Nature Computational Science

The Nature group is launching a series of new on-line-only journals, including Nature Computational Science which could be of interest to some readers of the ‘Og. It is rather unfortunate that statistics is not explicitly mentioned in the list below. And that the only acknowledged editors are the chief editor, Fernando Chirigati, and the consulting edutor, Yann Sweeney. Nature does not have an editorial board in the standard way

Nature Computational Science is a multidisciplinary journal that focuses on the development and use of computational techniques and mathematical models, as well as their application to address complex problems across a range of scientific disciplines. The journal publishes both fundamental and applied research, from groundbreaking algorithms, tools and frameworks that notably help to advance scientific research, to methodologies that use computing capabilities in novel ways to find new insights and solve challenging real-world problems. By doing so, the journal creates a unique environment to bring together different disciplines to discuss the latest advances in computational science.

Disciplines covered by Nature Computational Science include, but are not limited to:

• Bioinformatics
• Cheminformatics
• Geoinformatics
• Climate Modeling and Simulation
• Computational Physics and Cosmology
• Applied Math
• Materials Science
• Urban Science and Technology
• Scientific Computing
• Methods, Tools and Platforms for Computational Science
• Visualization and Virtual Reality for Computational Science

Another new Nature on-line journal of potential interest is Nature Reviews Methods Primers, albeit it focusses on life science and physics:

Nature Reviews Methods Primers is an online-only journal publishing high-quality Primer articles covering analytical, applied, statistical, theoretical and computational methods used in the life and physical sciences.

counting COVID-19 deaths (or not)

Two COVID-19 articles in the recent issue of Nature relating to data gathering issues. One on the difficulty to distinguish direct COVID deaths from indirect ones from the excess deaths, which “to many scientists, it’s the most robust way to gauge the impact of the pandemic” (which I supported). As indeed the COVID pandemic reduced people access to health care, both because health structures were overwhelmed and because people were scared of catching the virus when visiting these structures. The article [by Giuliana Viglione] supports the direct exploitation of death certificates, to improve the separation, quoting Natalie Dean from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Although this creates a strong lag in the reporting and hence in health policy decisions. (Assuming the overall death reporting is to be trusted, which is not the case for all countries.)

“This long-standing neglect has been exacerbated by the lack of national leadership during the pandemic.”

The other article is about the reasons why the COVID-19 crisis in the US is doubled by a COVID-19 data crisis. Mentioning “political meddling, privacy concerns and years of neglect of public-health surveillance systems” as some of the sources for unreliable data on the pandemic range and evolution. Hardly any contact tracking (as opposed to South Korea or Vietnam), a wealth of local, state and federal structures, data diverted and hence delayed (or worse) to a new system launched by the US Department for Health and Human Services (HHS) for an ill-used $10 million. And data often shared (or lost) by fax! “Lack of leadership,” to state the obvious….

post-COVID post-conference mood

Nature ran a 4-page comment on the post-COVID future of massive conferences (NeurIPS or JSM style) and on how to make them less carbon greedy. Some of their common-sense suggestions come close to what I had suggested a while ago and some became promptly implemented in these times of COVID-19 travel restrictions, as, e.g., to systematically include virtual attendance option(s), with provisions from one’s institutions for quality time (as if one was indeed away), to add multiple (3?) regional hubs to a single location, which also offers the perk of a round-the-clock meeting, with an optimisation of the three places chosen to minimise (estimated) total flight distances for the potential participants, as in e.g. choosing U.S. central Chicago rather than extremes like Seattle or Miami, and possibly adding Tokyo and Paris, to reduce the frequency of the monster meetings by coordinating with sister societies, to enforce an individual or institutional maximum yearly budget, to have corporate sponsors turning from travel support to improving remote access in less favoured countries.

Obviously, it seems difficult to completely switch to a fully virtual solution, as attending a conference has many academic dimensions to be accounted for, but the “big ones” should be the first to shrink, if only because the most impacting. And also because small, high quality workshops have much more impact research-wise on their attendants. With the above still offering some savings. And also the possibility to bypass financial, personal, visa, political, life-threatening impossibilities to attend a meeting in a specific foreign country. Provided uncensored remote communication tools are allowed or possible from the said  country. (Calling for the question, barring financial difficulties, and once COVID-related restrictions have been lifted, what are the countries where everyone could consider attending?!)

This year, before lockdown forced the cancellation of ABC in Grenoble, we had set a mirror version in Warwick. Which led us to create the One World ABC seminar. The Bernoulli-IMS World congress was postponed by one year but a few dedicated volunteers managed to build within a few weeks a free impressive virtual substitute with more than 600 talks and close to 2000 participants (so far). Remember it is to take place on 24-28 August, on different time zones and with ten live plenaries repeated twice to this effect.

Next year, we still hope to organise an Objective Bayesian workshop at Casa Matemática Oaxaca (CMO) in México and the current sanitary conditions imply a reduction of the physically present participants by two thirds. Meaning for certain a remote component and possibly a mirror location depending on the state of the World in December 2021.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data‑Driven World [EJ’s book review]

“…this book will train readers to be statistically savvy at a time when immunity to misinformation is essential: not just for the survival of liberal democracy, as the authors assert, but for survival itself.Perhaps a crash course on bullshit detection should be a mandatory part of the school curriculum.”

In the latest issue of Nature, EJ Wagenmaker has written a book review of the book Calling Bullshit, by  Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. Book written out of a course taught by the authors at the University of Washington during Spring Quarter 2017 and aimed at teaching students how to debunk bullshit, that is, misleading exploitation of statistics and machine learning. And subsequently turned into a book. Which I have not read. In his overall positive review EJ regrets the poor data visualisation scholarship of the authors, who could have demonstrated and supported the opportunity for a visual debunking of the original data. And the lack of alternative solutions like Bayesian analysis to counteract p-fishing. Of course, the need for debunking and exposing statistically sounding misinformation has never been so present.

COVID picture