Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science

The Park City Math Institute (PCMI) 2016 Summer Undergraduate Faculty Program met for the purpose of composing guidelines for undergraduate programs in Data Science. The group consisted of 25 undergraduate faculty from a variety of institutions in the U.S., primarily from the disciplines of mathematics, statistics and computer science. These guidelines are meant to provide some structure for institutions planning for or revising a major in Data Science

From Knowledge, Knowability and the Search for Objective Randomness to a New Vision of Complexity

Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do with our understanding of randomness, irreversibility and unpredictability using physical theory, and these in turn undermine our certainty regarding what we can and what we cannot know about complex phenomena in general. The sources of complexity examined herein appear to be channels for the amplification of naturally occurring randomness in the physical world. Our analysis suggests that when the conditions for the renormalization group apply, this spontaneous randomness, which is not a reflection of our limited knowledge, but a genuine property of nature, does not realize the conventional thermodynamic state, and a new condition, intermediate between the dynamic and the thermodynamic state, emerges. We argue that with this vision of complexity, life, which with ordinary statistical mechanics seems to be foreign to physics, becomes a natural consequence of dynamical processes.Comment: Phylosophica

The precautionary principle. Between social norms and economic constructs

Cet article confronte les interprétations proposées pour le principe de précaution qui viennent de deux horizons différents : les théories économiques du risque qui s'inscrivent dans un cadre bayésien et les repères heuristiques de la doctrine validée par les institutions européennes et françaises. Les traits communs sont mis en évidence, mais aussi d'importantes différences quant aux concepts et aux contextes d'application. Malgré ces différences, l'analyse économique propose des éclairages utiles sur plusieurs questions controversées soulevées par la mise en œuvre du principe de précaution comme norme sociale. Cela concerne par exemple la réversibilité des mesures de précaution, la question de l'application directe du principe à toute personne ou aux seules autorités publiques et le problème de l'imputation de la charge de l'instruction scientifique des hypothèses de risque.

The years of high econometrics: A short history of the generation that reinvented economic

This book is an essay in biography and its subject matter is the collective effort of that brilliant generation of economists who aspired to transform economics into a rigorous science. The powerful econometric movement took shape in the 1930s, the years of high theory – the concept that Shackle used to describe the period of the inception of the Keynesian revolution, a period that cannot be thoroughly understood unless both movements are contrasted. In a sense, both the Keynesian revolution and the econometric revolution shared the same motivation: to extend the empirical capacity of economics, broadening its analytical scope and strengthening its capacity for designing a control policy. As the story unfurls, it becomes obvious that the young econometricians with Keynesian leanings were more radically engaged in such a task than the Cambridge circle itself, and this was the profound reason for a great deal of the harsh criticism and disappointment that they faced. Furthermore, the acceptance of the epistemological primacy of a very peculiar type of simple mathematical formalism contributed to the marginalisation of some of the major theoretical alternatives developed in the first half of the century. Evidence shows that the endorsement of the urgent political agenda for action against unemployment and the dangers of war were instrumental in determining the victory of a specific mathematical drive, and that the econometric programme as it came to be conceived in these incipient years was shaped by this movement. As a consequence of its impact, econometrics became a tool for the reconstruction of neoclassical economics, which sought to be redescribed in the language of mathematical formalism and statistical inference and estimation, and simultaneously responsible for the decay of heterodox alternatives elsewhere. In that sense, modern economics was a tributary of that success.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio