more border policing won’t save lives

It is just shocking that the widespread reaction to an increasing number of migrants’ deaths (whether at sea or in the Belarus wetlands) is a call for more policing… And for criminalising NGOs that bring basic help to those stranded in liquid or terrestrial no man’s lands. The EU should act to give migrants and asylum seekers just-as-basic rights, rather than delegating its border control to non EU countries with abyssal human right records and accepting that its member states breach asylum laws and deny the victims their humanity.

Misera Carta Privationis

Read in The Guardian of 18 November that the UK Government was pushing for a new bill on nationality and borders that would

• open the possibility for said Government of stripping British citizens of their nationality without noticing them (and hence depriving them from appealing the decision)
• barring anyone arriving in the UK by an illegal route from claiming refugee status
• criminalising anyone trying save an illegal immigrant life
• giving UK Border Force staff immunity from prosecution if their operations result in death

which are failing basic human right principles in the country that established the Magna Carta as a basis for a lawful government… (From a cynic perspective, the 1253 charter was only giving right to a very small fraction of the English population, while serfdom lasted until 1574.) And another illustration of how Brexit is more easily used to cut rights than to establish new ones.

JB³ [Junior Bayes beyond the borders]

Bocconi and j-ISBA are launcing a webinar series for and by junior Bayesian researchers. The first talk is on 25 June, 25 at 3pm UTC/GMT (5pm CET) with Francois-Xavier Briol, one of the laureates of the 2020 Savage Thesis Prize (and a former graduate of OxWaSP, the Oxford-Warwick doctoral training program), on Stein’s method for Bayesian computation, with as a discussant Nicolas Chopin.

As pointed out on their webpage,

Due to the importance of the above endeavor, JB³ will continue after the health emergency as an annual series. It will include various refinements aimed at increasing the involvement of the whole junior Bayesian community and facilitating a broader participation to the online seminars all over the world via various online solutions.

Thanks to all my friends at Bocconi for running this experiment!

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.

Ebola virus [and Mr. Bayes]

Just like after the Malaysian Airlines flight 370 disappearance, the current Ebola virus outbreak makes me feel we are sorely missing an emergency statistical force to react on urgent issues… It would indeed be quite valuable to have a team of statisticians at the ready to quantify risks and posterior probabilities and avoid media approximations. The situations calling for this reactive force abound. A few days ago I was reading about the unknown number of missing pro-West activists in Eastern Ukraine. Maybe statistical societies could join forces to set such an emergency team?! Whose goals are somewhat different from the great Statistics without Borders…

As a side remark, the above philogeny is taken from Dudas and Rambaut’s recent paper in PLOS reassessing the family tree of the current Ebola virus(es) acting in Guinea. The tree is found using MrBayes, which delivers a posterior probability of 1 to this filiation! And concluding “that the rooting of this clade using the very divergent other ebolavirus species is very problematic.”