en route to Australia

Despite the very long flights and the two transfers in Singapore and Brisbane, I found the trip to Australia only moderately tiring! Maybe because I managed to sleep for close to 8 hours on the first leg. Maybe because of the (great) facility of my new and cheap Compaq to keep running for a whole leg of seven hours without exhausting the battery (that I reloaded in Singapore). Maybe because I am finally getting used to twelve hour flights after my round trip to Kyoto last week. Maybe because having five breakfasts (my favourite meal!) in two days is a good enough reward. I even watched a movie, The Hunger Games, in two parts: one half before landing in Singapore and the other half over Bali. It is a terrible movie, with poor acting and even worse scenario. Plus, it has a rather lame ending, since the structure of the Orwellian society where those games take place is not at all perturbed by the actions of the characters since they were manipulated till the very end. However. the lame plot had some interesting game theory implications: in a game where all adversaries have to be eliminated, does it make sense to make temporary alliances? And then I suddenly remembered having read a blog about this, a few months ago!

The only painful part of the trip actually was to travel with two laptops, as I am not trusting the Compaq to stand the whole visit to Australia, nor the newly installed Macbook to be sufficiently stable. (I even took an external hard-drive to make daily security backups and to keep both laptops attuned…) I also wish my daughter had not “borrowed” my Canon point-and-shoot camera as there were particularly nice views when we landed both in Singapore and in Brisbane. Travelling with my (wife’s) Nikon J1 is not exactly as easy (more about this later!). And I do not think I can take it running, although I will obviously give it a try.

I now hope it won’t take me too long to get on Australian time(s) and look very much forward the interactions being an AMSI Lecturer can induce!

\STATE [algorithmic package]

I fought with my L^αT_εX compiler this morning as it did not want to deal with my code:

 \begin{algorithmic}[1]
 \STATE N=1000
 \STATE $\hat\pi=0$
 \FOR {I=1,N}
 \STATE X=RDN(1), Y=RDN(1)
 \IF {$\text{X}^2+\text{Y}^2<1$}
 $\hat\pi$ = $\hat\pi +1$
 \ENDIF
 \ENDFOR
 \RETURN 4*$\hat\pi/$N
 \end{algorithmic}
 

looking on forums for incompatibilities between beamer and algorithmic, and adding all kinds of packages, to no avail. Until I realised one \STATE was missing:

 \begin{algorithmic}[1]
 \STATE N=1000
 \STATE $\hat\pi=0$
 \FOR {I=1,N}
 \STATE X=RDN(1), Y=RDN(1)
 \IF {$\text{X}^2+\text{Y}^2<1$}
 \STATE $\hat\pi$ = $\hat\pi +1$
 \ENDIF
 \ENDFOR
 \RETURN 4*$\hat\pi/$N
 \end{algorithmic}
 

(This is connected with my AMSI public lecture on simulation, obviously!)

Xi’an Australian Tour 2012

Here is my schedule (so far) for my Australian trip this summer/winter… Looking forward meeting loads of interesting people, problems and places!

Tour Schedule

Date	Host Institution	Venue	Time	Title
12 July	Australian Statistical Conference	Meeting Room 11	9:30 am	Approximate Bayesian Computation for model selection
13 July	University of Adelaide	TBC	TBC	TBC
16 July	University of NSW	Via AGR	2 pm	ABC methods for Bayesian model choice
17 July	University of Western Sydney	TBC	TBC	Rao-Blackwellisation of sampling schemes
26 July	University of Melbourne	Russell Love theatre, Richard Berry (Bldg 160)	2 pm	Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC): advances and limitations
26 July	AMSI Public Lecture	TBC	6 pm	Simulation as a universal tool for statistics
27 July	Monash University, Econometrics and Business Statistics seminar	TBC	2 pm	ABC methods for Bayesian model choice
14 August	Australian National University	Seminar Room G35, John Dedman (Bldg 27)	2 pm	Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC): advances and limitations
15 August	University of Wollongong	CSSM Meeting (Goulburn)		Rao-Blackwellisation of sampling schemes
20 August	University of Queensland	Room N201, Building 50	2 pm	Rao-Blackwellisation of sampling schemes
21 August	Queensland University of Technology	GP-Z1064 Gibson Room	TBC	ABC methods for Bayesian model choice
21 August	Queensland University of Technology	GP-Z1064 Gibson Room	TBC	Simulation as a universal tool for statistics

AMSI lecturer

In conjunction with my summer trip down under in July-August, I have been nominated an AMSI-SSAI Lecturer. (AMSI stands for Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute and SSAI for Statistical Society of Australia Inc.) In essence, this means I will travel in several places around Australia to give talks and meet people. This is quite exciting, although I find the prospect of giving a public lecture (as opposed to academic talks) a wee daunting. (Simulation seems like a safe topic, though, as it is hard to fail to find manageable examples. Simulated annealing for sudokus was the first to come to my mind.)