ABC model choice not to be trusted [3]

On Friday, I received a nice but embarrassing email from Xavier Didelot. He indeed reminded me that I attended the talk he gave at the model choice workshop in Warwick last May, as, unfortunately but rather unsurprisingly giving my short span memory!, I had forgotten about it! Looking at the slides he joined to his email, I indeed remember attending the talk and expecting to get back to the results after the meeting. As I went from Warwick to Paris only to leave a day after for Benidorm, and the Valencia 9 meeting, in such a hurry that I even forgot my current black notebook, the plans of getting back to the talk got forgotten so completely that even reading the tech report (now appeared in Bayesian Analysis) could not rescind them!

Here are some of Xavier’s comments, followed by my answers:

R exam

I spent most of my Saturday perusing R codes to check the answers written by my students to the R exam I gave two weeks ago… The outcome is mostly poor, even though some managed to solve a fair part of the long problem. Except for the few hopeless cases who visibly never wrote a single line of R code before the exam, all students have managed the basics of R programming and graphics, if not of Monte Carlo approximations or of boostrapping. One of the problems involved the distribution of a disk area and I found that half of the [third year math!] students do not know the formula! Although I had repeatedly told them about the good training in trying to solve Le Monde puzzles (as well as checking my posts about them), only one student found the solution to puzzle #49…

Marie Curie [2]

As a coincidence, following the previous post about Marie Curie grants, the French postal services launched this weekend a new stamp in honour of both Marie Curie, who got her (second) Nobel Prize in Chemistry 100 years ago (the first one was in Physics in 1903) and of the International Year of  Chemistry. Since Pierre and Marie Curie lived in my home town of Sceaux, the stamp was first emitted here and I got a postcard with the new stamp (as well as an older stamp of 1967 commemorating Marie Curie’s 100th birthday). Another unfortunate coincidence about the Curies is that Pierre Curie got run over place Dauphine where the Université Paris-Dauphine now stands…

Art brut

Dauphine mathematician in Tunisian government!

Our colleague at Dauphine Elyès Jouini (who also is the vice-president for research) joined the new Tunisian government as the Minister for economic reforms (Ministre auprès du premier ministre chargé des réformes économiques et sociales et de la coordination avec les ministères concernés). A praiseworthy if challenging move! All the best, Elyès!