Athlii Gwaii

A long article in The Guardian on how the island of Haida Gwaii along the northern coast of British Columbia managed to turn resistance to logging into a global success in nature and culture preservation. Our original holiday plans last August were to spend half our time there. But the travel costs were alas such that we ended up in Prince Rupert, 100 km east across Hecate Strait. A mere seven-hour ferry crossing!

assistant professor opening at UBC Stats

A new and exciting position in Statistics at UBC, Vancouver, a great place with more to it than just this terrific view I took on my last visit there, in Dec 2019. Details available there. With deadline on 15 November.

Arrowleaf Cellars [pinot noir]

Pacific [far]Northwest

The last week of our BCations was spent in Prince Rupert, 54⁰18’W, on Kaien Island, almost the northernest coastal spot before Alaska. (Although Stewart, 55⁰56’W, may qualify.) With a much more oceanic [and cooler] weather than in farther south, still warm enough to swim in the ocean. And an interesting airport since it sits on another island, with an airport bus taking all passengers from the airport to town via a 15mn ferry, and luggages being delivered only at the end. (Which led to some confusion on our side!)

This place was once called “the halibut capital of the World”, with numerous canneries of halibut and salmon along the coastline. We visited one such (p)reserved cannery, the North Pacific Cannery, which operated till the 1980’s with appalling working and living conditions (and racial discriminations against First Nation, Chinese and Japanese workers). Which made me realise that Canada had also turned to the internment of Japanese descendants during WW II. While there is some degree of recognition of the First Nation rights to land, since 95% of BC territory is unceded, with acknowledgments of which First Nation one uses the land, the persistence of the colonial era struck me in the numerous topographical names with British connections, from the name of the province, to the name of the city, the first Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. (The fish we ate while in Prince Rupert was fabulous!)

Prince Rupert is a passenger ferries and cruise stop, even though most unfortunately the ferry to Alaska was not running this year, supposedly due to staff shortage, although this could be yet another round of the US-Canada dispute of the area. (Cruise days are to be avoided at all costs, as cruisers invade the waterfront and even the closest hiking trails!) This is also the northwesternmost container port in North America connected by rail (hence, an unceasing parade of  endless CPR trains).

Bertrand’s paradox [re]solved?

On the plane back from Vancouver, I read Bertrand’s Paradox Resolution and Its Implications for the Bing–Fisher Problem by Richard A. Chechile [who had pointed out his paper to me] In this paper, Chechile considers the Bayesian connections/sequences of Betrand’s paradox, as he sees it Bertrand’s different solutions/paradox to be

“designed to illustrate his dissatisfaction with the Bayes and Laplace use of a probability distribution to represent an unknown parameter that can have any continuous value”

and proposes to “resolve” this paradox, which imho is neither a paradox nor in need of a resolution!, as I see it more like a reflection on the importance of sigma algebras and measure theory. The uniform distribution (behind the “random” chord) is not a uniquely specified concept, just like the maximum entropy distribution is relative to the dominating measure. When arguing that

“Such a definition [based on any possible distribution of a stochastic chord] would yield a random variable, but this weak sense of the word random is not satisfactory, because there is an infinite number of stochastic processes that can be defined to yield a probability distribution of chord lengths.”

the author is simply restating that infinite collection of dominating measures.  But imho he is somewhat missing this point when defining Shannon`s entropy by resorting to a discrete version. And when adopting a uniform measure on the chord as a reference (Section 3.2, on The Importance of a Dominant Metric Representation). While the probability P(L>1) is invariant under any increasing transform of L (and 1)… This amounts to arguing for a favourite parameterisation in constructing  a reference prior (Section 4, where Jeffreys prior is also dismissed for not being at maximum entropy). The ensuing discussion as to why the three solutions of Bertrand’s are not valid (Section 2.2) is thus most curious to me since they all are implementable/practical ways of producing stochastic chords. I find it rather amusing that one returns to the quest for the ideal priori distribution Bayesians were so fiercely debating at the turn of the previous century. And non-Bayesians were all too happy to exploit when arguing against this approach.