the exponential power of now

The New York Times had an interview on 13 March with Britta Jewell (MRC, Imperial College London) and Nick Jewell (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine & U of C Berkeley), both epidemiologists. (Nick is also an AE for Biometrika.) Where they explain quite convincingly that the devastating power of the exponential growth and the resulting need for immediate reaction. An urgency that Western governments failed to heed, unsurprisingly including the US federal government. Maybe they should have been told afresh about the legend of paal paysam, where the king who lost to Krishna was asked to double rice grains on the successive squares of a chess board. (Although this is presumably too foreign a thought experiment for The agent orange. He presumably prefers the unbelievable ideological rantings of John Ioannides. Who apparently does mind sacrificing “people with limited life expectancies” for the sake of the economy.) Incidentally, I find the title “The exponential power of now” fabulous!

biostatistician postdoc in stratified medicine with genomics

Another postdoctoral offer:

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.