In the first time in recent memory, summer in the U.S. lacks spectator sports, summer blockbusters, and grounded pools.  Of course, all of these sunny staples of American culture have fallen victim to COVID-19 but, interestingly, new summer blockbusters have come to the front.  Families are spending more time together, new hobbies and interests are developing, and people everywhere are finding new outlets for the real summer blockbuster – American ingenuity.

Now onto the columns.

Expert judgement is hard to come by.  It takes a long time to accumulate the experience and practice needed to accurately pick the true from the false, the authentic from the fake, and find the right category for each object that comes our way.  This month, Aristotle To Digital begins a multi-part analysis of one the key machine learning applications: classification.

Markets work best when there is transparency.  Of course, not everybody in a market place wants transparency and, even if they do, it can rarely be achieved.  Regardless of the reason, the lack of information leads to market inefficiencies.  Interestingly, one of the more powerful methods for dealing with certain macroeconomic market inefficiencies is also one of the more ignored in introductory texts.  Common Cents introduces the concept of arbitrage and sets the ground work for later columns that look in depth at how arbitrage opportunities provide a mechanism to smooth out imbalances and how frustrating these opportunities can lead to some very undesirable outcomes.

This month’s Under The Hood finishes the two-part study of the exact solutions of Navier-Stokes equations.  The focus in this column is on two very important examples of Couette flow: steady flow in cylindrical geometry and time-varying linear flow.

Enjoy!