Ted Pavlic (he/him/his)

A: You absolutely should not shake that orange juice bottle.
B: Really?!
A: No cap.

Gandalf actually started his career as a safety inspector. When he found fire extinguishers that were expired, he would exclaim, "You shall not PASS!"

The previous DHS Secy shut down all university funding from DHS, including major DHS Centers of Excellence that were doing valuable work developing new tools for efficiently securing the homeland. Will new DHS Secy reconsider the value of technological and operations research?

Sounds like the #Bridgerton producers were willing to invest a lot in the music for the show. They say it was instrumental to it's success.

"Fortunately" (??), the push (and technically now govt mandate as of the Nelson memo that went into effect in 2026) for open-access publishing makes it very costly to submit papers for peer review. So, that balances the negative externalities a bit when authors have to pay $2k–$15k for each paper...

Einstein - AI Homework Agent Einstein logs into Canvas and does your homework automatically. He has his own computer — he can watch lectures, read essays, write papers, and participate in discussions.

Before, the AI agents were general purpose and just happened to allow students to complete online assignments in one click. Now they're marketed as specialists at this.
companion.ai/einstein

Humbled by Evolution Understanding the history and diversity of life inspires awe and wonder.

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

The RenFair announced that it was giving away spears to the first 100 people to attend jousting matches. It was big news -- particularly for all the free-lance reporters.

I tried to take a photo of a grasshopper on my windshield, but now it looks like a gigantic bug destroying the town.

It's surprising that a curling iron is not a good fit for a curling match...

Our dog groomer has a special on Fridays -- "nails trimmed, half off."

That seems a little deep!

Guide to Tuning the Many Hyperparameters of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) YouTube video by Ted Pavlic

Here you go! This lecture (phrased to hopefully be useful to people even outside of the class I'm teaching) goes over the 5–6 GA hyperparameters and hwo they fit on the diagram above.
youtu.be/TwZxTuU8LUI

Guide to Tuning the Many Hyperparameters of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) YouTube video by Ted Pavlic

Here you go! This lecture (phrased to hopefully be useful to people even outside of the class I'm teaching) goes over the 5–6 GA hyperparameters and hwo they fit on the diagram above.
youtu.be/TwZxTuU8LUI

Looks like Facebook is starting to blend its spam together. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.

Oh -- a key to the quantities:

M: Census population size (N for popgen)
R: Size of parent pool (effective pop size N_E for popgen)
Pc: Crossover fraction
Pm: Mutation rate
E: Number of elites carried over
SP: Selection pressure in selection operator

/cc: @wcratcliff.bsky.social -- You might have some passing interest in this. An attempt to more seriously use concepts from popgen and artificial selection to better understand and use evolutionary algorithms, and I would argue the hand-drawn diagram applies to artificial sel'n in general.

I follow that up with this slide, which I put together a while back to help students use ideas from popgen to build high-level intuition about what you're trying to do when changing hyperparameters/designing new operators. The new diagram just makes that more explicit and tailored for a GA.

In case it's helpful for anyone covering metaheuristics, here is my handy guide for choosing the major hyperparameters of a Genetic Algorithm. I tried to bring in more inspiration from popgen as well as breeding while keeping an engineering (instead of breeder) perspective.

Oh, no! I was really looking forward to getting that pet odor back.

Restorative epistasis can occur between 2 complementary loss-of-function mutations (in yeast) if they happen to cooccur in just the right way (2 wrongs making a right).

"Predicting epistasis across proteins by structural logic"
by Tang et al. (2026, PNAS)
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#RedBull should partner with a major chicken chain on a promotion where if you buy a RedBull you get free 🪽s

NASA won’t bring Mars samples back to Earth: this is the science that will be lost A Congressional bill restores funding for most NASA space-science missions, but there is no money for returning samples already collected on the red planet.

Tariffs hit Mars imports.

"Congressional bill restores funding for most NASA space-science missions, but there is no money for returning samples already collected on the red planet."

"NASA won’t bring Mars samples back to Earth: this is the science that will be lost"
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Do you think it would be a good idea or a bad idea for the U.S. to use military force to take possession of Greenland from Denmark?"
Good idea: 4%
Bad idea: 71%
(Ipsos)

4%. He did it. He finally hit Lizardman's Constant.

ACM Digital Library: Evolving Access to Support Open Research DL Pricing

Well, the ACM Digital Library Premium is pretty slimy too -- doubling the membership fee just to get access to articles in order to support "Open" access elsewhere -- but at least ACM is much cheaper than IEEE and even gives you an IEEE discount.
libraries.acm.org/subscription...

I generally appreciate scientific societies, but the IEEE continues to be a total scam. So, I saved $510 off my membership by being a member? I guess those who specialize in circuits shouldn't be faulted for circular logic...

After trying out Plus for a few days, the on-screen UI downgrade was just too bad. The voice assistant is a bit better, but it's not worth the losses. Fortunately going back to the old version is as easy as:

"Alexa, end early access"

Hopefully they keep working on this product.

For anyone with an #Amazon #Echo device without a physical volume ring, you can get early access to #AmazonAlexa's #AlexaPlus. Sadly, the on-screen UI is half baked. Example: Below is the legacy Amazon Alexa with a yellow bar indicating a notification on my Echo Show 5. That bar goes away in "Plus".

"In a profession that already demands enormous sacrifices, precarious positions and geographical flexibility, with work that consumes evenings and weekends more often than we’d like to admit, we owe it to ourselves to at least understand how we’re being compensated."
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

“There Are Two Possible Futures for American Science.” The Simons Foundation president talks about science philanthropy, the future of the research enterprise, and remaining hopeful.

#Science in America right now – Half of the tenure-track jobs in math have been lost between 2024 and 2025 (150 to 70) and the Simons Foundation is funding 1/7 of the remaining jobs. Science is being held together with philanthropy and dental floss. 🧪
issues.org/american-sci...

I told #AlexaPlus a dad joke about bookstores. She understood the joke and inferred that it probably caused my wife to give me an eye roll that "could shutdown a bookstore faster than Amazon."

I was taken aback a bit by an #Amazon AI joking about killing bookstores!