Waco, indeed… [my body, your choice]

Just read a terrible story in The New York Time Magazine about a pregnant Texan teenager with absentee parents being denied abortion (in the Roe vs. Wade past era) by a Waco judge on the basis that “she was not mature enough to make that decision”… Leading to the irrational conclusion that she was deemed to be mature enough to raise children since she was to continue her pregnancy till delivery. Unsurprisingly, the story does not end up well.

“The question of “maturity” is open to wildly different interpretations, particularly when assessed by a judge who answers to voters (…)The maturity test was not about a teenager’s ability to weigh the benefits and risks of her medical choice.”

 

more threats on reproductive rights

Despite the slightly positive attitude of the US electorate during the midterms towards abortion and reproductive rights, especially concerning ballots specifically targeting those rights, these elections did not see a shift in the States already suppressing these rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Incl. ten States where abortion is completely prohibited. And, unsatisfied with the outcome, US Catholic bishops have reinforced their anti-abortion activism with the election of Archbishop Broglio, under the newspeak slogan of fighting “an uncompromising secularism” [sic] even though the Supreme Court is so much bent in implementing a Catholic agenda. Most revealingly, they “worried that many Catholics actually support abortion rights under certain circumstances“. (Next they will think for themselves!)

Meanwhile, the far-right  National Front proposed to enshrine the right to abortion into the French constitution, incl. the current limitation to 14 weeks into pregnancy. This sounds most paradoxical from a party that has long been opposed to abortion rights. A first reason is to block in the near future any extension of the limitation. A second one is to protect and enlarge the conscience clause that protects practicians who refuse to perform abortions, clause that can be used to prohibit in practice abortions in an entire city or district if all local doctors claim this exemption (as exemplified by Italy)… The attempt was however short-cut at the eleventh hour by the [almost] entire Parliament moving towards this inclusion of the right to abortion without the snares planned by the far-right party. (But it is no over yet!)

states of the union

abortion in Québec

day one at ISBA 22

Started the day with a much appreciated swimming practice in the [alas warm⁺⁺⁺] outdoor 50m pool on the Island with no one but me in the slooow lane. And had my first ride with the biXi system, surprised at having to queue behind other bikes at red lights! More significantly, it was a great feeling to reunite at last with so many friends I had not met for more than two years!!!

My friend Adrian Raftery gave the very first plenary lecture on his work on the Bayesian approach to long-term population projections, which was recently  a work censored by some US States, then counter-censored by the Supreme Court [too busy to kill Roe v. Wade!]. Great to see the use of Bayesian methods validated by the UN Population Division [with at least one branch of the UN

Stephen Lauritzen returning to de Finetti notion of a model as something not real or true at all, back to exchangeability. Making me wonder when exchangeability is more than a convenient assumption leading to the Hewitt-Savage theorem. And sufficiency. I mean, without falling into a Keynesian fallacy, each point of the sample has unique specificities that cannot be taken into account in an exchangeable model. Nice to hear some measure theory, though!!! Plus a comment on the median never being sufficient, recouping an older (and presumably not original) point of mine. Stephen’s (or Fisher’s?) argument being that the median cannot be recursively computed!

Antonietta Mira and I had our ABC session this afternoon with Cecilia Viscardi, Sirio Legramanti, and Massimiliano Tamborino (Warwick) as speakers. Cecilia linked ABC with normalising flows, in collaboration with Dennis Prangle (whose earlier paper on this connection was presented as the first One World ABC seminar). Thus using past simulations to approximate the posterior by a neural network, possibly with a significant increase in computing time when compared with more rudimentary SMC-ABC methods in larger dimensions. Sirio considered summary-free ABC based on discrepancies like Rademacher complexity. Which more or less contains MMD, Kullback-Leibler, Wasserstein and more, although it seems to be dependent on the parameterisation of the observations. An interesting opening at the end was that this approach could apply to non iid settings. Massi presented a paper coauthored with Umberto that had just been arXived. On sequential ABC with a dependence on the summary statistic (hence guided). Further bringing copulas into the game, although this forces another choice [for the marginals] in the method.

Tamara Broderick talked about a puzzling leverage effect of some observations in economic studies where a tiny portion of individuals may modify the significance or the sign of a coefficient, for which I cannot tell whether the data or the reliance on statistical significance are to blame. Robert Kohn presented mixture-of-Gaussian copulas [not to be confused with mixture of Gaussian-copulas!] and Nancy Reid concluded my first [and somewhat exhausting!] day at ISBA with a BFF talk on the different statistical paradigms take on confidence (for which the notion of calibration seems to remain frequentist).

Side comments: First, most people in the conference are wearing masks, which is great! Also, I find it hard to read slides from the screen, which I presume is an age issue (?!) Even more aside, I had Korean lunch in a place that refused to serve me a glass of water, which I find amazing.