absurdum technicae

In what could have been the most expensive raclette ever, I almost get rid of my oven! Last weekend, to fight the ongoing cold wave, we decided to have a raclette with mountain cheese and potatoes, but the raclette machine (mostly a resistance to melt the cheese) had an electric issue and kept blowing the meter. We then decided to use the over to melt the cheese but, while giving all signs of working, it would not heat. Rather than a cold raclette, we managed with the microwave (!), but I though the oven had blown as well. The next morning, I still checked on the web for similar accidents and found the explanation: by pressing the proper combination of buttons, we had succeeded to switch the over into the demo mode, used by shops to run the oven with no heating. The insane part of this little [very little] story is that nowhere in the manual appeared any indication of an existing demo mode and of a way of getting back to normal! After pushing combinations of buttons at random, I eventually got the solution and the oven is again working, instead of standing in the recycling bin.

MCMSki IV [day 2.5]

Despite a good rest during the ski break, my cold did not get away (no magic left in this world!) and I thus had a low attention span to attend the Bayesian statistics and Population genetics session: while Jukka Corander mentioned the improvement brought by our AMIS algorithm, I had difficulties getting the nature of the model, if only because he used a blackboard-like font that made math symbols too tiny to read. (Nice fonts, otherwise!), Daniel Lawson (of vomiting Warhammer fame!) talked about the alluring notion of a statistical emulator, and Barbara Engelhardt talked about variable selection in a SNP setting. I did not get a feeling on how handling ten millions of SNPs was possible in towards a variable selection goal.  My final session of the day was actually “my” invited session on ABC methods, where Richard Everitt presented a way of mixing exact approximation with ABC and synthetic likelihood (Wood, Nature) approximations. The resulting MAVIS algorithm is  not out yet. The second speaker was Ollie Ratman, who spoke on his accurate ABC that I have discussed many times here. And Jean-Michel Marin managed to drive from Montpelier, just in time to deliver his talk on our various explorations of the ABC model choice problem.

After a quick raclette at “home”, we headed back to the second poster session, where I had enough of a clear mind and not too much of a headache (!) to have several interesting discussions, incl. a new parallelisation suggested  by Ben Calderhead, the sticky Metropolis algorithm of Luca Martino, the airport management video of Jegar Pitchforth, the mixture of Dirichlet distributions for extremes by Anne Sabourin, not mentioning posters from Warwick or Paris. At the end of the evening  I walked back to my apartment with the Blossom skis we had brought in the morning to attract registrations for the ski race: not enough to make up for the amount charged by the ski school. Too bad, especially given Anto’s efforts to get this amazing sponsoring!