JSM 2010 [end]

On Wednesday morning, before boarding my plane to San Francisco, I attended the first two talks in the Erich Lehmann memorial session. The first talk by Juliet Shaffer related Lehmann’s work on multiple testing to the recent developments on FDRs and FNRs. In particular, she mentioned the decision theoretic foundations of those false discovery indicators, but seemed unaware of our 2005 JASA paper with Peter Müller, Giovanni Parmigiani and Judith Rousseau where we set a decision-theoretic framework able to handle all four indicators. Peter Bickel surveyed the works of Erich Lehmann in a very personal and compelling way. I have always considered both books by Lehmann on estimation and testing as major references. And still thinks students of statistics should be exposed to them. A nitpicking remark about Peter Bickel’s biography of Erich Lehmann: he mentioned that Lehmann was born in Strasbourg, France, during German occupation in the first World War, while this was actually Germany, annexed since the 1870 war… Sadly, I missed Persi Diaconis‘ talk for fear of missing my flight (only to discover once I had boarded the plane that the pilots were 90 minutes away!!!)

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the meeting: I met very interesting people and heard a few talks that gave me food for thought, but feel that the scientific tension I brought back from Washington D.C. last year was not palpable in Vancouver. (Maybe my fault for waking up too early for keeping my concentration over the day, as others did find the meeting exciting! Still, I went to many sessions with very little attendees and had a hard time with filling my schedule…)