It’s a straightforward exercise to divide any free society into those who have power, those who held power, those who are enthralled by power, and those who are merely obedient. Each segment presents a certain type of danger to free society. Today our focus will be on the power enthralled.

The power enthralled are typically those who have never actually held power, but are terribly desperate to hold it. And, it matters not what kind of power they often seek to hold so long as they hold some power over some dynamic of human life. In interacting with them, you may often find them percolating in the mid sections of society unable to rise from their [...]

In the past few months, we’ve seen quite a lot of activity in the renewed space race. As you know, commercial entities like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit have all flown missions in spectacular fashion. There was even a few tussles between them already as the space race heats up. But how will this affect you?

Well, it’s mostly all good news for the consumer, be it someone living in the United States or abroad: Space represents a final frontier in exploration, but a new frontier in technology, economics, science, governance, and even religion. The hurdles required to permanently move humans into [...]

Instagram: The result of my generation’s (millennials) constant seeking of attention, non-stop craving for social proof, and addiction to new social media platforms.

Hi, again! It’s been a while! Glad to be back…

Now…let’s get started…

Depending on your age, either Instagram is this weird platform where young people are posting snaps or videos of themselves doing the most ludicrous poses, or you don’t even know it exists. What you don’t know (or maybe you do) is that among the 14-26 age group, Instagram is not just a social media platform the way Facebook was for us, but it’s a central part of [...]

Falstaff: I will not lend thee a penny.

Pistol: Why then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open

Falstaff: Not a penny.

From Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

Starting out 2019, there is a lot of Chaos (capital C) and in these uncertain times it will be easy for most to forget the big picture. 2018 for me was a true roller coaster, but saw some incredible changes in my life. I’d say 2018 was a great success for me personally and professionally though, and I thought maybe I can share with you three things that helped me make it so.

Slowly but surely you’ve felt a mild Facebook addiction creeping in. At first, you didn’t even want to join Facebook. Perhaps you felt that it was a useless platform – well with email and all. And then – suddenly you thought – OK why not? Time passed and pretty soon you were messaging, status sharing, and even posting those trendy new photos from your latest trip to China. When you left that horrible job with the racist or sexist boss, you even posted the new change in your career – proudly announcing – “I’m off to a new and wonderful beginning, y’all”.

Then it [...]

I got into a long and highly theoretical debate with a fellow Phd student recently, and it prompted this post. It started out as a conversation about a bad class we both took together, and started to veer off into who would, could or would’ve done well in that course. The conversation then steered itself into the concept of geniuses, hard workers, and contributions to society – big and small.

The terrible thing that we as a society often do to ourselves is to label some of us as geniuses – those special alien beings that can do what we can’t. Popular culture would have you believe that those people truly exist. You’ll hear stories about the [...]

As if print publications in the academic community have simply and finally given up altogether, my experience with Science Magazine over the past year has been emblematic of a business model that is struggling for survival. Let me give you some background:

Last summer, as the sun was shining and the birds were chirping and I was feeling the urge to expand my mind so that I can take it all in from the heavens, I decided to support my academic community and the print industry by subscribing to Science Magazine/Journal – one of the premiere science journals in the world, trumped only by Nature (which I’m also a subscriber to). Science is also a [...]

I have been working with networks now for a long time (maybe since 2008?), and after many projects and thousands of hours spent on studying and working with networks, I’ve recently started looking into subjects that make use of graph theory in an attempt to take what I know about graph theory and see if I can build some complementary skills in other areas. So when I started taking a Bayesian Networks (Graphical Probability) course, I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting and how much can be transferred over in terms of basic concepts.

The truth is however, the term networks in Bayesian [...]

This past Wednesday, Dr. Jay W. Forrester – the pioneer of the system dynamics methodology of modeling and simulation and arguably the father of all of modern modeling and simulation passed away. Dr. Forrester created the collection of methods that is known as system dynamics.

System dynamics essentially uses differential equations to describe the stocks and flows that move and govern the behavior of systems as diverse as population growth systems, innovation adoption in a market, the movement of good through a supply chain and even the movement of fluids through a pipe. SD applications are wide and varied and honestly it would take too long to go through all the [...]

Following up on our poll-driven modeling election series, and my previous prediction that in this election cycle the poll-model system that seems to be in place will fail, it behooves us to at least consider what kind of modeling system we would replace the current system with. I should tell you upfront that I don’t have a final answer yet, but I am playing with some code. This is just a think out loud kind of situation.

I did mention that an agent-based model would be the most likely contender to replace a micro-simulation in my last piece. The advantage would be that you can instantiate an entire population of voters and give each agent in that population his/her own [...]

My last article posted in June of 2016 talked about how in 2014 we will end up with a whole slew of new, sleek political models that will be able to “supposedly” predict the rise of Donald Trump. Tonight, as we watch the seemingly inevitable victory of Trump unfold, it’s becoming absolutely clear that the predictive and statistical poll-based models used by the most experienced professionals in the field are missing key components, or at minimum using bad training data.

Something is wrong with polling in general, the models that use the polling and the standard methodology in current use. In fact, up to 100 days prior to an election, [...]

Next year – suddenly out of nowhere – we’ll have a slew of new political prediction models all of them claiming to have been able to predict the Rise of Donald Trump, the Sanders Movement and even the recent exit of Britain from the European Union. Of course, all of them will be after the fact which has always been an easier thing to accomplish – and in the next cycle we’ll throw them all out and go back to the standard models that assume that most people will vote the way that they’re expected to vote under normal circumstances.

We’re talking about some major models breaking down in the face of unexpected changes using standard [...]