Angkor finale [jatp]

cement homeless

bâtiment Alan Turing [jatp]

deaths at sea and a workshop

For several years, actually from the beginning of the Syrian revolution, I have been looking for data and for statisticians working on migrant deaths resulting from crossing the Mediterranean. With very little success, either because the researchers I met had poor and fragmented data, or because the agencies I contacted showed no (good) will into returning these statistics. Frontex being the most blatant example. I thus read with a lot of interest this article “Uncounted: Invisible Deaths on Europe’s Borders” which analyses the reasons for not producing statistics on the deaths at sea linked with desperate migrants crossing the sea in ill-suited boats.

In connection with this pressing issue, Kerrie Mengersen, Pierre Pudlo and myself organise next November a small workshop on Young Bayesians and Big Data for social good, at CIRM, Marseille, France. It will take place on the weekend before our main conference, Bayesian statistics in the Big Data era, that is, on 23-26 November 2018. Registration is free (and on site accomodation is cheap) but the number of attendees is limited, so apply asap! Senior participants include at this stage Tamara Broderick (MIT), Julien Cornebise (Element AI, TBC), David Corliss (Peace Work), Ruth King (Edinburgh), Cody Ross (UCSD, TBC), and the workshop aims at bringing participants to work together on methodological challenges and characteristic datasets. The outcome of the workshop will be presented at the beginning of the Bayesian statistics in the Big Data era, conference, on Monday 26 November.

art brut

snapshot from Amiens [#1]

visiting musée Rodin

A chance visit to the Rodin museum in Paris, a museum I had never visited before. Located in the classical Hôtel Biron [almost an anagram of Rodin!] and which was just renovated a few months ago, thanks to support from the French State and the Cantor Foundation. The building and gardens are superb, with the massive sculptures of the Bourgeois de Calais and the Porte de l’Enfer standing against the background of the golden dome of the Invalides…

I had a very vague idea of Rodin’s career and production, hence was quite impressed by the range of sculptures, casts, paintings and drawing he produced. While some sculptures kept a strong connection with classicism, the progressive distanciation from the official canons is striking. As is the series of sculptures as steps to the final realisation, most visible in the museum for the sculpture of Gustave Flaubert. I was quite impressed by the plaster cast of one of Flaubert’s gown, which manages to suggest the writer without any human representation.

The other obvious clue of this distanciation is the progressive inclusion of the raw material like marble in the sculpture, not only as a deconstructionist trick of “art in action” but also as a birth from the original silt. Some of the later pieces are striking annunciations of Picasso or Braque.