Bernoulli-IMS One World Symposium 2020 [accessible to everyone from everywhere!]

[Since the Bernoulli-IMS meeting in Seoul had to be postponed till August 2021, the IMS, the Bernoulli society and the founding organisers of the One World webinars got together to hastily patch up a virtual substitute, resulting in this exciting event, a first on many different reality planes, with a surprisingly positive return from contacted speakers and co-organisers. The first Bernoulli-IMS meeting where the sun never sets! Free of fees and travel costs. Hopefully accessible for “everyone from everywhere”, that is, even from countries with restrictions on Internet access like China and Cuba. Or with poor broadband access.]

Join the Bernoulli Society and IMS for the first-ever, “Bernoulli-IMS One World Symposium 2020” August 24-28, 2020! The meeting will be virtual with many new experimental features. Participation at the symposium is free, but registration is mandatory to get the passwords for the Zoom sessions.

Live talks by plenary speakers include Emmanuel Candes, Martin Hairer, Kerrie Mengersen, and Wendelin Werner. The symposium will also include live talks by early career speakers, prerecorded 10-minute talks with discussion sessions, posters, experimental interactive events, and problem solving sessions. Topics from probability and  mathematical statistics are arranged in 23 sessions (with 23 Zoom rooms) to which all researchers are warmly invited to contribute and discuss their original research results. Live talks will be set at two different times in order to reach the most time zones.

Accessible to Everyone from Everywhere!

snapshots from Nature

Among many interesting things I read from the pile of Nature issues that had accumulated over a month of travelling, with a warning these are mostly “old” news by now!:

• the very special and untouched case of Cuba in terms of the Zika epidemics, thanks to a long term policy fighting mosquitoes at all levels of the society;
• an impressive map of the human cortex, which statistical analysis would be fascinating;
• an excerpt from Nature 13 August 1966 where the Poisson distribution was said to describe the distribution of scores during the 1966 World Cup;
• an analysis of a genetic experiment on evolution involving 50,000 generations (!) of Escherichia coli;
• a look back at the great novel Flowers for Algernon, novel I read eons ago;
• a Nature paper on the first soft robot, or octobot, along with some easier introduction, which did not tell which kind of operations could be accomplished by such a robot;
• a vignette on a Science paper about the interaction between honey hunters and hunting birds, which I also heard depicted on the French National Radio, with an experiment comparing the actual hunting (human) song, a basic sentence in the local language, and the imitation of the song of another bird. I could not understand why the experiment did not include hunting songs from other hunting groups, as they are highly different but just as effective. It would have helped in understanding how innate the reaction of the bird is;
• another literary entry at the science behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
• a study of the Mathematical Genealogy Project in terms of the few mathematicians who started most genealogies of mathematicians, including d’Alembert, advisor to Laplace of whom I am one of the many descendants, although the finding is not that astounding when considering usual genealogies where most branches die off and the highly hierarchical structure of power in universities of old.