Quantifying the population density of an urban area is a fraught issue. Measures of density are often defined differently from place to place or applied inconsistently, and arguments abound over just how much of the land surrounding a city should and
should not be classified as `urban. The prime candidates for a consistent density measure are overall density OD (also known as average density) and population-weighted density PWD (as recently adopted by the US Census Bureau). In this note some less intuitive aspects of PWD are explored, so that the consequences of adopting PWD as a density measure are better understood relative to OD. It will also be seen that one cannot entirely dispense with the need to define urban boundaries, to work preferentially with the smallest parcels of land for which one has data, and to pay careful attention to the delineation of boundaries to ensure high-density and low-density developments are allocated to separate parcels where possible.
It is well-known that the Continuum Hypothesis (CH) is independent of the other axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with choice (ZFC). This raises the question of whether an intuitive justification exists for CH as an additional axiom, or conversel
y whether it is more intuitive to deny CH. Freilings Axiom of Symmetry (AS) is one candidate for an intuitively justifiable axiom that, when appended to ZFC, is equivalent to the denial of CH. The intuition relies on a probabalistic argument, usually cast in terms of throwing random darts at the real line, and has been defended by researchers as well as popular writers. In this note, the intuitive argument is reviewed. Following William Abram, it is suggested that while accepting CH leads directly to a counterexample to AS, this is not necessarily fatal to our intuition. Instead, we suggest, it serves to alert us to the error in a naive intuition that leaps too readily from the near-certainty of individual events to near-certainty of a joint event.
The Monty Hall problem is the TV game scenario where you, the contestant, are presented with three doors, with a car hidden behind one and goats hidden behind the other two. After you select a door, the host (Monty Hall) opens a second door to reveal
a goat. You are then invited to stay with your original choice of door, or to switch to the remaining unopened door, and claim whatever you find behind it. Assuming your objective is to win the car, is your best strategy to stay or switch, or does it not matter? Jason Rosenhouse has provided the definitive analysis of this game, along with several intriguing variations, and discusses some of its psychological and philosophical implications. This extended review examines several themes from the book in some detail from a Bayesian perspective, and points out one apparently inadvertent error.
This mathematical recreation extends the analysis of a recent paper, asking when a traveller at a bus stop and not knowing the time of the next bus is best advised to wait or to start walking toward the destination. A detailed analysis and solution i
s provided for a very general class of probability distributions of bus arrival time, and the solution characterised in terms of a function analogous to the hazard rate in reliability theory. The note also considers the question of intermediate stops. It is found that the optimal strategy is not always the laziest, even when headways are not excessively long. For the common special case where one knows the (uniform) headway but not the exact timetable, it is shown that one should wait if the headway is less than the walking time (less bus travel time), and walk if the headway is more than twice this much. In between it may be better to wait or to walk, depending on ones confidence in being able to catch up to a passing bus.
