deaths on Mont Maudit (and bad graph)

A large avalanche on one of the most classical routes to the summit of Mont Blanc early yesterday morning alas caught several groups climbing towards Mont Blanc and most sadly killed nine of them, including the BMC former secretary Roger Payne. It was triggered by a sérac fall above the route, always a possibility in this area whose name says it all… At a very minor level, compared with those tragic deaths, let me point out that The Guardian reported on this tragic accident with the following “bad graph”, which apparently gives the number of deaths on each accident (month?) with no consideration for the time (first axis). In other words, the barplot is missing all the zeroes. (It also missed the group of two who died from exhaustion in the Jorasses last November…)

This is not the right post to elaborate on the announcement that the next MCM’ski conference will take place in Chamonix, presumably on January 6-8, 2014. I am currently waiting for a formal proposal from the conference bureau in Chamonix… Nor on the incoming creation of a computational Bayes (BayesComp) ISBA section [if enough ISBA members support this creation].

About commercial publishers

Julien Cornebise has [once again!] pointed out a recent Guardian article. It is about commercial publishers of academic journals, mainly Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley, with a clear stand from its title: “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist“! The valuable argument therein is that academic publishers make hefty profits (a 40% margin for Elsevier!) without contributing to the central value of the journals, namely the research itself that is mostly funded by public or semi-public bodies. The publishers of course distribute the journals to the subscribers, but the reported profits clearly show that, on average, they spend much less doing so than they charge… Here are some of the institutional rates (can you spot Elsevier journals? journals published by societies? free open access journals?!):

• Communications in Statistics (A, B, C, print and online):  9,526 euros
• Journal of Econometrics: $3,560
• Statistics and Probability Letters: $2,941
• PNAS: $2,910
• JMA: $2,130
• Statistics and Computing: 1037 euros
• PRTF: $999
• Econometrica: $650
• JASA (print and online): $615
• JRSS B (print and online): $565 
• International Statistical Review: $411
• Annales de l’IHP: $400
• Annals of Statistics: $390
• Biometrika: $282
• Significance: $279
• JCGS: $233
• Technometrics: $180
• Chance: $96
• Bayesian Analysis: $0.00
• Journal of Statistical Software: $0.00

(apart from greed, there is no justification for the top four [Taylor and Francis/Elsevier] journals to ask for such prices! The Journal of Econometrics also charges $50 per submission! PNAS is another story given the volume of the [non-for-profit] publication: 22750 pages in 2010, meaning it is highly time to move to being fully electronic. The rate for Statistics and Computing is another disappointment, when compared with JCGS. )

The article reports the pressure to publish in such journals (vs. non-commercial journals) because of the tyranny of the impact factors. However, the reputation of those top-tier journals is not due to the action of the publishers, but rather to the excellence of their editorial boards; there is therefore no foreseeable long-term impact in moving from one editor to another for our favourite journals. Moreover, I think that the fact to publish in top journals is more relevant for the authors themselves than for the readers when the results are already circulating through a media like arXiv. Of course, having the papers evaluated by peers in a strict academic mode is of prime importance to distinguish major advances from pseudo-science; however the electronic availability of papers and of discussion forums and blogs implies that suspicious results should anyway be detected by the community. (I am not advocating the end of academic journals, far from it!, but an evolution towards a wider range of evaluations via Internet discussions, as for the DREAM paper recently.) The article also mentions that some funding organisms impose Open Access publishing. However, this is not the ideal solution as long as journals also make a profit on that line, by charging for open access (see, e.g., PNAS or JRSS)! Hence using another chunk of public (research) money towards their profits… My opinion is that everyone should make one’s papers available on-line or better via arXiv. And petition one’s societies for a tighter control of the subscription rates, or even a move to electronic editions when the rates get out of control.

PS-Here is a link to an Australian blog, the Conversation, where some publishers (Wiley and Elsevier) were interviewed on these points. I will not comment, but this interview is quite informative on the defense arguments of the publisher!

Testing and significance

Julien Cornebise pointed me to this Guardian article that itself summarises the findings of a Nature Neuroscience article I cannot access. The core of the paper is that a large portion of comparative studies conclude to a significant difference between protocols when one protocol result is significantly different from zero and the other one(s) is(are) not…  From a frequentist perspective (I am not even addressing the Bayesian aspects of using those tests!), under the null hypothesis that both protocols induce the same null effect, the probability of wrongly deriving a significant difference can be evaluated by

> x=rnorm(10^6)
> y=rnorm(10^6)
> sum((abs(x)<1.96)*(abs(y)>1.96)*(abs(x-y)<1.96*sqrt(2)))
[1] 31805
> sum((abs(x)>1.96)*(abs(y)<1.96)*(abs(x-y)<1.96*sqrt(2)))
[1] 31875
> (31805+31875)/10^6
[1] 0.06368

which moves to a 26% probability of error when x is drifted by 2! (The maximum error is just above 30%, when x is drifted by around 2.6…)

(This post was written before Super Andrew posted his own “difference between significant and not significant“! My own of course does not add much to the debate.)

Mathematics and realism

I read in Liberation a rather surprising tribune (in French) by “Yann Moix, writer”. The starting point is a criticism of Stephen Hawking (and Leonard Mlodinow)’s recent book The Grand Design, With regards to its conclusion that a god is not necessary to explain the creation and the working of the Universe: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” I haven’t read Hawking’s book (although I briefly considered buying it in London last time I was there, here is a Guardian review), I had never heard before of this (controversial) writer, and I do not see the point in debating about supernatural beings (except when reviewing a fantasy book!). However, the arguments of Moix are rather limited from a philosophical viewpoint.

Creationism in UK schools?!

“It was found that Britons were almost three times more likely than Egyptians to want creationism and intelligent design to be included in the teaching of evolution.” The Guardian, October 25, 2009

I was reading the Guardian on the flight to Madrid and there was this terrible statistics that 54% of the UK public wanted creationism to be “taught” in public schools. This is worse than in the US… Quite an appaling statistic for the Darwin year and Darwin’s country! Of course, this kind of result should be taken with a pinch of salt since the same Guardian reports that four Britons out of five repudiate creationism, along with a paraodical region-by-region map where each region has more than 25% of the people in favour of creationism or “intelligent” design! (The quote above is rather dumb as well! Why should Egyptians be more in favour of creationism?!) Here is a blog reporting more clearly on a similar study, conducted by Science, with France coming almost on top of Darwinian countries! Except that Britain is fairly close to the top as well. So this may end up being a catchy title making too much of a limited or poorly conducted survey. To conclude that “More than half of British adults think that intelligent design and creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schoolscience lessons” based on 973 Britons is extrapolation to the third power…