Exploring Scientific Wilderness

You've probably gotten a spam email or two. So how do we detect if an email is spam? And what does that have to do with classifiers, machine learning, overfitting, CAPTCHAs, and the Turing test?

A chat with Alden Wright, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Montana about his career in science.

You're in a room with 99 other people-- what are the chances someone shares your birthday? And what are the chances that any pair of people share a birthday? And what does this have to do with cryptographic hashes and forging digital documents?

How can you figure out the identity of a baker by looking only at the cookies that they bake? And how can this be used to predict the weather or to do speech recognition?

A chat with Jesse Johnson, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montana about his career in science.

How do we make computers faster every year? And what does it have to do with the rise of GPUs and the battle between 4 pigs and 4096 chickens?

A chat with Oliver Serang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montana about his career in science.

A diner has too many people dining alone, and so they can't seat a family of four. What does that have to do with why it's slow to copy a movie to your USB stick?

There's a lot of data online: people's blogs, emails, and social media posts. So how do companies mine that text for information? And what does it have to do with the word usage in Dracula and Frankenstein?

Imagine you have a coupon for free ice cream, but you have to spend exactly $17.25. How can you solve this and get your free ice cream? And what does it have to do with chemistry?

Cutting things in half is such an important idea, it shows up all over the place. So what does it have to do with cake, wine cellars, cootie testing, and the number of particles in the universe?

Welcome back!

The end of season 1-- leave any feedback on iTunes or on Google Play... or on Tigr!

We've already heard about turning sausages back into pigs... But how can we use the world around us (e.g., half a box of uncooked spaghetti noodles) to do all the work?

Someone offers you an envelope filled with cash... but there's chance that a second envelope has more $ in it. Do you switch?

You have a pile of bolts and a pile of hex nuts and they don't all fit together. How do you pair them up?

Fibonacci numbers come up in the strangest places. What do they have to do with breeding rabbits, converting between miles and kilometers, and how Google works?

Multiple testing failure is one of the biggest threats to scientific progress. But what does it have to do with online dating?