Cincinnato Polluce

Denver snapshot [jatp]

Angkor beer

Pommard

Chateau du Lucquet

Nature tea[dbits]

A very special issue of Nature (7 February 2019, vol. 556, no. 7742). With an outlook section on tea, plus a few research papers (and ads) on my principal beverage. News about the REF, Elsevier’s and Huawei’s woes with the University of California, the dangerous weakening of Title IX by the Trump administration, and a long report on the statistical analysis of Hurricane Maria deaths, involving mostly epidemiologists, but also Patrick Ball who took part in our Bayes for Good workshop at CIRM. Plus China’s food crisis and ways to reduce cropland losses and food waste. Concerning the tea part(y), a philogenetic study of different samples led to the theory that tea was domesticated thrice, twice in Yunnan (China) and once in Assam (India), with a divergence estimated at more than twenty thousand years ago. Another article on Pu-Ehr, with the potential impacts of climate change on this very unique tea. With a further remark that higher altitudes increase the anti-oxydant level of tea… And a fascinating description of agro-forestry where tea and vegetables are grown in a forest that regulates sun exposure, moisture evaporation, and soil nutrients.

Bayesian intelligence in Warwick

This is an announcement for an exciting CRiSM Day in Warwick on 20 March 2019: with speakers

10:00-11:00 Xiao-Li Meng (Harvard): “Artificial Bayesian Monte Carlo Integration: A Practical Resolution to the Bayesian (Normalizing Constant) Paradox”

11:00-12:00 Julien Stoehr (Dauphine): “Gibbs sampling and ABC”

14:00-15:00 Arthur Ulysse Jacot-Guillarmod (École Polytechnique Fedérale de Lausanne): “Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization of Deep Neural Networks”

15:00-16:00 Antonietta Mira (Università della Svizzera italiana e Università degli studi dell’Insubria): “Bayesian identifications of the data intrinsic dimensions”

[whose abstracts are on the workshop webpage] and free attendance. The title for the workshop mentions Bayesian Intelligence: this obviously includes human intelligence and not just AI!