Ten Million Dollars for Science

Ten Million Americans Have It

Iterative Helical CT Reconstruction in the Cloud for Ten Dollars in Five Minutes

Iterative statistical X-ray CT reconstruction algorithms can improve image quality for low dose scans. Unfortunately, their clinical utility has been hampered by their enormous computational requirements; typical low-dose reconstructions require about an hour on commercial systems. Most existing parallel implementations use a shared memory programming model, limiting available parallelism. We i...

Ten Simple (Empirical) Rules for Writing Science

“. . .though a Philosopher need not be sollicitous that his style should delight its Reader with his Floridnesse, yet I think he may very well be allow’d to take a Care that it disgust not his Reader by its Flatness, especially when he does not so much deliver Experiments or explicate them, as make Reflections or Discourses on them; for on such Occasions he may be allow’d the liberty of recreat...

How Much is 131 Million Dollars? Putting Numbers in Perspective with Compositional Descriptions

How much is 131 million US dollars? To help readers put such numbers in context, we propose a new task of automatically generating short descriptions known as perspectives, e.g. “$131 million is about the cost to employ everyone in Texas over a lunch period”. First, we collect a dataset of numeric mentions in news articles, where each mention is labeled with a set of rated perspectives. We then...

How Not to Win a Million Dollars: A Counterexample to a Conjecture of L. Breiman

Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target amount. Specifically, we disprove a 50-year old conjecture of L. Breiman [1], that there exists a threshold strategy that optimizes the expected number of rou...