No; I was all horns and thorns Sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright — Joanna Newsom Far be it for me to be accused of liking things. Let me, instead, present a corner of my hateful heart. (That is to say that I’m supposed to be doing a really complicated thing right now and […]
Category: Statistics
Survivalist vi
A few days ago I wrote about computational survivalists, people who prepare to be able to work on computers with only software that is available everywhere. Of course nothing is available everywhere, and so each person interprets “everywhere” to mean computers they anticipate using. If you need to edit a text file on a Windows […]
How to think scientifically about scientists’ proposals for fixing science
I kinda like this little article which I wrote a couple years ago while on the train from the airport. It will appear in the journal Socius. Here’s how it begins: Science is in crisis. Any doubt about this status has surely been been dispelled by the loud assurances to the contrary by various authority […]
Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology
Judith Tanur writes: The Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology recognizes students in the social sciences who incorporate visual analysis in their work. The contest is open worldwide to undergraduate and graduate students (majoring in any social science). It is named for Rachel Dorothy Tanur (1958–2002), an urban planner and lawyer who cared deeply […]
MHC2020
There is a conference on mixtures (M) and hidden Markov models (H) and clustering (C) taking place in Orsay on June 17-19, next year. Registration is free if compulsory. With about twenty confirmed speakers. (Irrelevant as the following remark is, this is the opportunity to recall the conference on mixtures I organised in Aussois 25 […]
What is a privacy budget?
The idea behind differential privacy is that it doesn’t make much difference whether your data is in a data set or not. How much difference your participation makes is made precise in terms of probability statements. The exact definition doesn’t for this post, but it matters that there is an exact definition. Someone designing a […]
Poetry corner
Ray Could Write Statistics Be What has happened down here is the winds have changed Spin The Paper of My Enemy Has Been Retracted Imaginary gardens with real data A parable regarding changing standards on the presentation of statistical evidence Thanks to W. B. Yeats, Young Tiger, Randy Newman, W. H. Auden, Clive James, Marianne […]
Queueing theory and regular expressions
Queueing theory is the study of waiting in line. That may not sound very interesting, but the subject is full of surprises. For example, when a server is near capacity, adding a second server can cut backlog not just in half but by an order of magnitude or more. More on that here. In this […]
at the centre of Bayes
2:14:04!!!
When presenting a new method, talk about its failure modes.
A coauthor writes: I really like the paper [we are writing] as it is. My only criticism of it perhaps would be that we present this great new method and discuss all of its merits, but we do not really discuss when it fails / what its downsides are. Are there any cases where the […]
The best is the enemy of the good. It is also the enemy of the not so good.
This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. The Ocean Cleanup Project’s device to clean up plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is back in the news because it is back at work and is successfully collecting plastic. A bunch of my friends are pretty happy about it and have said so on social […]
holy sister [book review]
Third and last volume in Mark Lawrence’s series, this book did not disappoint me, as often conclusions do. Maybe because I was in a particularly serene mind after my month in Japan! The characters were the same, obviously, but had grown in depth and maturity, including the senior nuns that were before somewhat caricatures of […]
Hyperexponential and hypoexponential distributions
There are a couple different ways to combine random variables into a new random variable: means and mixtures. To take the mean of X and Y you average their values. To take the mixture of X and Y you average their densities. The former makes the tails thinner. The latter makes the tails thicker. When […]
On the term “self-appointed” . . .
I was reflecting on what bugs me so much about people using the term “self-appointed” (for example, when disparaging “self-appointed data police” or “self-appointed chess historians“). The obvious question when someone talks about “self-appointed” whatever is, Who self-appointed you to decide who is illegitimately self-appointed? But my larger concern is with the idea that being […]
1:59:40!
Japanese mushrooms [jatp]
Dan’s Paper Corner: Yes! It does work!
Only share my research With sick lab rats like me Trapped behind the beakers And the Erlenmeyer flasks Cut off from the world, I may not ever get free But I may One day Trying to find An antidote for strychnine — The Mountain Goats Hi everyone! Hope you’re enjoying Peak Libra Season! I’m bringing […]
What’s the p-value good for: I answer some questions.
Martin King writes: For a couple of decades (from about 1988 to 2006) I was employed as a support statistician, and became very interested in the p-value issue; hence my interest in your contribution to this debate. (I am not familiar with the p-value ‘reconciliation’ literature, as published after about 2005.) I would hugely appreciate […]
Elsevier > Association for Psychological Science
Everyone dunks on Elsevier. But here’s a case where they behaved well. Jordan Anaya points us to this article from Retraction Watch: In May, [psychology professor Barbara] Fredrickson was last author of a paper in Psychoneuroendocrinology claiming to show that loving-kindness meditation slowed biological aging, specifically that it kept telomeres — which protect chromosomes — […]