zombie ants

Nature worries

In the 29 August issue, worries about the collapse of the Italian government coalition for research (as the said government had pledge to return funding to 2009 [higher!] levels), Brexit as in every issue (and the mind of every EU researcher working in the UK), facial recognition technology that grows much faster than the legal protections which should come with it, thanks to big tech companies like Amazon and Google. In Western countries, not China… One acute point in the tribune being the lack of open source software to check for biases. More worries about Amazon, the real one!, with Bolsonaro turning his indifference if not active support of the widespread forest fires into a nationalist campaign. And cutting 80,000 science scholarships. Worries on the ethnic biases in genetic studies and the All of Us study‘s attempt to correct that (study run by a genetic company called Color, which purpose is to broaden the access to genetic counseling to under-represented populations). Further worries on fighting self-citations (with John Ioannidis involved in the analysis). With examples reaching a 94% rate for India’s most cited researcher.

un lagarto en las Cataratas del Iguazú [guest jatp]

wildlife photograph of the year [2015]

Judith Rousseau gets Bernoulli Society Ethel Newbold Prize

As announced at the 60th ISI World Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, my friend, co-author, and former PhD student Judith Rousseau got the first Ethel Newbold Prize! Congrats, Judith! And well-deserved! The prize is awarded by the Bernoulli Society on the following basis

The Ethel Newbold Prize is to be awarded biannually to an outstanding statistical scientist for a body of work that represents excellence in research in mathematical statistics, and/or excellence in research that links developments in a substantive field to new advances in statistics. In any year in which the award is due, the prize will not be awarded unless the set of all nominations includes candidates from both genders.

and is funded by Wiley. I support very much this (inclusive) approach of “recognizing the importance of women in statistics”, without creating a prize restricted to women nominees (and hence exclusive).  Thanks to the members of the Program Committee of the Bernoulli Society for setting that prize and to Nancy Reid in particular.

Ethel Newbold was a British statistician who worked during WWI in the Ministry of Munitions and then became a member of the newly created Medical Research Council, working on medical and industrial studies. She was the first woman to receive the Guy Medal in Silver in 1928. Just to stress that much remains to be done towards gender balance, the second and last woman to get a Guy Medal in Silver is Sylvia Richardson, in 2009… (In addition, Valerie Isham, Nicky Best, and Fiona Steele got a Guy Medal in Bronze, out of the 71 so far awarded, while no woman ever got a Guy Medal in Gold.) Funny occurrences of coincidence: Ethel May Newbold was educated at Tunbridge Wells, the place where Bayes was a minister, while Sylvia is now head of the Medical Research Council biostatistics unit in Cambridge.