The big one is here!

Nano-2006, The next edition of the mother of all nano-related conferences, has been announced. It will be held here in our Institute during 21-26 August 2006. The Conference is chaired by two of our colleagues in our Department: Prof. Kamanio Chattopadhyay and Prof. Atul Chokshi.

The previous edition, Nano-2004 (the Seventh International Conference on Nanostructured Materials), was held at Weisbaden in Germany during June 2004. You might want to take a look at its website to get a flavour for this series of conferences.

Let it be noted that, in direct contrast to their subject matter, these conferences tend to be rather Giga in scale ...

The Monty Hall puzzle

An article by Junpei Sekino begins thus:

On one Sunday of September 1990, the following question appeared in the Ask Marilyn column in Parade, a Sunday supplement of local newspapers.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors; Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No.1 and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No.3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No.2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? -Craig F. Whitaker, Columbia, Md.

Now, having read the original version of the Monty Hall puzzle, try to find an answer. Then read various excellent accounts of this puzzle in the article by Junpei Sekino, as well as here, and here. I found all these links in a comment by Enrico Scalas to a post by Tommaso Dorigo over at the Quantum Diaries website, through which you can "follow physicists from around the world as they live the World Year of Physics 2005"

Finally, let me quote Tommaso Dorigo: "...several Professors of Physics got it [the puzzle] wrong when I tried it with them, and one well-known theoretical physicist actually had to run a Monte Carlo simulation in order to become convinced of the solution".

What are colleges good for?

Matthew Yglesias, a Harvard alumnus, has a couple of interesting posts about this subject. Also, take a look at Tim Burke's views in this thoughtful essay.

Google's recruiting technique

In an earlier post, I linked to some posts about a very effective recruiting technique employed by Google. Somehow, I missed this MathWorld post, which has answers to these and other clever and geeky puzzles from Google.

Charming ...