JSM 2018 [#4]

As last ½ day of sessions at JSM2018 in an almost deserted conference centre, with a first session set together by Mario Peruggia and a second on Advances in Bayesian Nonparametric Modeling and Computation for Complex Data. Here are the slides of my talk this morning in the Bayesian mixture estimation session.

which I updated last night (Slideshare most absurdly does not let you update versions!)

Since I missed the COPSS Award ceremony for a barbecue with friends on Locarno Beach, I only discovered this morning that the winner this year is Richard Samworth, from Cambridge University, who eminently deserves this recognition, if only because of his contributions to journal editing, as I can attest from my years with JRSS B. Congrats to him as well as to Bin Yu and Susan Murphy for their E.L. Scott and R.A. Fisher Awards!  I also found out from an email to JSM participants that the next edition is in Denver, Colorado, which I visited only once in 1993 on a trip to Fort Collins visiting Kerrie Mengersen and Richard Tweedie. Given the proximity to the Rockies, I am thinking of submitting an invited session on ABC issues, which were not particularly well covered by this edition of JSM. (Feel free to contact me if you are interested in joining the session.)

a weird beamer feature…

As I was preparing my slides for my third year undergraduate stat course, I got a weird error that got a search on the Web to unravel:

! Extra }, or forgotten \endgroup.
\endframe ->\egroup
  \begingroup \def \@currenvir {frame}
l.23 \end{frame}
  \begin{slide}
?

which was related with a fragile environment

\begin{frame}[fragile]
\frametitle{simulation in practice}
\begin{itemize}
\item For a given distribution $F$, call the corresponding 
pseudo-random generator in an arbitrary computer language
\begin{verbatim}
> x=rnorm(10)
> x
 [1] -0.021573 -1.134735  1.359812 -0.887579
 [7] -0.749418  0.506298  0.835791  0.472144
\end{verbatim}
\item use the sample as a statistician would
\begin{verbatim}
> mean(x)
[1] 0.004892123
> var(x)
[1] 0.8034657
\end{verbatim}
to approximate quantities related with $F$
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}\begin{frame}

but not directly the verbatim part: the reason for the bug was that the \end{frame} command did not have a line by itself! Which is one rare occurrence where the carriage return has an impact in LaTeX, as far as I know… (The same bug appears when there is an indentation at the beginning of the line. Weird!) [Another annoying feature is wordpress turning > into > in the sourcecode environment…]