Science

I got wonderful news today. Our paper “Specialization and herding behavior of trading firms in a financial market” (pdf) has been selected by the Editorial Board of New Journal of Physics as part of the Journal’s Best of 2008. According to their site, “Best of 2008” is a compilation of articles selected by the Editorial Board and staff team on the basis of criteria including referee endorsements, readership and citation levels and simple broad appeal. ...

Mark Twain (1924) probably had politicians in mind when he reiterated Disraeli’s famous remark ("There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics"). Scientists, we hope, would never use data in such a selective manner to suit their own ends. But, alas, the analysis of data is often the source of some exasperation even in an academic context. On hearing comments like ‘the result of this experiment was inconclusive, so we had to use statistics’, we are frequently left wondering as to what strange tricks have been played on the data. ...

One of the areas of my research is stochastic differential equations (SDE). I posted about it several times before. One of the things students and collaborators keep asking me about SDEs is the weird stochastic Itô Calculus. Itô Calculus is different from what you learn in 101 calculus. In particular, the chain rule is not longer valid. Let me explain it with an example. Suppose you have the following equation ...

The Eigenfactor Project and Moritz Stefaner join efforts to visualize the citation network between different journals belonging to different research fields. It is amazing and a wonderful way to explore patterns in citation networks  Found via FlowingData

Although the public transportation system in Madrid is very good, I don’t usually take the bus or the train to move around. But sometimes my car decides I should take public transportation (bus or train). One of things I always found intriguing is that I always wait way more for the bus than what is expected according to the frequency quoted by the transportation companies at the bus or train stop. ...

I found an interesting presentation by Sami Mitra, associate editor of Physical Review Letters, about the editorial office and the editorial process at PRL. Among some interesting figures about the journal and also about the procedure of selecting potential referees, I enjoyed very much the quotes from some of the referee communications with the editorial office. Here they are: I cannot review this paper as it is wrong and I did it first. ...