Related papers: Too Soon for Doom Gloom?
It is often suggested that extraterrestial life sufficiently advanced to be capable of interstellar travel or communication must be rare, since otherwise we would have seen evidence of it by now. This in turn is sometimes taken as indirect…
A phenomenon that strongly influences the demography of small introduced populations and thereby potentially their genetic diversity is the Allee effect, a reduction in population growth rates at small population sizes. We take a stochastic…
Despite the general acknowledgment of the role of niche and fitness differences in community dynamics, species abundance has been coined as a relevant feature not just regarding niche perspectives, but also according to neutral…
We prove that a random group, in Gromov's density model with $d < 1/16$ satisfies with overwhelming probability a universal-existential first-order sentence $\sigma$ (in the language of groups) if and only if $\sigma$ is true in a…
To answer questions about racial inequality and fairness, we often need a way to infer race and ethnicity from names. One way to infer race and ethnicity from names is by relying on the Census Bureau's list of popular last names. The list,…
Can we predict the future popularity of a song, movie or tweet? Recent work suggests that although it may be hard to predict an item's popularity when it is first introduced, peeking into its early adopters and properties of their social…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
In the long run, the eventual extinction of any biological population is an inevitable outcome. While extensive research has focused on the average time it takes for a population to go extinct under various circumstances, there has been…
There is both much optimism and pessimism around artificial intelligence (AI) today. The optimists are investing millions of dollars, and even in some cases billions of dollars into AI. The pessimists, on the other hand, predict that AI…
Since its early beginnings, mankind has put to test many different society forms, and this fact raises a complex of interesting questions. The objective of this paper is to present a general population model which takes essential features…
The article attempts to demonstrate the rich history of one truly remarkable problem situated at the confluence of probability theory and theory of numbers - finding the probability of co-primality of two randomly selected natural numbers.…
To understand the evolution of galaxies, we need to know as accurately as possible how many galaxies were present in the Universe at different epochs. Galaxies in the young Universe have hitherto mainly been identified using their expected…
We adopt an empirical approach to the characterization of the distribution of twin primes within the set of primes, rather than in the set of all natural numbers. The occurrences of twin primes in any finite sequence of primes are like…
In this study we are concerned with the general problem of choosing from a set of endangered species T a subset S of k species to protect as a priority. Here, the interest to protect the species of S is assessed by the resulting expected…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
Behavioral experiments on the Ultimatum Game have shown that we human beings have remarkable preference in fair play, contradicting the predictions by the game theory. Most of the existing models seeking for explanations, however, strictly…
Wisdom of crowds refers to the phenomenon that the aggregate prediction or forecast of a group of individuals can be surprisingly more accurate than most individuals in the group, and sometimes - than any of the individuals comprising it.…
Philosophers now seem to agree that frequentism is an untenable strategy to explain the meaning of probabilities. Nevertheless, I want to revive frequentism, and I will do so by grounding probabilities on typicality in the same way as the…
A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of…
In genetic drift of small population, it is well known that even when the ratio of alleles is 0.5, specific genes are fixed in or disappear from the population. It seems the reason why inbreeding is avoided. On the other hand, this…