Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime economist, trader, artist, expat, poet, EA, and programmer—writes on things of int­erest.

Notes: The Gender Gap in Math
women in stem, mathy, talk notes

"The Gender Gap in Math" presented by the Harvard Undergraduate Mathematics Association

Panel: Gigliola Staffilani (Professor, MIT Math), Rediet Adebe '13 (PhD, Harvard SEAS), Hilary Finucane '09 (PhD, MIT), Alison Miller '08 (Postdoc, Harvard Math)
Moderator: Sarah Richardson (Professor, Harvard Social Studies)

Notes legibility estimate: HIGH

Notes completeness estimate: Incomplete; important, scattered quotes only.

Please assume that everything is at best a loose paraphrasing of what the panelists actually said; in the place where it got really bad, I've noted [paraphrased], but the others aren't always close quotations, either. Many good answers were left off because I'm seriously not that fast at taking notes.

HUMS: Some Numbers

The Harvard Undergraduate Math Survey (May 2014) was organized by Meena Boppana, Kate Donahue, Domniki Georgopoulou, and Caitlin Stanton, with contributions by Rahul Dalal, Ellen Robo, and Isabel Vogt, and advised by Prof. Benedict Gross. It had 130 responses, 55 from math concentrators (1/3 of math undergrads); here are a few of the findings.

Are you made uncomfortable by the

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January 16 Links: Technologies, Games, and Play
links, effective altruism, public health, space, mathy, twitter, tech in classrooms, video games, mathy puzzles, google, ms, earning to give

Yes, the Friday linkwrap is, in fact, going out on Friday. We're living in the future!

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The Harvard Political Review reports that a Chicago nonprofit is scraping Twitter to pass on complaints about food poisoning in restaurants to the Chicago Department of Public Health:

Foodborne Chicago depends on human judgment in addition to computerized predictions. First, the algorithm "surfaces tweets that are related to foodborne illnesses." Next, "a human classifier goes through those complaints that the machine classifies, [...determining] what is really about food poisoning and what may be other noise." The Foodborne team then tweets back at the likely cases, providing a link for users to file an official complaint. In short, computers deal with the massive quantity of Twitter data, and humans ensure the quality of the result. According to its website, between its launch on March 23, 2013 and November 10, 2014, the Foodborne algorithm flagged 3,594 tweets as potential food poisoning cases. Of these tweets, human coders have identified 419,

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November 28 Bucket o' Links: "(Un)reality" Edition
links, internet, irony, virtual reality, art, mathy

Welp, some weeks I just sit on the linkwrap for an extra five days. Plan is still to throw another one up this Friday, by which I mean, tomorrow... urp.

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Blah blah blah blah Reading Feed blah.

1

Sometimes, when we're interacting with people on the internet, we forget that, on the other end of a digital pipeline, there's an actual human being.

...and so, sometimes the right way to deal with internet trolls is by letting their mothers know what they're up to:

Alanah Pearce, student and sometime-game-reviewer, is quoted in The Guardian:

"A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren't adult males... It turns out that mostly they're young boys and the problem is they don't know any better, so responding to

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