All seminars are Tuesday at 12:05 pm in 4274
Chamberlin
Hall except as noted. Refreshments will be served.
Short List
Sep 11, 2018 - Shimon Kolkowitz, Physics
Sep 18, 2018 - Jordan Ellenberg, Mathematics
Sep 25 2018 - Rogers Hollingsworth, Sociology and History
Oct 2, 2018 - Moe Hirsch, Mathematics
Oct 9, 2018 - Doug Maynard, Sociology
Oct 16, 2018 - Michael Winokur, Physics
Oct 23 2018 - Amy Cochran, Biostatistics & Medical
Informatics
Oct 30, 2018 - Tim Allen, Botany
Nov 6, 2018 - Sigurd Angenent, Mathematics
Nov 13, 2018 - Bill Hibbard, Space Science and Engineering
Center
Nov 20, 2018 - Clint Sprott, Physics
Nov 27, 2018 - Alex Lazarian, Astronomy
Dec 4, 2018 - Michael Notaro and Rose Pertzborn, Nelson
Institute Center for Climatic Research
Dec 11, 2018 - Tim Smeeding, Lafollette School of Public
Affairs
Abstracts
September 11, 2018
A brief history of time(keeping): Optical atomic clocks and
their applications
Shimon Kolkowitz, UW Department of Physics
Optical atomic clocks are now the most stable and accurate
timekeepers in the world, with fractional accuracies equivalent
to neither losing nor gaining a second over
the entire age of the universe. This unprecedented level of
metrological precision offers sensitivity to new physics
phenomena, opening the door to exciting and unusual
applications. This talk will provide an introduction to how and
why time is measured from a historical perspective, with
an emphasis on the recent development of optical atomic clocks and
their applications. I will discuss recent progress on
pushing clocks to even greater levels of precision, as well as
prospects for future improvement. Finally, I will give
a brief overview of potential future applications of
clocks, including gravitational wave detection, tests of
general relativity, and searches for physics beyond the Standard
Model.
September 18, 2018
Redistricting and randomness
Jordan Ellenberg, UW Department of Mathematics
I will talk about the challenge of providing a useful,
robust, and simple measure of “partisan gerrymandering,” the
practice of drawing legislative district lines to secure advantage
for one political party. This has been a contentious legal
issue for many years, with Wisconsin’s own assembly districts
among those which have are in legal jeopardy, and one of the great
challenges is to establish protocols which are both legally and
mathematically sound.
September 25, 2018
Changes in excellence among United States research universities
Rogers Hollingsworth, UW Departments of Sociology and History
What are the explanations for changes in excellence in American
research universities? The classic answers to this problem were
variations on Robert Merton’s elaboration of the “Matthew” effect in
science – those who have abundance will accumulate advantage and
those who have not will continue to be disadvantaged. Numerous
analysts have addressed the Matthew effect when explaining
inequality in research excellence among individual scientists as
well as universities.
This presentation demonstrates that the Mertonian explanation is not
correct when analyzing long-term changes in recognition of
excellence among American research universities. It focuses on the
considerable instability in the ranking of excellence in the basic
biological sciences over many decades. It demonstrates that
recognition for excellence of research universities is distributed
into six patterns, the analysis and explanation of which is the
major focus of the presentation.
It is a small part of the study of changes over many decades in
research excellence among universities in France, Great Britain, the
United States, and Germany with soft comparisons to universities in
Sweden and Japan.
The data for the presentation is based on re-analysis of data
collected at various time points by the American Council of
Education, the National Research Council, and citation indices by
ISI-Thompson Reuters. The data are also based on 596 in-depth
interviews of scientists by Hollingsworth in the six named countries
over thirty years (some scientists were interviewed on multiple
occasions for a total of 913 interviews). See https://go.wisc.edu/tt4tf6
for the names, exact dates, and places of the interviews. Data
sources and methodology for rankings are available at https://go.wisc.edu/16vxo2.
October 2, 2018
Some half-baked philosophy of mathematics
Moe Hirsch, UW Department of Mathematics
I'll discuss what
I think are the basic philosophical questions:
(1) What makes
math universal? Its results seem independent of time and place.
No one doubts Euclid's or Pythagoras' theorems of thousands of
years ago, even if we think some of the proofs aren't correct.
No one since Hitler and Stalin thinks its correctness depends on
race, religion or nationality. But will the same math be found
wherever there's life in the universe?
(2) Why is math so useful? Try spending a day without thinking
about numbers.
(3) Its results seem absolutely true. But are they? If they are,
how can we prove it? And if we can prove it, how do we know our
proof is correct?
Readings:
Essays in
Humanistic Mathematics: Mathematical Association of America
What is
Mathematics Really? R. Hersh, Oxford University Press
Where
Mathematics Comes from: G. Lakoff & R Nunez, Basic Books
Observations concerning forensic and clinical encounters involving
children with autism spectrum disorder.
Doug Maynard, UW Department of Sociology
Perceivedly inappropriate social behavior is a
central feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder, in that
individuals with ASD frequently may violate or breach commonsense
norms and expectations. These violations may meet with
polite indifference, informal prohibitions, or corrections.
Using two forensic cases (police encounters with ASD
individuals) and one clinical encounter, I will explore more
formal sanctioning and how this can involve something we call
“transpositioning.” Under the auspices of official protocols,
transpositioning refers to how an official may turn a child’s
responsive move into an initiating move, justifying
consequential indifference at best or sometimes severe
intervention at worst. However, by situating violations in their
interactional contexts, we can see how actions usually
attributed to the child and his psychological functioning
alone are concertedly produced. In group discussion, I hope
to have us consider how we can have better understandings of
ASD-associated conduct in home, school, and public
environments.
October 16, 2018
Renewable energy: A viable path forward
Michael Winokur, UW Department of Physics
The rate of growth in renewable energy production has generally
exceeded even the most optimistic projections. This
dramatic scenario has been driven by a steady stream of
technological advancements in combination with a breathtaking
reduction in the actual cost of the energy production.
Many traditional sources of energy are becoming economically
uncompetitive. This introductory level talk will give
a broad overview of the potential sources of renewable energy with
an emphasis on the recent history of solar and wind energy
production and likely near-term developments which will further
improve device performance. Time permitting some of the
issues associated with energy storage will be discussed.
October 23, 2018
The dynamics of mood in bipolar disorder
Amy Cochran, UW Departments of Biostatistics & Medical
Informatics
Bipolar disorder is a chronic disease of severe mood
fluctuation. Longitudinal patterns are central to any patient
description, but are condensed into simple attributes and
categories. Although these provide a common language for
clinicians, they are not supported by empirical
evidence. In this talk, I will discuss modeling
frameworks for providing patient-level descriptions of
longitudinal patterns. Since these frameworks often represent
competing hypotheses, e.g. mood is periodic or mood has distinct
'states', I will focus on a key question: how to differentiate
between models when only time courses of mood are available?
Through statistical analysis, we settle on the idea that BP could
arise from an inability for mood to quickly return to normal when
perturbed and present a model to embody this idea that can be
personalized to individual with bipolar disorder. I will conclude
by discussing next steps for translating this work into
clinical care.
October 30, 2018
Complexity and levels of analysis: more than one required
Tim Allen, UW Department of Botany
A complex system requires more than one level of analysis. The
levels do not map onto one another, and that leads to uncertainty
and contradiction. Complexity arises not from material reality
but rather how the observer questions the system. Multiple
levels is a good way to explain complexity to mechanistic
reductionists. I will give examples of complexity in these
terms: Koestler’s holon, Chaos theory, Skeleton as a lever
system, Jevons paradox, High and Low gain EROI, Rosen similarity vs
similitude, Euclidean vs non-Euclidean space. Complexity
appears in emergence between non-linearity and levels in conflict
with privilege denied to any one level.
November 6, 2018
A report on the recent work by Araujo and Liotta on the topological
requirements for robust perfect adaptation in networks of any size
Sigurd Angenent, UW Department of Mathematics
From the article, Robustness, and the ability to function and thrive
amid changing and unfavorable environments, is a fundamental
requirement for living systems. Until now it has been an open
question how large and complex biological networks can exhibit
robust behaviors, such as perfect adaptation to a variable stimulus,
since complexity is generally associated with fragility. Here we
report that all networks that exhibit robust perfect adaptation
(RPA) to a persistent change in stimulus are decomposable into
well-defined modules, of which there exist two distinct classes.
These two modular classes represent a topological basis for all
RPA-capable networks, and generate the full set of topological
realizations of the internal model principle for RPA in complex,
self-organizing, evolvable bionetworks. This unexpected result
supports the notion that evolutionary processes are empowered by
simple and scalable modular design principles that promote robust
performance no matter how large or complex the underlying networks
become.
November 13, 2018
Artificial general intelligence
Bill Hibbard, UW Space Science and Engineering Center
In the early 1960s Ray Solomonoff combined Turing's theory of
computation with Shannon's information theory to create algorithmic
information theory. The Kolmogorov complexity of a binary string is
defined as the length of the shortest program that computes the
string. Solomonoff used a related measure as the basis for an
(uncomputable but approximable) universal induction algorithm for
predicting arbitrary binary strings. In the early 2000's Marcus
Hutter combined this induction algorithm with sequential decision
theory to define his universal AI that maximizes expected rewards
from arbitrary environments, and to define a formal measure of
intelligence. This work led to conferences and journals dedicated to
the mathematical study of properties of artificial general
intelligence (AGI) systems, including ways that they may fail to
conform to the intentions of their designers and ways to design
systems that do conform to their design intentions. These problems
are not resolved and research is very active. While some mainstream
AI developers criticize AGI theory, the creators of some of the most
successful AI systems (e.g., Google DeepMind) are also deeply
involved in this AGI research. Practical versions of Hutter's
universal AI are called Bayesian program learning and in some ways
they outperform the deep learning algorithms that are
revolutionizing AI.
The harmonic oscillator is the simplest and most common nontrivial
dynamical system. The prototypical mechanical example is a mass
suspended by a spring, but the same dynamics occur in most musical
instruments, many electronic devices, models of economic and
ecological systems, some chemical reactions, and many other
real-world systems. However, most oscillations in nature are not
simple but rather exhibit aperiodic fluctuations such as the weather
and the stock market. I will describe a new model of a chaotic
oscillator whose behavior is identical to a harmonic oscillator in
equilibrium with a source of heat at a constant temperature. It
represents the culmination of a 30-year search for an elegant
chaotic model whose solution is ergodic and whose variables
accurately exhibit a normal (Gaussian) distribution as expected for
a truly random process.
The Sun is a magnetically active star. Solar activity results in
inducing the solar wind as well as generating the energetic
particles. The solar wind affects the size of the heliosphere around
the solar system and this induces modulation of the galactic cosmic
rays arriving to the Earth. Energetic particles from the Sun
interact with the Earth's magnetic field and cause electromagnetic
storms. I shall discuss how the Sun affects the Earth ecosystem.
December 4, 2018
Advancing climate science education, inquiry, and literacy across
rural Wisconsin communities
Michael Notaro, UW Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research
and
Rosalyn Pertzborn, UW Space Science and Engineering Center
Our project, recently funded by the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea
Endowment, aims to inspire scientific, placed-based inquiry and
advance climate science education and literacy across the
economically disadvantaged rural communities of Wisconsin. The
collaborative team synergistically unites the climate change
expertise of the UW-Madison Nelson Institute Center for Climatic
Research, science education experience of the UW-Madison
Atmospheric, Earth, and Space Outreach Program of the Space Science
and Engineering Center, and local environmental sustainability focus
and extensive volunteer network of the Wisconsin Ice Age Trail
Alliance. We aim to (1) expand understanding of environmental
issues by facilitating accessibility to climate researchers; (2)
incorporate data collection within the Global Learning and
Opportunities to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program for
comparison of climate phenomena and local environmental impacts; (3)
provide teacher/citizen scientist training for GLOBE protocol
application at schools; and (4) provide authentic K-12 research
experiences by developing GLOBE special measurement protocols in
collaboration with climate scientists to facilitate effective
community climate change adaptation. Data collection focuses
on a north-south transect of schools along the Wisconsin Ice Age
Trail through the sharp climatic and ecological gradients of the
Curtis tension zone. Environmental data collection and
analysis will support evidence-based scientific understanding of
climate change risks for guiding community decisions on adaptation.
December 11, 2018
Social and economic mobility in an era of extreme inequality; Who
owns the robots?
Tim Smeeding, LaFollette School of Public Affairs and Economics
Americans used to believe that we lived in a land of opportunity
with a good chance for everyone and their children to do well. But
America is near the bottom of nations where everyone has fair chance
of reaching the American Dream. This lecture considers mobility at
the bottom, top and middle of the distribution, both over time and
across generations in a nation where capital income (who owns the
robots) dominates labor income, where public policy increases
extreme inequality and where the future of work is increasingly dim
for those without a college education and without good opportunities
to make use of that investment.