Summer school in Gran Paradiso
The Parco Nazionale Gran Paradiso and the Università di Pavia are organising a summer school on “Advances in species distribution modelling in ecological studies and conservation” in Pavia and Cogne, 12-18 September 2011. This school includes R and Winbugs tutorials, regular classes, plus a field trip to the park, so this sounds quite exciting (at least if you are interested in statistical ecology or ecological statistics). Following my great experience there two years ago, I wish I could get back to Aosta to attend (and try once again to climb La Grivola!) but this is the start of the semester… (The deadline for registration is July 31.)
Xi'an's Og 
June 20, 2011 at 6:29 am
I wish they’d hold it in January – Cogne has the best ice climbing in Europe… rather colder than in summer, though :-)
June 20, 2011 at 7:37 am
Better ice climbing than in Scotland?!
June 20, 2011 at 2:41 am
MaxEnt makes me feel uncomfortable…
June 20, 2011 at 9:03 am
In which sense? Principle or company?!
June 20, 2011 at 10:47 am
There’s a company? (I’m a happy little capitalist – it’s a valid, albeit inefficient, way to disseminate academic work)
I just feel nervous when I can’t tell if a method is going to work. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I feel nervous when I can’t tell *if* a method has worked or when there isn’t an obvious model behind it (colour me ‘unconvinced’ on maximum entropy methods, especially in situations with less than perfect data [i.e. any spatial presence data]).
It’s fully possible that I’m just ignorant here, however. Maybe all of these ‘problems’ don’t exist or have been solved. It would be nice – high dimensional optimisation is a hell of a lot easier than high dimensional integration…
June 21, 2011 at 7:16 am
Dan: Pardon my French! I meant company as in “in the company of cheerful ladies”, not as in a incorporated company”. There is a MaxEnt society running the MaxEnt meetings, though, and John Skilling runs (ran?) a consulting company called Maximum Entropy Data Consultants Ltd (MEDC). I would actually feel more nervous (even though I don’t) by the statement that maxent (or whatever method) works all the time and in every situation, i.e. by the somehow militant advocation of the principle that in the most radical members of the community sometimes borders the religious…