBA currently uses player-tracking that estimates player position on the court in…Tags: basketball, ESPN, NBA, tracking
March 10, 2023, 4:37 p.m.
For Tedium, Chris Dalla Riva examined why the number of credited songwriters per…Tags: Chris Dalla Riva, music, producers, Tedium
Feb. 15, 2023, 10:16 a.m.
Irving Burr came up with a set of twelve probability distributions known as Burr I, Burr II, …, Burr XII. The last of these is by far the best known, and so the Burr XII distribution is often referred to simply as the Burr distribution. Cumulative density functions (CDFs) of …
AI-based image generation take bits and pieces from existing people-made images and tries…Tags: AI, attribution, ethics, Stable Diffusion
Researchers at Google built a model that generates music based on brief text…Tags: Google, machine learning, music
AI training data comes from the internet, and as we know but maybe…Tags: AI, cleaning, ethics, OpenAI, Sama
People have been having fun with generative AI lately. Enter a prompt and…Tags: AI, ethics, generative art, Maggie Appleton
When I shared an image from the previous post on Twitter, someone who goes by the handle Nonetheless made the astute observation that image looked like the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. That made me wonder what 1/Γ(x) would be like turned into a probability distribution, and whether it would be approximately like …
Stable Diffusion is an AI model that lets you enter text to generate…Tags: AI, music, spectrogram, Stable Diffusion
