The Cost of the Degree of Education

The New York Times has an article about how at certain public universities that certain degrees. While I understand this for graduate and professional school, I don't think it is a good idea for undergraduates.

Presentation Slides for Math Psych Conference

Today I gave my presentation entitled "A context-free language for binary multinomial processing tree models" at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology. I go through the main results of the paper that my advisor and I are working on; this is one of the reasons that I have not blogged much recently. The goal is to have the paper submitted to the Journal of Mathematical Psychology by August 31st.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

So I am a Luddite now...

So while I am sure that my large fan base was eagerly awaiting the promised posts, my hard drive died on Sunday and the data is irrecoverable (unless I want to pay $500 or so, and even then no guarantee). I think it will survive, but it is depressing to lose so much of my academic work, not to mention my music and shows. Oh well...

I have the previous version of my paper that I am working on and my dissertation proposal as well as the presentation. Since I have those three documents, I should be able to survive. But I do have to re-do a fair amount of work on my paper since I had not (yet) backed up the latest revisions. All of this is a long way to say that my promised posts are going to be delayed.

At least two posts almost ready to go...

So, I know that I have been somewhat remiss in posting this past week or so. I have been aiming for posting at least 3 times a week, but I certainly did not manage that the last week or so. I will blame that on there being good surf...

But there are two things I plan to post on by Sunday night (hopefully).

1. I just read Skyrms' The Evolution of the Social Contract and I would like to offer some thoughts on how it has helped me think about the evolution of norms.
   
2. Related to (1), there is an article in a recent issue of Science about the evolution of norms that I would to talk about.

You may have notice that I will be blogging more and more about games, decisions, and dynamics and that is because there are some issues in the evolution of norms (social structure and language) that interest me and that I would like to begin to investigate formally. But don't worry: mathematical psychology will not disappear.

Research Meeting

One of the reasons that MBS is such a wonderful graduate program is the contact that we have with graduate students outside of our specific field of study; not just with people inside our program, but people outside it as well.

For example, my work uses the tools of mathematical logic in mathematical psychology. Another individual in my program (who is beginning a Postdoc in August) uses algebra to investigate media theory, which is the theory of how knowledge is accumulated. And yet another student in our program is looking at psychophysical response times of vision and using differential equations to model his empirically findings about vision. So, the interests of the grad students in the MBS program is quite diverse. But we also are in weekly, if not almost daily, contact with grad students in other programs (economics, cognitive science, management, logic and philosophy of science) who use mathematics to model the social and behavioral sciences. This gives us a very broad, yet somewhat deep understanding of all of the ways that mathematics is being used in the social and behavioral sciences.

This is the beauty of mathematics: if you understand the mathematics, then you can understand the application even if it is in a field you are totally unfamiliar with the subject matter, like say, finance.

This leads me to the weekly summer research lunch meeting that we have. It is informal and no one is under any obligation to go. But since we learn so much from one another during the academic year in seminar and elsewhere, we continue to have contact with one another over the summer to bounce our research ideas off one another. And also to talk about baseball.

To give a sampling of what types of things we talk about see this conference. It was an excellent conference and any outsider would have been truly impressed with the quality of our work.

Short Profile on Pen Maddy

On the UCI website there is a short profile on Pen Maddy, the Logician and Philosopher of Science. I have taken three classes with her (two on the philosophy of logic and one of the philosophy of mathematics; and schedule permitting, I will take some more in the future). Anyway, she is the kindest and most helpful professor as well as being brilliant. (Parenthetically, she is also a baseball fan, which is awesome.)

She has had four books published; the most recent of which is Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method. This book, which I had the privilege to read with Prof Maddy and some of the Logic and Philosophy of Science graduate students at UCI demonstrates how a scientist, whom Maddy refers to as as the 'Second Philosopher' (she- the Second Philosopher- is philosophically naive, but scientifically sophisticated) would go about doing philosophy. First, Maddy describes how the Second Philosopher reacts to various philosophies and then she shows how the Second Philosopher does philosophy in an austere form of naturalism.

If you have not read Maddy's books before, and naturally I suggest that you do, one of the reasons they are such a pleasure to read even though the content is dense is that she is very attuned to the history of science and mathematics. And so Maddy actually looks at the way that science and mathematics is done as opposed to just giving some a priori explanation that has nothing to do with science. This leads me to what I think is the best invention in the Second Philosophy book, viz. the notion of a KF-Structure. (The K stands for Kant and the F for Frege.) The KF-Structure, is, as I recall it, the bare bones world that the Second Philosopher is able to come up with. And it turns out, that there is plenty one can do with such a world. Anyway, when I get my hands on a copy again I will write more about the KF-Structure. And this reminds me, I also need to talk about- one day- with respect to the philosophy of mathematics robust and thin realism as well as arealism. (I generally consider myself to be a thin realist- like Aristotle before me, whereas Maddy is an arealist.)

As a follow-up on ID

This is from slashdot... It turns out that I agree with someone named "Satanic Puppy"- see the comments.