Mathematics

If there is one lesson that political experts may have finally gotten in 2020, it's that polls are shockingly inaccurate. Trust in polls was already shaky after the 2016 prediction debacle and 2020 hurt their standing even more. Democrats who went into Tuesday expecting a clear rebuke of President Trump did not get what supposedly scientific data promised them. There is no blowout. No takeover of the Senate. The Cboe Vix index of US stock market volatility dropped after being up sharply for weeks because financial analysts had believed polls. They assumed that former Vice-President Joe Biden…

A new mathematical model seeks to predict economic performance of crops, which will allow breeders to obtain the plants with the highest possible quality.  Using even the most advanced legacy tools, it is very difficult to create a new variety of plants and it usually takes 10-12 years. Using genomic selection models, this process can be accelerated several times, finds the new study, using a new mathematical model for predicting crop phenotypic traits as a function genotype. "Our mathematical model, based on machine learning methods, performs better than modern analogs as it…

Is it possible to predict nonlinear behavior, such as when a protest will become a riot? Perhaps, though parameters bring special challenges. We've seen the weaknesses of numerical modeling when it comes to disease epidemiology, and many of those concerns were evident before SARS-CoV-2 took the world by storm. In Chile of 2019, social unrest disrupted the daily routines of many citizens so scholars recently combined well-known epidemic models with tools from the physics of chaos and interpreted their findings through the lens of social science as economics. If that sounds like more…

There is a popular saying in statistics - "Everyone believes the data except the collector. No one believes the model except the modeler." It means just what it reads like. Statistics can be used for anything. Coronavirus created a difficult problem for disease epidemiologists in that epidemiology had been overrun by claims about any chemical being linked to "greater risk" of some disease while any food can be linked "increased" longevity. Those claims were not fabricated by journalists, groups from International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to the U.S. National Institute of…

Early on in this year's coronavirus pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, experts began to explore whether the pool testing approach used in blood banking could be adapted to increase testing capacity in coronavirus diagnostics and protect those with a high mortality risk from the coronavirus. This would protect those at greater risk from asymptomatic individuals, including the medical and care staff that look after them. Viral infections are challenging because people can be contagious before developing symptoms. Studies have said individuals can spread the coronavirus two days before the onset of clinical…

During difficult times, we hope that everyone will pull together, keep calm, and work as a unit to ensure that society continues to run smoothly. Unfortunately, this is not always the case – as is particularly evident right now. Toilet paper has reached incredible prices on eBay. Videos of supermarket brawls populate the internet. One man in Tennessee bought 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer, hoping to sell them for a fat profit. In the UK, where I’m currently under lockdown, we are increasingly seeing bare shelves in store and huge online queues to order groceries by delivery. But we are…

I recently presented a mathematical model to describe the evolution of the Holy Trinity from a system formed with differential equations that correspond to the God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Thanks to this, it was possible to obtain an analytical solution of time, and it shows that God the Son is the point of convergence of creation. This work can be obtained at https://cvraulisea.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/holytrinity-isea.pdf Based on the fact that God is Triune in nature, it was possible to introduce three differential equations capable of mathematically…

Communist dictatorships lack transparency, so if they don't want to be bound by the same ethical rules as everyone else, they won't be. Some in western countries gush about claims they make regarding solar power, for example, but only their CO2 emissions - highest in the world - can be verified from outside.  It turns out their voluntary organ donation claims may be just as made up, and that is because the Chinese government is systematically misreporting data, according to new research. A history of fraud and unethical behavior In 2015 China promised the world they would no longer…

If you live in a city, your chances of being involved victim of a criminal act go up, and as cities grow in size, crime grows even faster. But not all crimes go up at the same rate.  Rape grows only linearly, at roughly the same pace as a city's population, while car theft and robbery compound and outpace the population. A new mathematical model says the same underlying mechanism that boosts urban innovation and startup businesses can also explain why certain types of crimes thrive in a larger population.  The difference is that certain crimes are "social" in nature and require a…

An exploratory correlation claims that ozone levels can lead to lungs similar to the damage of someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes per day for three decades. Though ozone in air has dropped since the 1980s, the statistical link found that if the ambient ozone level was 3 parts per billion higher where a person lives compared to another location over 10 years, they could create an increase in emphysema risk roughly the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for 29 years.  The exploratory paper also suggests that ozone levels in some major U.S. cities are increasing by that…