We in the United States are deep in the middle of a major national election, and over half of the world’s population also have elections in 2024. This is why Carry the Two is going to focus on the intersection of mathematics and democracy for our new season.

In this, the sixth and final episode of our mathematics and democracy season, we dig into both how surveys and polls are conducted and how they are reported. For the former we are joined by David Dutwin Senior Vice President at NORC and Chief Scientist of Amerispeak and for the latter by Nathaniel Rakich Senior Editor and Senior Elections Analyst at FiveThirtyEight.

Find our transcript here: Google Doc or .txt file

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

David Dutwin

NORC

AmeriSpeak

VoteCast

Nathaniel Rakich

FiveThirtyEight

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348

We in the United States are deep in the middle of a major national election, and over half of the world’s population also have elections in 2024. This is why Carry the Two is going to focus on the intersection of mathematics and democracy for our new season.

In this episode, the fifth episode of our mathematics and democracy season, we dig into political numbers and statistics. Helping Sam and Sadie do the digging is Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, FRS, OBE, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge, former Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, past Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, and current non-executive Director at the UK Statistics Authority. David discusses why it is so important to be a trustworthy communicator, the watchdog work the UK’s Office of Statistics Regulation is engaging in, and his personal manifesto for those who share political numbers and statistics.

Find our transcript here: Google Doc or .txt file

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

David Spiegelhalter

UK Statistics Authority

Art of Statistics

Art of Uncertainty

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348

In this episode, the fourth episode of our mathematics and democracy season, we dig into two stories about the intersection of political geography and mathematics. The first story comes from Ranthony Clark and is about her work with the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group around identifying communities of interest, with a focus on her in Ohio alongside CAIR Ohio, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC), the Ohio Citizens Redistricting Commission, and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State. The second story is about polling sites in cities, and the places in those cities that may not be covered as well as they should be. We hear from Mason Porter and Jiajie (Jerry) Luo, two members of the team, about how they used topological data analysis to find these holes in coverage.

Find our transcript here: Google Doc or .txt file

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

Ranthony Clark

Collaborators for the data science team: Erin Chambers, Ranthony A. Clark, Moon Duchin, Parker Edwards, JN Matthews, Anthony Pizzimenti, Chanel Richardson, Parker Rule, and Ari Stern

Communities of Interest Paper

MGGG

Districtr

Mason Porter 

Jiajie (Jerry) Luo

Persistent Homology for Resource Coverage: A Case Study of Access to Polling Sites

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348

We in the United States are deep in the middle of a major national election, and over half of the world’s population also have elections in 2024. This is why Carry the Two is going to focus on the intersection of mathematics and democracy for our new season.

In this, the third episode of our mathematics and democracy season, we speak to Andrea Mock, Gunnar Carlsson, Samin Aref, and Zachary Neal. We dig into what mathematics has to say about the stability of political coalitions, how mediators can make coalitions more stable, the ways in which Democrats and Republicans can be clustered together in the House of Representatives based on their votes, and the hidden third coalition of really successful legislators in the House that co-sponsorship data can illuminate.  

Find our transcript here: Google Doc or .txt file

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

Political structures and the topology of simplicial complexes 

Andrea Mock & Ismar Volić

Gunnar Carlsson

The topology of politics: voting connectivity in the US House of Representatives

Pek Yee Lum, Alan Lehmann, Gurjeet Singh, Tigran Ishkhanov, Gunnar Carlsson, & Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson

Samin Aref

Zachary Neal

Identifying hidden coalitions in the US House of Representatives by optimally partitioning signed networks based on generalized balance

Samin Aref & Zachary Neal

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348

We in the United States are deep in the middle of a major national election, and over half of the world’s population also have elections in 2024. This is why Carry the Two is going to focus on the intersection of mathematics and democracy for our new season.

In this episode, the second episode of our mathematics and democracy season, we speak again with mathematician Ismar Volić of Wellesley College and Director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy and Theodore R. Johnson, a scholar of Black electoral politics, a military veteran, and a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. We dig into what mathematics has to say about how the USA apportions members of the House of Representatives to states, learn how a fight between Jefferson and Hamilton over rounding led to the first presidential veto, and discuss different techniques for reforming the Electoral College.  

Find our transcript here: Google Doc or .txt file

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

Ismar Volić

Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation 

Institute for Mathematics and Democracy

Theodore R. Johnson

A Failing Grade for the Electoral College

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348

IMSI is very proud to announce that Carry the Two is back and with a new co-host, IMSI’s new Director of Communications and Engagement Sam Hansen!

We in the United States are deep in the middle of a major national election, and over half of the world’s population also have elections in 2024. This is why Carry the Two is going to focus on the intersection of mathematics and democracy for our new season.

In this episode, the first episode of our mathematics and democracy season, we speak with mathematician Ismar Volić of Wellesley College and Director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy and Victoria Mooers, an economics PhD student at Columbia University. We discuss what mathematics has to say about our current plurality voting system, how switching to preference ranking votings systems could limit polarization and negative campaigning, and why too much delegation causes problems for those pushing for Liquid Democracy.  

Find our transcript here: Google Doc or .txt file

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

Ismar Volić

Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation 

Institute for Mathematics and Democracy

Victoria Mooers

Liquid Democracy. Two Experiments on Delegation in Voting

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348

Find our transcript here: LINK

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Follow Sadie Witkowski: https://www.sadiewit.com/, @SadieWit

This episode was audio engineered by Tyler Damme.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348.

In this classic episode, we explore how GPT-3, a free online natural language processing artificial intelligence by Open AI, does and doesn’t work. Make sure to stick around until the end for an update on how AI is a core demand between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

GPT-3 takes advantage of a whole new method of artificial intelligence research, called neural nets, to create plays, write code, and even roleplay as a historical figure. But what are the limitations to this kind of AI? University of Chicago professor Allyson Ettinger walks us through how GPT-3 manages to sound so human and where and how it fails in interesting ways.

Find our transcript here: LINK

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

When GPT-3 accidentally lies: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063487/meta-large-language-model-ai-only-survived-three-days-gpt-3-science/

Microsoft’s chatbot that went racist: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist

Is GPT-3 a replacement or tool for journalists: https://contently.net/2022/12/15/trends/chatgpt/

Entertainment Community Fund: https://entertainmentcommunity.org/

Science and Entertainment Exchange: http://scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/

AO3 and data scraping: https://www.transformativeworks.org/ai-and-data-scraping-on-the-archive/

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Follow Caitlin Parrish: @caitcrime

Follow Allyson Ettinger: https://allenai.org/team, @AllysonEttinger

This episode was audio engineered by Tyler Damme. 

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348.

Were you impressed by the underwater scenes in Avatar 2? Have you spent hours trying to figure out how they built the ice wall in Game of Thrones? Everything from big effects like these to smaller hidden visual effects like creating a skyline for an indoor set fall under the purview of visual effects. In this episode of Carry the Two, we get a behind-the-scenes tour of how Fuse FX effects supervisor Jamie Barty from I’m a Virgo leads a team to achieve these effects - and the copious amounts of mathematics that come into play!

Find our transcript here: LINK

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

Fuse FX: https://fusefx.com/

Course on the mathematics behind visual effects: https://www.fxphd.com/details/215/

I’m a Virgo: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13649510/

Entertainment Community Fund: https://entertainmentcommunity.org/

Science and Entertainment Exchange: http://scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Follow Jamie Barty: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4495160/

This episode was audio engineered by Tyler Damme. 

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348.

Could a fungus really wipe out the majority of humans, as shown in the HBO (Max) series The Last of Us? How realistic is the show’s portrayal of epidemiology? Guest and project scientist at UCLA, Tara Kerin explores these questions and how statistics are a core tool in her field of research.

Find our transcript here: LINK

Curious to learn more? Check out these additional links:

The San Diego Comic Con International masquerade ball: https://www.comic-con.org/cci/newsletter/sunday

How to calculate R0 (R-naught): https://globalhealth.harvard.edu/understanding-predictions-what-is-r-naught/

Tara’s work on HIV: https://cch.ucla.edu/about-atn-cares/

More on R0: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/1/17-1901_article

More on the science in The Last of Us: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/17/1157842018/the-science-that-spawned-fungal-fears-in-hbos-the-last-of-us

Entertainment Community Fund: https://entertainmentcommunity.org/

Science and Entertainment Exchange: http://scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/

Follow more of IMSI’s work: www.IMSI.institute, (twitter) @IMSI_institute, (mastodon) https://sciencemastodon.com/@IMSI, (instagram) IMSI.institute

Follow Tara Kerin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarakerin/, @tarakerin

This episode was audio engineered by Tyler Damme. 

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

The Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) is funded by NSF grant DMS-1929348.