Science

In the old days, research quality was measured by the number of papers you published. Publishing was a hard process and only few scientists were able to publish several papers per year. However, with the bloom of new journals, the appearance of electronic editorial process, and the specialization of research fields, the number of publications per year has grow exponentially during the last decades. Thus publishing is not longer a good measure of the quality of research. ...

Good news to fans of the “language of Nature”, mathematics. Wall Street Journal is running an article on what are the best jobs in 2008. The ranking is done “evaluating 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.” And which one do you think ranks first? Here is the list of the first ten: ...

In 1828, Robert Brown published the manuscript entitled “A brief account of microscopical observations made in the months of June, July and August 1827, on the particles contained in the pollen of plants; and on the general existence of active molecules in organic and inorganic bodies” in the Edinburgh new Philosophical Journal [download it in pdf format here]. He suspended some of the pollen grains of the species Clarkia pulchella in water and examined them closely, only to see them “filled with particles” of around 5 µm diameter that were “very evidently in motion”. ...

Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.  A famous quote by Stewart Brand, that appear in John Brockman’s essay (and book) The Third Culture

News from the arXiv: a new section has been created to host preprints about Quantitative Finance. The section (as stated in the press release) intends to fix a problem with existing pre-print repositories. One one hand, social sciences repositories like SSRN, RepEC/IDEAS and others are too academic for practitioners, while on the other hand sites like defaultrisk.com or wilmott.com have not attracted many academic contributors. The new category in the arXiv would be a gathering point for both practitioners and academic people working in this important research field ...

Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are basically inhomogenous ordinary differential equations that depend on an external stochastic process. Typically, that stochastic process is white noise, which is the mathematical idealization of the noise found in nature. This idealization is handy, because it simplifies the mathematical description. However, this idealization comes at some cost: traditional calculus is no longer valid and you have to use the so-call Itô calculus. This introduces some non intuitive changes. ...