November 8, 2019
For today
Turn in the Chapter 10 notebook
Turn in your project proposal (due Thursday so I can read them before class)
Today
Evolution
Lotka-Volterra and ABM
For next time:
Read Chapter 12 and do the reading quiz
Work on your project.
Optional video:
A semester at Olin has 26 class meetings, like the miles in a marathon.
Marathoners say that Mile 20 is half way. True for the semester, too?
Distance running calls on (and develops) a mental discipline I think applies to life.
The sprint mentality says "I just need to get through this, and then that", for various values of this and that.
Which means you always think of what you are doing as the means to the next thing, which is the goal.
The distance mentality says, "There is no that, there's just this."
What you are doing now is the thing, not the thing that gets you the next thing.
Please interpret the results. If the question asks "is it long tailed" or "it is fractal", you should answer the question and explain how you came to that conclusion.
To test whether a distribution is long-tailed, you can plot the PMF on a log-log scale, but the results tend to be noisy.
Or you can plot the complementary CDF on a log-log scale.
Either way, a straight line is evidence for a tail that follows a power law.
Let's review why that's true.
Plotting the CDF on a log-log scale doesn't tell you much at all.
However, plotting the CDF on a log scale is a way of testing for a log-normal or log-uniform distribution. We haven't talked about that much, but maybe now is a good time :)
Let's pick on an example notebook and see what we think of the interpretation: https://github.com/NickShermeister/ThinkComplexity2/blob/master/notebooks/chap08mine.ipynb
Let's talk about evolution, that is, the theory that life on earth has evolved (primarily) by natural selection.
What is the tautology argument against evolution?
Let's do some analysis on this quote from http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/tautology.html
The second prong of Darwin's "theory" is generally nothing but a circular statement: Through the process of natural selection, the "fittest" survive. Who are the "fittest"? The ones who survive! Why look – it happens every time! The "survival of the fittest" would be a joke if it weren't part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community. The beauty of having a scientific theory that's a tautology is that it can't be disproved.
What is the origin of the phrase "red in tooth and claw"?
How about "struggle of each against all"?
And what about "selfish gene"?
Let's do some analysis on this quote from https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/red-in-tooth-and-claw.html:
On into the 20th century, the enthusiastic Darwinist Richard Dawkins used 'red in tooth and claw' in The Selfish Gene, to summarize the behaviour of all living things which arises out of the survival of the fittest doctrine.
My response: https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingBros/
Most projects have promise, some riskier than others. We'll talk.
As we shift from proposal to draft, make sure you are presenting clearly what is in the paper you are replicating and what you have done.
Some conventions might help:
"In a 2015 paper, Smith and Jones use <some kind of model> to <predict/explain/design> <some system>.
"They generated the following figure, which shows that their model works
"We replicated their experiment, and produced the following figure, which is similar to theirs in all the important ways, and differs in ways that are not important because...
"In order to answer the question that naturally arises, we extended the model and performed this additional experiment...
"And now here are the results we generated from our experiment, which is ours...
Project Two Schedule
Bibliographies: Oct 29, Nov 1, Nov 5
Proposal: Nov 8
Working notebook: Nov 15
Draft: Nov 22
Final: Dec 11
And now a few words about Lotka-Volterra:
L. V. Nedorezov, "The Dynamics of the Lynx-Hare System: an Application of the Lotka-Volterra Model" https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1134%2FS000635091601019X.pdf
1) When you read the abstract, can you tell the difference between prior work and a description of the current project?
2) What is the explanandum (the thing this paper is trying to explain)?
3) What criterion does the author propose to evaluate the model?
4) How does the author show that the model satisfies the criterion?
5) With how many significant digits does the author report results? How many are justified?
6) What is Figure 3 intended to show? Does it?
7) What are the conclusions of this paper? Are they justified?
BTW, the last paragraph is hilarious.
https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=1304
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~forrest/classes/cs365/lectures/Lotka-Volterra.pdf