Related papers: 'Bose minus Einstein' and other examples of misatt…
In a recent paper, Hirsch (2018) proposes to attribute the credit for a co-authored paper to the {\alpha}-author--the author with the highest h-index--regardless of his or her actual contribution, effectively reducing the role of the other…
This essay identifies a failure mode of AI chat systems that we term attribution laundering: the model performs substantive cognitive work and then rhetorically credits the user for having generated the resulting insights. Unlike…
Interference effects are widely neglected in searches for new physics. This is the case in recent publications on searches for W'-bosons using leptonic final states. We examine the effects of interference on distributions frequently used to…
This paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding AI hallucinations as a distinct form of misinformation. While misinformation scholarship has traditionally focused on human intent, generative AI systems now produce false yet…
Authorship misattribution can have profound consequences in real life. In forensic settings simply being considered as one of the potential authors of an evidential piece of text or communication can result in undesirable scrutiny. This…
Recently I posted a paper entitled "External observer reflections on QBism". As any external observable, I was not able to reflect some features of QBism properly. Therefore comments which I received from one of its creators, C. Fuchs, are…
This article discusses several erroneous claims which appear in textbooks on numerical methods and computational physics. These are not typos or mistakes an individual author has made, but widespread misconceptions. In an attempt to stop…
We show how degeneracies, accidental or otherwise, can obscure some interesting physics. We further show how one can get around this problem.
Contribution to the discussion of "When should meta-analysis avoid making hidden normality assumptions?" by Dan Jackson and Ian R. White (2018; https://doi.org/10.1002/bimj.201800071).
In 1924, S. N. Bose proposed (i) a new counting method for photons and (ii) a probabilistic law of microscopic matter-radiation interactions, treating emission and absorption as two aspects of a single, field-dependent process. While…
Astronomical data is full of holes. While there are many reasons for this missing data, the data can be randomly missing, caused by things like data corruptions or unfavourable observing conditions. We test some simple data imputation…
This paper investigates the combinatorics that gives rise to the Boltzmann probability distribution. Despite being one of the most important distributions in physics and other fields of science, the mathematics of the underlying model of…
This article examines the overlooked risk of false negative errors arising from eliminations in forensic firearm comparisons. While recent reforms in forensic science have focused on reducing false positives, eliminations--often based on…
Certain approaches to quantum gravity, such as the one based on the concept of purely virtual particles (fakeons), sacrifice the cause-effect relation at very small scales to reconcile renormalizability with unitarity. Other developments…
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: diversity breeds innovation, and yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this…
What can physics students learn about science from those scientists who got the answers wrong? Students encounter little science history, and what they have encountered typically portrays scientists as The People with the Right Answers. But…
A random variable is sampled from a discrete distribution. The missing mass is the probability of the set of points not observed in the sample. We sharpen and simplify McAllester and Ortiz's results (JMLR, 2003) bounding the probability of…
The aim of this comment (set to appear in a formal discussion in JASA) is to draw out some conclusions from an extended back-and-forth I have had with Wang and Blei regarding the deconfounder method proposed in "The Blessings of Multiple…
Imputation procedures in biomedical fields have turned into statistical practice, since further analyses can be conducted ignoring the former presence of missing values. In particular, non-parametric imputation schemes like the random…
Recent results on effects of Bose-Einstein symmetrization in a system of independently produced particles are interpreted in terms of statistical physics. For a large class of distributions, the effective sizes of the system in momentum and…