STAT 157: Links, books and papers mentioned in lectures

Further links can be found on the page Possible topics for future lectures.

Lecture 1: Everyday perception of chance.

Links.

[anchor data] Searches for "chance of" in Bing
Annotated list of contexts where we perceive chance
References to chance in micro-blogs - Examples by topic
References to chance in blogs
Illustrative hypothetical examples from textbooks
Everyday Life in a Philosophy Department?
Taxonomies of chance, risk and unpredictability.
Which math probability predictions are actually verifiable?
Implicit and explicit lists of representative examples of chance
books on Big Data

Books and papers. I don't know any books or papers in the spirit of this lecture.

Lecture 2: The Kelly criterion for favorable games: stock market investing for individuals.

Links.

[anchor data] Risk and return scatter plot for index funds (scroll down to first chart).
S&P500 chart.
Inflation Adjusted S&P 500.
S&P calculator.
WolframAlpha shows optimal portfolio.
Shiller PE ratio.
The million dollar bet
My review of The Black Swan.

Books. Most related to the lecture is

Useful for the individual investor: For general interest: Typical introductory textbook on mathematical finance Papers.

Listed roughly in order of relevance to the lecture.

Good and bad properties of the Kelly criterion by Leonard C. MacLean, Edward O. Thorp and William T. Ziemba.
Mutual fund ratings and future performance from Vanguard.
Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review by Andrew W. Lo.
review by David Steinsaltz of the book The Quants by Scott Patterson.
Learning to live with not-so-efficient markets by Luigi Zingales.
Is efficient-market theory becoming more efficient? from The Economist.
Market Risk Premium used in 2010 by Analysts and Companies: a survey with 2,400 answers by Pablo Fernandez and Javier del Campo.
Evaluating Trading Strategies By Campbell Harvey and Yan Liu.
Why are gambling markets organised so differently from financial markets? by Steven D. Levitt.
What is the Difference Between Gambling and Investing? by Thomas Murcko.

Lecture 3: Sports rating models

Links

Current English Premier League standings.
[anchor data] Football Elo Ratings - National Teams.
Elo Rating system -- Wikipedia description.
TrueSkill Ranking System for Xbox Live.
2014 lecture, based on the Langville - Meyer book below.
Vegas sportsbooks take hit on big day for NFL favorites.

Books.

Undergraduate text using linear algebra:

Statistical theory for the Bradley-Terry model:

Papers mentioned in class.

Statistics-free sports prediction by Alexander Dubbs.
Mathematical probability foundations of dynamic sports ratings (draft paper by me).
On Probabilistic Excitement of Sports Games by Jan Vecer et al.

For other sports-related papers see this page.

Lecture 4: Risk to individuals: perception and reality.

Links

Lightning fatalities
WolframAlpha
History of lightning fatalities.
[anchor data] risk perception versus risk data
Correlation
guidance on treatment of the economic value of a statistical life
Wikipedia: value of Life
2845 ways to spin the Risk, from the Understanding uncertainty site.
Categorization of risks implicit in The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger.

Books.

Papers.

Listed roughly in order of relevance to the lecture.

Euthanizing the Value of a Statistical Life by Trudy Ann Cameron.
The Value of a Statistical Life: Some Clarifications and Puzzles by Cass Sunstein.
Bacon sandwiches and middle-class drinkers: the risk of communicating risk by David Spiegelhalter.
Visualizing Uncertainty About the Future by David Spiegelhalter and Mike Pearson and Ian Short.
Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics by Gerd Gigerenzer et al.
The Cry Wolf Effect and Weather-Related Decision Making by Jared LeClerc and Susan Joslyn.
The combined effect on survival of four main behavioural risk factors for non-communicable diseases by Eva Martin-Diener et al.
Alcohol: Balancing Risks and Benefits by Harvard School of Public Health.

Lecture 5: Short and Medium term predictions and risks in politics and economics.

Links

the Good Judgment Project
World Economic Forum
Annual Global Risks Reports 2008 2011 2014 2016. World Economic Forum.
[anchor data] graphic from the 2016 report above

Books.

Papers.

International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War by John Gaddis.
Accuracy of forecasts in strategic intelligence by David Mandel and Alan Barnes.
On the Difference between Binary Prediction and True Exposure With Implications For Forecasting Tournaments and Decision Making Research by Nassim Taleb and Philip E. Tetlock.
Future Global Shocks by the OECD (2011).
Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds by National Intelligence Council.
Shifting Gear: policy challenges for the next 50 years by the OECD (2014).
A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis from the CIA site.
Assessing Uncertainty in Intelligence by Jeffrey A. Friedman and Richard Zeckhauser.
Confidence Calibration in a Multiyear Geopolitical Forecasting Competition by Don Moore et al.
How to see into the future by Tim Harford.
Predicting the future (1993) by Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno.

Lecture 6: Coincidences, near misses and one-in-a-million chances.

Links

Oakland As active roster.
[anchor data] Cambridge Coincidences Collection.
Cancer kills three 9/11 firefighters on the same day.
Probability of breast cancer in men.
Winning the 1.6 billion Powerball prize is as likely as .....

Books.

Papers.

Methods for Studying Coincidences by Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller.
Fancy Meeting You Here! by G.J. Kirby.
The psychology of the near miss by R.L. Reid.
Near misses in bingo by Willioam Chon.
Should Travelers Avoid Flying Airlines That Have Had Crashes in the Past? by Nate Silver.
Was 2016 especially dangerous for celebrities? An empirical analysis by Jason Crease.

Lecture 7: Game theory.

Links

pogo.com -- Dice City Roller
[anchor data] Data and theory for a Nash equilibrium.
Results of the Least Unique Integer game.

Books.

Papers.

Introducing Nash equilibria via an online casual game which people actually play. Extended write-up of lecture.
A model of human cooperation in social dilemmas by Valerio Capraro.
Testing game theory in the field: Swedish LUPI lottery games by R. Ostling et al.
Evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters by Andrew W. Delton and Max M. Krasnow and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.
Professionals do not play minimax: evidence from Major League Baseball and the National Football League by Kenneth Kovash and Steven D. Levitt.
Ten Little Treasures of Game Theory and Ten Intuitive Contradictions by Jacob K. Goeree and Charles A. Holt.
Early Round Bluffing in Poker by California Jack Cassidy.
Evolutionary cycles of cooperation and defection by Lorens A. Imhof, Drew Fudenberg and Martin A. Nowak.
Self-enforcing strategies to deter free-riding in the climate change mitigation game and other repeated public good games by Jobst Heitzig, Kai Lessmann, and Yong Zou.

Lecture 8: Luck.

Links

Everyday Life in a Philosophy Department?
U.S. Army Field Manual 3-0: Operations.
Luck (Wikipedia)

Books.

Papers.

The Belief in Good Luck Scale by Peter R. Darke and Jonathan L. Freedman.
The psychology and philosophy of luck by D. Pritchard and M. Smith.

Lecture 9: Prediction markets, fair games and martingales.

Links

PredictIt.
[anchor data] On the wisdom of crowds (my experience).
RealClearPolitics.
Advanced Football Analytics.

Books.

Papers.

Interpreting Prediction Market Prices as Probabilities by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz.
{Prediction markets: history and revival} from The Economist.
Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google by Bo Cowgill and Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz.
Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research by Anna Dreber et al (summary here).

Lecture 10: Psychology of probability: predictable irrationality.

Links

List of cognitive biases

Books.

Papers.

Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Lecture 11: Coding and entropy.

Links

xkcd: Password Strength.
Password strength tester. This and previous constitute [anchor data] .
Google Ngram viewer
Popular baby names.
ASCII

Books.

Papers.

Probability distributions and maximum entropy by Keith Conrad.

Lecture 12: Science fiction meets science.

Links

Fermi paradox.
Near-Earth object.
Technological singularity.

Books.

Papers.

The Great Filter, Branching Histories and Unlikely Events.
Bolts from the blue (gamma ray bursts) from The Economist.
Extreme weather and resilience of the global food system (2015) , by the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience, The Global Food Security programme, UK.
Preparing for Future Catastrophes. International Risk Governance Council, Lausanne.
Global Catastrophic Risks (book introduction) by Martin J. Rees and Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic.
Anthropic Shadow: Observation Selection Effects and Human Extinction Risks by Milan Cirkovic and Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom.
Fermi's paradox, extraterrestrial life and the future of humanity: a Bayesian analysis by Vilhelm Verendel and Olle Haggstrom.
Feeding the world: getting the data right for decision-making by Molly Jahn.
Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change from National Academies Press.

Lecture 13: Physical randomness and the local uniformity principle.

Links

More on Kinetic Molecular Theory
40,000 coin tosses ........
Benford's law

Books.

Papers.

Shuffling Cards and Stopping Times by David Aldous and Persi Diaconis.
When Can One Test an Explanation? Compare and Contrast Benford's Law and the Fuzzy CLT by David Aldous and Tung Pham.
Trailing the dovetail shuffle to its lair by Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis.
Dynamical bias in the coin toss by Persi Diaconis et al.
Analysis of casino shelf shuffling machines by Persi Diaconis et al.
http://www.amstat.org/publications/JSE/v5n2/datasets.starr.html Nonrandom Risk: The 1970 Draft Lottery by Norton Starr.

Lecture 14: Size-biasing, regression effect and dust-to-dust phenomena.

Links

Regression effect in league sports.
[anchor data] Birth names frequency time series.
Washington Scandals and Baby Names by Charles Franklin.

Books.

Papers.

Lottery winners: The myth and reality by H. Roy Kaplan.
You Name It -- How Memory and Delay Govern First Name Dynamics by David A. Kessler et al.

Lecture 15: A glimpse at probability research: spatial networks on random points.

Links

Beta_skeleton graphs.
Atlas of routed 4-networks.

Papers.

Connected Spatial Networks over Random Points and a Route-Length Statistic by David Aldous and Julian Shun.
True scale-invariant random spatial networks by David Aldous and Karthik Ganesan.
Spatial networks, a long survey paper by Marc Barthelemy.
Optimal design of spatial distribution networks by Michael Gastner and Mark Newman.

Lecture 16: Branching processes, tipping points and phase transitions.

Links

Tipping point (climatology)

Books.

Papers.

Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system by Timothy Lenton et al.
E pluribus unum: From Complexity, Universality by Terence Tao.
The role of population heterogeneity and human mobility in the spread of pandemic influenza by Stefano Merler and Marco Ajelli.
Multiscale mobility networks and the spatial spreading of infectious diseases by Duygu Balcan et al.
Epidemic modelling: aspects where stochasticity matters by Tom Britton and David Lindenstrand.

Lecture 17: Toy models in population genetics: some mathematical aspects of evolution.

Links

Parrot phylogeny.
Neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Wright-Fisher model.

Books.

Papers.

Stochastic Models and Descriptive Statistics for Phylogenetic Trees by David Aldous.
Tracing evolutionary links between species by Mike Steel.
Toy models for macroevolutionary patterns and trends by Bradly Alicea and Richard Gordon.
Ten Thousand Wedges: Biodiversity, Natural Selection and Random Change by Steve Jones.
Algorithms, games, and evolution by Erick Chastain et al.
The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour by Kevin Foster and Hanna Kokko.
Regular rates of popular culture change reflect random copying by R. Alexander Bentley et al.

Lecture 18: Toy models of human interaction: use and abuse.

Links

Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas.

Books.

Papers.

Social Networks and the Diffusion of Economic Behavior by Matthew O. Jackson and Leeat Yariv.
Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities by J.Xie et al.
Exact Solution for a Metapopulation Version of Schelling's Model by Richard Durrett and Yuan Zhang.
A simple generative model of collective online behavior by James Gleeson et al.

Lecture 19: Miscellany.

Links

Buffon's needle.
Field Poll (opinion poll) track record.
2845 ways to spin the Risk, from the Understanding uncertainty site.

Books.

Papers.

What is the probability your vote will make a difference? by Andrew Gelman and Nate Silver and Aaron Edlin.
A comparative analysis of influenza vaccination programs by S. Bansal and B. Pourbohloul and L. A. Meyers.