non-reversible gerrymandering

Gregory Herschlag, Jonathan C. Mattingly [whom I met in Oaxaca and who acknowledges helpful conversations with Manon Michel while at CIRM two years ago], Matthias Sachs, and Evan Wyse just posted an arXiv paper using non-reversible MCMC methods to improve sampling of voting district plans towards fighting (partisan) Gerrymandering. In doing so we extend thecurrent […]

hue & cry [book review]

While visiting the Blackwell’s bookstore by the University of Edinburgh last June, I spotted this historical whodunit in the local interest section. Hue & Cry by Shirley McKay. It stayed on a to-read pile by my bed until a few weeks ago when I started reading it and got more and more engrossed in the […]

Bayesian model averaging in astrophysics [guest post]

.[Following my posting of a misfiled 2013 blog, Ewan Cameron told me of the impact of this paper in starting his own blog and I asked him for a guest post, resulting in this analysis, much deeper than mine. No warning necessary this time!] Back in February 2013 when “Bayesian Model Averaging in Astrophysics: A […]

broken homes [book review]

Even though this is the fourth volume in the Peter Grant series, I did read it first [due to my leaving volume one in my office in Coventry and coming across this one in an airport bookstore in Düsseldorf], an experiment I do not advise anyone to repeat as it kills some of the magic […]

recent reads

During my trips in the recent weeks, I managed to read a few books, although nothing spectacular: Arnaldur Indriðason’s Outrage (Myrká in Icelandic) is a thriller in the Erlandur series, where inspector Erlundur does not appear at all but is replaced with inspector Elinborg who deals with the murder of a drug rapist. And her […]