matrix multiplication [cover]

Nature snapshots [10 November]

As I was reading Nature in a [noisy] train from Coventry to London, I came across

• India (federal) government scapping nearly 300 science awards this year
• a re-analysis of a sudden infant death conviction in Australia relying on rare genetic mutations rather than statistics (as in Sally Clark’s case)
• a book review about a story of the Huxley family that made me realise I had confused most of them as a single person
• a DNA analysis of Black Death survivors (in both London and Denmark), showing natural selection occurred very quickly during the pandemic and increased the risk of autoimmune diseases
• a genuine design of experiment that demonstrated that light grazing by sheep increases diversity, while fertilization does not
• an astronomy paper on cooling supernovae using Bayes factors
• an attempt at rationalising the answer to the Covid threat involving a large panel of experts (and my colleague Miquel Olui-Barton as a co-author)
• a pessimistic assessment by graduate students of their career prospects

in defense of subjectivity [sound the gong]

When browsing the IMS Bulletin [01 October] a few days ago, I saw that Ruobin Gong (from Rutgers) had written a tribune about Subjectivism. In response to [IMS President] Krysz Burdzy’s presidential address at the IMS Meeting in London a few months earlier. Address that I had missed and where he was calling for the end of the term subjective in statistics… (While ironically attending the Bayesian conference in Montréal!) Given the tone of his Search for Certainty book, which Andrew and Larry and I discussed a while ago, I am not at all surprised by another go at Bayesian statistics, but I will not indulge into another response, since Krysz found my earlier review “venomous”! Especially since Ruobin has produced a deeply argument ed and academically grounded criticism of the presidential address (which, if I may mention it, sounds rather rambling away from statistics). In particular, Ruobin introduces Objectivity³ as “an interpreted characterization of the scientific object”, which reminds me of Nietzsche’s aphorism about physics. And where personal and collegial inputs are plusses, even though they could be qualified to be “subjective”. This was also Poincaré’s argument for Bayesian reasoning. In conclusion, I think that the London call to cease using the term in statistics was neither timely (as the subjective-versus-objective debate has sort of dried out) nor appropriate (in that it clashed with the views of part of the IMS community).

Ada L. at the ATI [6 October 2022]

Dirty old times

The Pogues’ bassist, Darryl Hunt, passed away on Monday afternoon. Thanks to this unique band for merging punk energy with Celtic harmonies!