Category: Travel
from here to infinity
“Introducing a sparsity prior avoids overfitting the number of clusters not only for finite mixtures, but also (somewhat unexpectedly) for Dirichlet process mixtures which are known to overfit the number of clusters.” On my way back from Clermont-Ferrand, in an old train that reminded me of my previous ride on that line that took place […]
Antarctic sabbatical
Airbnb is supporting 5 volunteers that wish to join next December environmental scientist Kirstie Jones-Williams, from the University of Exeter, on a scientific expedition in Antarctica, investigating the presence of microplastics there. The deadline for applications is 11:59pm EDT on 8 October 2019. (I wish I could, but the news came a bit late to […]
Prussian blue [book review]
This is the one-before-last volume in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series (one-before-last since the author passed away last year). Which I picked in a local bookstore for taking place in Berchtesgaden, which stands a few kilometers west of Salzburg and which I passed on my way there (and back) last week. Very good title, full […]
Hausdorff school on MCMC [28 March-02 April, 2020]
The Hausdorff Centre for Mathematics will hold a week on recent advances in MCMC in Bonn, Germany, March 30 – April 3, 2020. Preceded by two days of tutorials. (“These tutorials will introduce basic MCMC methods and mathematical tools for studying the convergence to the invariant measure.”) There is travel support available, but the application […]
poor statistics
I came over the weekend across this graph and the associated news that the county of Saint-Nazaire, on the southern border of Brittany, had a significantly higher rate of cancers than the Loire countries. The complete study written by Solenne Delacour, Anne Cowppli-Bony, amd Florence Molinié, is quite cautious about the reasons for this higher […]
NeurIPS without visa
I came by chance upon this 2018 entry in Synced that NeurIPS now takes place in Canada between Montréal and Vancouver primarily because visas to Canada are easier to get than visas to the USA, even though some researchers still get difficulties in securing theirs. Especially researchers from some African countries, which is exposed in […]
Guinness [local]
ABC in Clermont-Ferrand
Today I am taking part in a one-day workshop at the Université of Clermont Auvergne on ABC. With applications to cosmostatistics, along with Martin Kilbinger [with whom I worked on PMC schemes] Florent Leclerc and Grégoire Aufort. This should prove a most exciting day! (With not enough time to run up Puy de Dôme in […]
unimaginable scale culling
Despite the evidence brought by ABC on the inefficiency of culling in massive proportions the British Isles badger population against bovine tuberculosis, the [sorry excuse for a] United Kingdom government has permitted a massive expansion of badger culling, with up to 64,000 animals likely to be killed this autumn… Since the cows are the primary […]
Le Monde puzzle [#1110]
A low-key sorting problem as Le Monde current mathematical puzzle: If the numbers from 1 to 67 are randomly permuted and if the sorting algorithm consists in picking a number i with a position higher than its rank i and moving it at the correct i-th position, what is the maximal number of steps to […]
two positions at UBC
A long-time friend at UBC pointed out to me the opening of two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions at the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2020 or January 1, 2021. The deadline for applications is October 18, 2019. Statistics at UBC is an […]
the three i’s of poverty
Today I made a “quick” (10h door to door!) round trip visit to Marseille (by train) to take part in the PhD thesis defense (committee) of Edwin Fourrier-Nicolaï, which title was Poverty, inequality and redistribution: an econometric approach. While this was mainly a thesis in economics, meaning defending some theory on inequalities based on East […]
email footprint
While I was wondering (im Salzburg) at the carbon impact of sending emails with an endless cascade of the past history of exchanges and replies, I found this (rather rudimentary) assessment that, while standard emails had an average impact of 4g, those with long attachments could cost 50g, quoting from Burners-Lee, leading to the fairly […]
9 pitfalls of data science [book review]
I received The 9 pitfalls of data science by Gary Smith [who has written a significant number of general public books on personal investment, statistics and AIs] and Jay Cordes from OUP for review a few weeks ago and read it on my trip to Salzburg. This short book contains a lot of anecdotes and […]
Salzburg castle [jatp]
likelihood-free inference by ratio estimation
“This approach for posterior estimation with generative models mirrors the approach of Gutmann and Hyvärinen (2012) for the estimation of unnormalised models. The main difference is that here we classify between two simulated data sets while Gutmann and Hyvärinen (2012) classified between the observed data and simulated reference data.” A 2018 arXiv posting by Owen […]
Japan’s Kumano Kodo pilgrimage [book review]
When preparing our hiking trip to the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage route, I was extremely pleased to find a dedicated guidebook that covered precisely the region we wanted to explore and provided enough background material to make the walk sound feasible. However, once I found the Kumano Travel reservation website, run most efficiently by the Tanabe […]