Mandy Gu on Word Embeddings and Text Classification – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 9

I am so grateful to Mandy Gu for being a guest on The Central Equilibrium to talk about word embeddings and text classification.  She began by showing how data from text can be encoded in vectors and matrices, and then she used a naive Bayes classifier to classify sentences as toxic or non-toxic – a very common problem for moderating discussions in online forums.  I learned a lot from her in this episode, and you can learn more from Mandy on her Medium blog.

If you are not familiar with naive Bayes classifiers, then I encourage you to watch my video tutorial about this topic first.

Mitchell Boggs on Game Theory in Behavioural Ecology – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 8

Mitchell Boggs kindly talked about game theory in behavioural ecology on my talk show, “The Central Equilibrium”!  He talked about 2 key examples:

• when animals choose to share or fight for food
• when parents choose to care for their offspring or seek new mates to produce more offspring

These examples illustrate why seemingly disadvantageous behaviours can persist or even dominate in the animal kingdom.

Mitch recommends a book called “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” by Frans de Waal.

Thanks for being such a great guest, Mitchell!

David Veitch on Rational vs. Irrational Numbers and Countability – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 7

I am so grateful that David Veitch appeared on my talk show, “The Central Equilibrium“, to talk about rational vs. irrational numbers.  While defining irrational numbers, he proved that is an irrational number.  He then talked about the concept of bijections while defining countability, and he showed that rational numbers are countable.

David used to work as a bond trader for Bank of America.  He writes a personal blog, and you can follow him on Twitter (@daveveitch).  He recently earned admission into the Master of Science program in statistics at the University of Toronto, and he will begin that program soon.  Congratulations, David!  Thanks for being a guest on my show!

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Arnab Chakraborty on The Monty Hall Problem and Bayes’ Theorem – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 6

I am pleased to welcome Arnab Chakraborty back to my talk show, “The Central Equilibrium“, to talk about the Monty Hall Problem and Bayes’ theorem.  In this episode, he shows 2 solutions to this classic puzzle in probability, and invokes Bayes’ Theorem for the second solution.

If you have not watched Arnab’s first episode on Bayes’ theorem, then I encourage you to do that first.

Marilyn Vos Savant provided a solution to this problem in PARADE Magazine in 1990-1991.  Thousands of readers disagreed with her solution and criticized her vehemently (and incorrectly) for her error.  Some of these critics were mathematicians!  She included some of those replies and provided alternative perspectives that led to the same conclusion.  Although I am dismayed by the disrespect that some people showed in their letters to her, I am glad that a magazine column on probability was able to attract so much readership and interest.  Arnab and I referred to one of her solutions in our episode.  Thank you, Marilyn!

Enjoy this episode of “The Central Equilibrium“!

Benjamin Garden on Simple vs. Compound Interest in Finance – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 5

I am so pleased to publish this new episode of “The Central Equilibrium“, featuring Benjamin Garden.  He talked about simple and compound interest in the context of finance and investment, highlighting the power of compound interest to grow your money and to enlarge debt from credit cards.  We compared the formulas for calculating the accrued amounts under simple and compound interest, and we derived the formula for the Rule of 72, a short-cut to estimate the length of time needed to double your investment under compound interest.

Check out Ben’s blog, Twitter account (@GardenBenjamin), and Instagram account (@ben.garden) to get more advice about managing your money!

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Layne Newhouse on representing neural networks – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 4

I am excited to present the first of a multi-episode series on neural networks on my talk show, “The Central Equilibrium”.  My guest in this series in Layne Newhouse, and he talked about how to represent neural networks. We talked about the biological motivations behind neural networks, how to represent them in diagrams and mathematical equations, and a few of the common activation functions for neural networks.

Check it out!

Arnab Chakraborty on Bayes’ Theorem – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 3

Arnab Chakraborty kindly came to my new talk show, “The Central Equilibrium”, to talk about Bayes’ theorem.  He introduced the concept of conditional probability, stated Bayes’ theorem in its simple and general forms, and showed an example of how to use it in a calculation.

Check it out!

Christopher Salahub on Markov Chains – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 2

It was a great pleasure to talk to Christopher Salahub about Markov chains in the second episode of my new talk show, The Central Equilibrium!  Chris graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics degree in statistics.  He just finished an internship in data development at Environics Analytics, and he is starting a Master’s program in statistics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Chris recommends “Introduction to Probability Models” by Sheldon Ross to learn more about probability theory and Markov chains.

The Central Equilibrium is my new talk show about math, science, and economics. It focuses on technical topics that involve explanations with formulas, equations, graphs, and diagrams.  Stay tuned for more episodes in the coming weeks!

You can watch all of my videos on my YouTube channel!

Please watch the video on this blog.  You can also watch it directly on YouTube.

Neil Seoni on the Fourier Transform and the Sampling Theorem – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 1

I am very excited to publish the very first episode of my new talk show, The Central Equilibrium!  My guest is Neil Seoni, an undergraduate student in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has studied data science in his spare time, most notably taking a course on machine learning by Andrew Ng on Coursera. He is finishing his summer job as a Data Science Intern at Environics Analytics in Toronto, Ontario.

Neil recommends reading Don Johnson’s course notes from Rice University and his free text book to learn more about the topics covered in his episode.

The Central Equilibrium is my new talk show about math, science, and economics. It focuses on technical topics that involve explanations with formulas, equations, graphs, and diagrams.  Stay tuned for more episodes in the coming weeks!

You can watch all of my videos on my YouTube channel!

Please watch the video on this blog.  You can also watch it directly on YouTube.