Hari grew up in west and central India and studied production engineering his native state, Tamilnadu. In August 2000, he started graduate school in industrial engineering at Arizona State University. While in Arizona, he traveled the beautiful landscapes of the American Southwest at every opportunity; these travels also led him to many American Indian reservations. After a two year healthcare engineering research position at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota – a place as cold as Arizona was hot – he joined the engineering faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His academic website is here. He blogs on themes related to the humanities – travel, nature, literature, history – at Thirty Letters in My Name. Email: hari [dot] balasubramanian [at] gmail [dot] com
by Hari Balasubramanian Something different this time — an article on one of my longstanding research themes. Since 2015, as part of research that has involved many students, I’ve worked with a dataset called the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). The survey is conducted annually by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).…
by Hari Balasubramanian In the long and evolving list of cognitive biases, the ‘frequency illusion’ feels most familiar: I’ve experienced it so many times that it seems almost ordinary. This is roughly how it works. First, you encounter something – an unusual word like ‘topology’, or the title of a new book or a movie…
by Hari Balasubramanian I’ve spent twenty-five years in a branch of applied mathematics called operations research; I’ve published papers and taught graduate engineering courses on probability, statistics, and optimization. But even with so much exposure to numbers and quantitative reasoning, I’ve never felt comfortable with math. That might sound like false modesty but it’s not:…
by Hari Balasubramanian Ecology is quite distant from my academic work in engineering, but I’ve developed a great love for it in recent years. To learn the basics, I’ve tried many books and articles, but I often turn to the college-level biology textbook Principles of Life. Like many academic texts, this one is not suited for…
by Hari Balasubramanian The slim, green book Natural History of Western Massachusetts is one of my favorites. Compressed into its hundred odd pages are articles and visuals that describe the essential natural features of the Amherst region, where I’ve lived since 2008. I turn to it every time something outdoors piques my interest — a…
by Hari Balasubramanian This year marks two decades since I moved from India to the United States. I look back at how it all began in Arizona. In the summer of 2000, after completing my bachelor’s degree in engineering, I had to decide where to go next. I could either take up a job offer…
by Hari Balasubramanian A degree in engineering from India, grad school at an American university, and a job at an American corporation: call it the Indian-engineer version of the American dream. Like hundreds of thousands of Indian immigrants, Ved, the 36-year old protagonist of A California Story, appears to have fulfilled this dream. He lives in…
by Hari Balasubramanian A bit of self indulgence – also a kind of preface to all the 3 Quarks Daily essays I’ve written. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who is more drawn to the humanities than to math or the sciences. This can seem very puzzling to someone who looks at my career…
by Hari Balasubramanian Optimization – the search for the best among many – is at the heart of the statistical and machine learning models that get used so extensively these days. Take the simple concept that underlies many of these models: fitting a mathematical curve to data points, better known as regression. In the simplest…
by Hari Balasubramanian Just as the distribution of wealth exhibits dramatic skews – a small percent owns a disproportionate share of the total wealth – so too does the distribution of healthcare expenditures. When individuals in the US population are ranked based on their healthcare expenditures in a particular year, then it turns out that:…
by Hari Balasubramanian There are techniques of processing food that ancient cultures everywhere seem to have arrived at through an unstructured process of trial and error, and without a formal understanding of chemistry. This is how wheat grains turned into bread loaves, milk to cheese, soybeans to tofu, fruits to alcohol. As the techniques traveled…
by Hari Balasubramanian Thoughts on the differences in math applied to the physical and social sciences. The quote in the title is attributed to the statistician George Box. The term ‘model' could refer to a single equation, a set of equations, or an algorithm that takes an input and carries out some calculations. Box's point…
by Hari Balasubramanian I've noticed that it isn't easy to strike up a meaningful conversation with someone who doesn't fit into your professional or social circle. Even among strangers we look for clues and – understandably – seek out people with whom we might have something in common. This behavior appears to erect subtle barriers…
by Hari Balasubramanian There are interests that lie dormant within us, waiting to take hold some day. If someone had said ten years back that I'd be into birds, I would have been skeptical. It's true that I always had a fondness for animals: in high school, I spent a lot of time following neighborhood…
by Hari Balasubramanian Of the 7097 languages in the world, twenty-three (including the usual suspects: Mandarin, English, Spanish, various forms of Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese) are spoken by half of the world's population. Hundreds of languages have only a handful of speakers and are disappearing quickly; one language dies every four months. Some parts of…
by Hari Balasubramanian I was in the city of Jogjakarta (also spelled as Yogyakarta) in May 2015. It was a short stay: I was primarily visiting Hong Kong, but then had to exit Hong Kong to re-enter because my visa-free stay had expired. Nearby countries would have served the purpose, but I chose Indonesia —…
by Hari Balasubramanian I've lived in Massachusetts for 8 years now, and I've always been struck by the density and variety of trees here – maples, oaks, birches, beeches, chestnuts, hickories, white pines, pitch pines, hemlocks, firs. Look in any direction and your view is likely to be blocked by a tangle of trees: in…
by Hari Balasubramanian Is probabilistic analysis of any use in analyzing text – sequences of letters or sequences of words? Can a computer generate meaningful sentences by learning statistical properties such as how often certain strings of words or sentences occur in succession? What other uses could there be of such analysis? These were some…
by Hari Balasubramanian The Indian subcontinent is well known for its spices, and one of its stellar contributions is the ubiquitous black pepper. Native to South India and Southeast Asia (see unripe green fruits in picture), it’s been around for thousands of years, making its way very early to Europe and other parts of Asia…
by Hari Balasubramanian During my middle and high school years, I became fascinated with two generations of stray dogs that lived in my neighborhood. This was in the early 1990s. My family lived in the central Indian city of Nagpur, in a 3rd story flat. The flat had a couple of balconies (decks) which gave…