Summer 2022 ends

So, the summer has ended and a new academic year has started. This summer I finally was able to get almost three weeks of decent vacation time (even did some unsuccessful fishing and stargazing). Thus I have recovered enough energy to prepare some new content for Physics of Risk. So Physics of Risk lives again!

Now, this semester we will take a look at a quite a few statistical puzzles. Some of the upcoming posts will be inspired by recent preprints I have seen on the arXiv this summer, while others will be solutions to various Riddler problems published on fivethirtyeight.com.

I was also considering writing a couple of posts on point processes (related to my newest paper [1]), random telegraph noise (currently still working on this paper) and non-Markovian opinion dynamics (seen couple of interesting seminars this summer). Though these will likely have to wait until after the new year.

Photo of a book by N. Arya (available from
pexels.com).

Happy new academic year!

References

IFISC: Complexity in social systems

What physics has to do with the analysis of social systems? Well, society is a complex system after all, so we can approach it as we would any complex system. Though, as usual, domain knowledge is often useful in such approaches.

We invite you to watch this interesting video scripted and edited by J. Llabres and Sara Oliver from IFISC.

With this post we going on summer hiatus. See you in September!

Wireless mouse battery problem

When teaching Numerical Methods and Matlab I like to challenge myself and take upon doing some new practical project to show my students how to apply their newly acquired skills to do something fun. This video is from the 2020 spring semester and in it I explore service time of a wireless mouse with two batteries.

For detailed problem statement and the solution see the recording on Youtube. Though, notably, the sound quality of the recording was not good. You can also find more details on GitHub, too (check out https://github.com/akononovicius/NMI-coding-session-archive/tree/main/2020-battery-problem).

Earlier videos as well as my other impressions on Matlab can be found more easily by checking out #Matlab tag.