art brut [oh door]

two positions at opposite ends of the map [openings]

In the past days, I received emails about two openings in statistics, in the beautiful and attractive [if geographically opposed!] cities of Bath, Britain, and Vancouver, British Columbia, and in two great departments:

• The Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Bath, UK is inviting applications for the posts of Professor of Statistics and Lecturer/Senior Lecture/Reader in Statistics. Deadline for application is Monday 16 October 2017.
• The Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) invites applications from outstanding new investigators for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor. Computational Statistics is targeted as a priority area for the search. Deadline for application is November 1, 2017.

the end of the Series B’log…

Today is the last and final day of Series B’log as David Dunson, Piotr Fryzlewicz and myself have decided to stop the experiment, faute de combattants. (As we say in French.) The authors nicely contributed long abstracts of their papers, for which I am grateful, but with a single exception, no one came out with comments or criticisms, and the idea to turn some Series B papers into discussion papers does not seem to appeal, at least in this format. Maybe the concept will be rekindled in another form in the near future, but for now we let it lay down. So be it!

snapshot from Vienna [jatp]

LaTeX issues from Vienna

When working on the final stage of our edited handbook on mixtures, in Vienna, I came across unexpected practical difficulties! One was that by working on Dropbox with Windows users, files and directories names suddenly switched from upper case to lower cases letters !, making hard-wired paths to figures and subsections void in the numerous LaTeX files used for the book. And forcing us to change to lower cases everywhere. Having not worked under Windows since George Casella gave me my first laptop in the mid 90’s!, I am amazed that this inability to handle both upper and lower names is still an issue. And that Dropbox replicates it. (And that some people see that as a plus.)

The other LaTeX issue that took a while to solve was that we opted for one chapter one bibliography, rather than having a single bibliography at the end of the book, mainly because CRC Press asked for this feature in order to sell chapters individually… This was my first encounter with this issue and I found the solutions to produce individual bibliographies incredibly heavy handed, whether through chapterbib or bibunits, since one has to bibtex one .aux file for each chapter. Even with a one line bash command, this is annoying to the extreme!

weapons of math destruction [fan]

As a [new] member of Parliement, Cédric Villani is now in charge of a committee on artificial intelligence, which goal is to assess the positive and negative sides of AI. And refers in Le Monde interview below to Weapons of Maths Destruction as impacting his views on the topic! Let us hope Superintelligence is no next on his reading list…

running ABC when the likelihood is available

Today I refereed a paper where the authors used ABC to bypass convergence (and implementation) difficulties with their MCMC algorithm. And I am still pondering whether or not this strategy makes sense. If only because ABC needs to handle the same complexity and the same amount of parameters as an MCMC algorithm. While shooting “in the dark” by using the prior or a coarse substitute to the posterior. And I wonder at the relevance of simulating new data when the [true] likelihood value [at the observed data] can be computed. This would sound to me like the relevant and unique “statistics” worth considering…