catching my train with no training

running after my plane

A bit of a hectic trip to Abidjan last Sunday, starting from Caen in the early morning where I was supporting my daughter, wife, mother, and mother-in-law for the annual Rochambelle women-only 5k race on the previous evening! With my daughter managing a fantastic 52nd position and ending up first of her category! As I was driven to the local train station to get back to my 63kg of Annals and my plane, the on-going 10k race kept preventing us from reaching it and I eventually decided 8 minutes before the deadline to leave the car and race to the station, actually running along the 10k racers for one kilometer and managing to enter the train just before it was leaving (too bad I could not finish the race, this start would have made for a great time despite my current injury!). And then when I eventually reached the CDG airport with my 63kg, I was told my bags were not good enough to carry them and that I had to drop some years of these Annals in the bin! So very frustrating… At least the remaining books reached their intended destination.The plane ride itself was uneventful and above a constant cover of clouds. While catching up with some unread arXivals, I also watched a great 2018 Japanese movie, Shoplifters, which sounded more like a modern tale than a realistic story, so outlying its characters were. With unexpected revelations towards the end and overall a moving and very subtle reflection on what ultimately makes a family. (Reading reviews on the movie later made me realise one scene had been censored for plane audiences…)

ENSEA & CISEA 2019

I found my (short) trip to Abdijan for the CISEA 2019 conference quite fantastic as it allowed me to meet with old friends, from the earliest days at CREST and even before, and to meet new ones. Including local students of ENSEA who had taken a Bayesian course out of my Bayesian Choice book. And who had questions about the nature of priors and the difficulty they had in accepting that several replies were possible with the same data! I wish I had had more time to discuss the relativity of Bayesian statements with them but this was a great and rare opportunity to find avid readers of my books! I also had a long chat with another student worried about the use or mis-use of reversible jump algorithms to draw inference  on time-series models in Bayesian Essentials, chat that actually demonstrated his perfect understanding of the matter. And it was fabulous to meet so many statisticians and econometricians from West Africa, most of them French-speaking. My only regret is not having any free time to visit Abidjan or the neighbourhood as the schedule of the conference did not allow for it [or even for a timely posting of a post!], especially as it regularly ran overtime. (But it did provide for a wide range of new local dishes that I definitely enjoyed tasting!) We are now discussing further opportunities to visit there, e.g. by teaching a short course at the Master or PhD levels.

talk at CISEA 2019

Here are my slides for the overview talk I am giving at CISEA 2019, in Abidjan, highly resemblant with earlier talks, except for the second slide!

green sunset [jatp]