Plans/debriefing for each class

W 8/27: Style of course; Example: Waiting in long lines and editing long documents; Experiment 1.
F 8/29: Thumbtacks, coin-tossing, Persi's conjecture, fine-grain principle, local uniformity principle

W 9/3: Predictions from local uniformity principle, asteroid near-misses, Benford's law.
F 9/5

M 9/8
W 9/10
F 9/12

M 9/15
W 9/17
F 9/19

M 9/22
W 9/24
F 9/26

M 9/29 Student talks
W 10/1 Student talks
F 10/3 Student talks

M 10/6
W 10/8
F 10/10

M 10/13
W 10/15
F 10/17

M 10/20
W 10/22
F 10/24

M 10/27
W 10/29
F 10/31

M 11/3
W 11/5
F 11/7

M 11/10
W 11/12
F 11/14

M 11/17
W 11/19 [Aldous away]
F 11/21 [Aldous away]

M 11/24 Student talks
W 11/26 Student talks

M 12/1 Student talks
W 12/3 Student talks
F 12/5 Student talks

M 12/8 Student talks
W 12/10 Student talks

What I actually did in 2006.

Classes were 80 minutes.

1. Style of course. Risks: in everyday life [Ropeik-Gray] and specific to UCB. Psychology of risks [Nickerson] - are people rational or irrational?

2. Mixing and sorting: physical objects and computer algorithms. Card shuffling; riffle shuffle as inverse of a sorting algorithm. 1970 draft lottery; mixing business cards.

3. Sports (focused on later analogy with stock market). Two approaches to prediction: use previous match results or use individual player stats (fantasy leagues). (analogous to technical/fundamental analysis of stocks). Randomness within-game and randomness over a season. Regression analysis of latter.

4. Physical randomness and the fine-grain principle [my Chap 1 handout]. Cards, coin-tossing, Benford's law. Informationless priors and estimation of future durations . Griffiths-Tenenbaum paper; lifetime of Berlin Wall, Microsoft, Homo Sapiens.

5. Game theory. Rock-paper-scissors, GOPS, Swedish lottery. Hawk-Dove, battle of the sexes [from Haigh].

6. Psychology of probability. [Nickerson]. Examples of: anchoring; conservatism vs base rate discounting; invariance, domination, framing; probability-matching; endowment; conjunction fallacy.

7-8. Stock market. What is "market", "stock". Data on monthly returns. Competing explanations of why/how prices fluctuate. IID model and Kelly criterion. Rough examples in optimal stock-bond allocation. How small a day-day serial correlation could be exploited? Different forms of efficient market hypothesis.

9-11. Critial points and scaling laws. Physics analogy of freezing + boiling. Queueing and Galton-Watson branching processes as basic examples; calculation of their scaling exponents. Contact process. Use of Erdos-Renyi random graph as epidemic model. Self-organized criticality in epidemic/forest fire model.

12. Complex networks and random graphs. My MSRI slides plus chalk-talk on 3 basic properties and examples.

13. Transportation networks.

14. Algorithms: counting and sampling. Elementary examples, working up to Markov Chain Monte Carlo for number of c-colorings of a graph G.

15. Coding, randomness and entropy. Basic math theory, emphasising Asymptotic Equipartition Property. Shannon codes. Lempel-Ziv and language-tree paper.

16. Genetics. Illustrate by calculation of chance you're genetically related to a particular 10th generation ancestor.

17. What maintains genetic diversity?. Selective sweeps, neutral theory, Wright-Fisher; 1+ 4 theta formula.

18. Time since most recent common ancestor in constant-size or in growing populations. Significance of 150K years since mitichondrial Eve; and of 500K years since split with Neanderthal.

19. Phylogenetic trees. My talk on overhead slides.

20. Food webs. Predator-prey graph; connection with body size.

21. Probability and the law. SIDS case in U.K. Island problem [from Senn]. Aligning lawyer and client interest [Polinsky-Rubinfeld paper].