Thanksgiving

I spent Thanksgiving at my sister's in San Diego. It was great to see my family and relax for a couple days! I met my sister's new cats, Rufus and Temperance (Tempe for short, of course ;)). I'm driving home to LA tomorrow, where it's back to the grind. I promise to follow up with boring posts about game theory, too...

Clinic Final Report Available

I have posted my undergraduate Clinic Final Report online,

www.michaelholtonprice.com/clinic.pdf

There were five undergraduate students on the Clinic team. The abstract and introduction are a good overview of our work. I wrote the technical introduction and derived the Euler-Bernoulli results. What is not clear from the report is that we used my Euler-Bernoulli solution in two ways. In the first semester we used it to design the dimensions of our silicon beams. For that, we didn't need the forced solution: the homogenous solution is sufficient to predict the resonant frequency of the first mode. In the second semester we did need the forced solution, to compare our measured amplitude with our predicted amplitude.

New game invented while dreaming

It's rare for me to come up with new ideas while dreaming. Apparently some people do so all the time. Nevertheless, I invented a new, simplified poker variant while dreaming, and I think I'll try solving it.

The betting structure is identical to that of 2/4 Limit Hold'em, but there are no community cards and each player only receives one card. There are two rounds of betting, with the betting capped at three, and a small and a big blind the first round. Similar to Crazy Pineapple, each player may choose, between the two betting rounds, to randomly exchange his or her dealt card for a new one. Discards and folds go into the muck and may not be drawn by subsequent players. Whether or not each player chooses to exchange is hidden information (not to themselves, of course, but I could change that or other things to explore imperfect recall and absentmindedness).

The payoff is determined by summing two contributions. First, the pot is split among all the winners, where the comparison for winning is the rank of the card. In the case of a tie, the pot is split evenly among all the tying players (yes, allowing for non-integer, rational payoffs). Second, a unique super-winner is declared, based first on rank and then on suit, with a suit ordering from best to worst of diamonds, hearts, clubs, then spades. All the non-folded players must pay the super-winner an amount determined by the suit and rank of the super-winner's card. If the super-winner's card is red, the amount is simply the rank of the card (0 for deuce up to 12 for ace). If the super-winner's card is black the amount is 13 plus the rank of the card.

That is all.

The schools to which I am applying

Here are the schools to which I am applying, organized by deadline:

Dec 1st

UCSB Anthropology, Integrative Anthropological Sciences

Dec 15th

Caltech Humanities and Social Sciences

UCLA Anthropology

UC Davis Anthropology, Evolutionary Wing

Arizona Anthropology

Jan 1st

Arizona State Applied Math for the Life and Social Sciences

Jan 2nd

New Mexico Anthropology

Jan 6th

Stanford Anthropology, Ecology and Environment

Jan 9th

Oregon Anthropology

Jan 23rd

Arizona Applied Math

Feb 15th

UCI Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences

Blog Inception

Graduate school applications are my primary concern right now. You can see my Curriculum Vitae at www.michaelholtonprice.com/cv.html. It's no fun working 40+ hours per week while writing personal statements, etc.!