le grand amphithéâtre de l’Université de Lyon

The talks of the statlearn 2017 conference took place in an amazing 19th Century amphitheatre that looked in much better conditions than the corresponding amphitheatre of La Sorbonne. After checking on-line, I found that this place had suffered a major fire in 1999 and had been renovated since then.

The main wall features a very academic painting by Jean-Joseph Weerts representing a rhethoric competition in Lugdunum (the hill of the god Lug, in Latin), under the Roman emperor Caligula. (It is hard to imagine this was painted at the time of the Impressionist revolution!) Which creates a huge distraction from listening to the first talk when one enters this room, as there are many stories woven into the painting, including the fate of the poor rethoricians, thrown in the Rhône by the emperor’s guards!

Saône, sunrise #2 [jatp]

Core [still] minus one…

Another full day spent working with Jean-Michel Marin on the new edition of Bayesian Core (soon to be Bayesian Essentials with R!) and the remaining hierarchical Bayes chapter… I have reread and completed the regression and GLM chapters, sent to very friendly colleagues for a last round of comments. Now, I am essentially idle, waiting for Jean-Michel to finish his part on the hierarchical Bayes chapter, so that I can do the final editing.round. Jean-Michel had a very long day on that chapter, leaving Montpellier at 5am to return only at half past midnight, due to massive delays in the train schedule (which is why I always fly to Montpellier…)

Core minus one!

Jean-Michel Marin visited me in Paris last week and, besides taking part in Pierre’s PhD defence, we made enough progress to close two more chapters of the new edition of Bayesian Core (soon to be Bayesian Essentials with R!) This follows the good work session we had in Carnon where we also completed two chapters (although it was hard to convince anyone that renting a flat by the Mediterranean sea was at all connected with…work! While it was: the only breaks I took were my morning runs…). There just remains one single chapter to complete, now, the one on hierarchical Bayes models. By all means, I dearly want to see it done by November 1!!!