This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize

Re:This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competin... by hugh on Thursday February 28, 2008 @10:32AM (#125484)

I've always known that science journalists don't know anything about science. I'm only now realizing that they don't know anything about journalism either.

They only know how to tell one story. That's the story of the underdog scientist who is (or more commonly, "might be about to") upsetting the stuffy old establishment. Everything that goes on in the scientific community has to be shoehorned into the storyline of "Dodgeball" or "The Mighty Ducks", or else they have no idea how to talk about it.

I was originally going to post this comment on the thread about the "surfer dude with theory of everything" article, but it fits here just as well.

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Re:This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competin... by jwp on Thursday February 28, 2008 @01:45PM (#125607)

Sure, there's plenty of fluff in the article, but it isn't because the author (http://www.math.wisc.edu/~ellenber/) is clueless about science. The article is probably at the right level of technical depth. Seems ambitious to even touch SVD in Wired.

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Re:This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competin... by hugh on Thursday February 28, 2008 @03:16PM (#125643)

Oops. I stand corrected. The author of this particular article obviously does know the subject very well. My apologies.

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Re:This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competin... by gms on Thursday February 28, 2008 @02:14PM (#125618)

I'm willing to bet every dollar to my name that the author can eat you for breakfast when it comes to "knowing about science".

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Re:This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competin... by technoguyrob on Thursday February 28, 2008 @03:31PM (#125654)

Umm...the author is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin, and he's a published author (in fiction).

Jordan Ellenberg ([email protected]) is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of the novel The Grasshopper King.

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Re:This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competin... by gms on Thursday February 28, 2008 @03:49PM (#125662)

...yes...that's what I was pointing out...

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Re:This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competin... by daniel-cussen on Thursday February 28, 2008 @10:51AM (#125502)

So true. It's like they got their ethos and values from Disney movies.

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Re:This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competin... by hugh on Thursday February 28, 2008 @04:20PM (#125680)

Whoops! OK, so just to clarify, I didn't mean for my off-hand generalization about "science journalists not knowing anything about science" to extend to the author of this article in particular, who as several people have now pointed out, turns out to actually be a professor of mathematics at Madison.

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