Scientists at Play

Minimax Play at Wimbledon

We use data from classic professional tennis matches to provide an empirical test of the theory of mixed strategy equilibrium. We Þnd that the serve-andreturn play of John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, Boris Becker, Pete Sampras and others is consistent with equilibrium play. The same statistical tests soundly reject the assumption of equilibrium play in experimental data, including the data from Barry ...

Psychologists at Play

Play has been an interesting but elusive topic in comparative psychology and related fields for more than a century. Gordon M. Burghardt has been grappling with its problems for nearly a quarter as long. In this volume, Burghardt explores the problems of defining and conceptualizing play along with the evolution and adaptive significance of behavioral patterns that might be labeled as play. The...

Gazing at the skyline for star scientists

Admittedly, despite the plethora of scientometric indices proposed to rank scientists, none of them can fully capture the performance and impact of a scientist, since each index quantifies only one or a few aspects of his/her multifarious performance. Therefore, the task of scientometric ranking can be seen as a multi-dimensional ranking problem, where the different indices comprise the dimensi...

PETA continues to claw at Columbia scientists.

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