Archive for UK politics
no haggis for Burns night!
Posted in Statistics with tags Brexit, Burns night, Christchurch, customs, EU, European Union, food shortage, haggis, M&S, Mark&Spencer, New Zealand, Paris, Robert Burns, Scotland, UK politics, University of Canterbury on January 25, 2021 by xi'an
Ghost Town [The Specials]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Coventry, Margaret Thatcher, Ska, The Specials, UK, UK politics on June 20, 2020 by xi'an
order, order!
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags Cauchy distribution, conditioning, John Bercow, Michel de L'Hôpital, order, order statistics, UK politics on June 9, 2020 by xi'an
A very standard (one-line) question on X validated, namely whether min(X,Y) could enjoy a finite mean when both X and Y had infinite means [the answer is yes, possibly!] brought a lot of traffic, including an incorrect answer and bringing it to be one of the “Hot Network Questions“, for no clear reason. Beside my half-Cauchy example, some answers pointed out the connection between mean and cdf, as integrated cdf on the negative half-line and integrated complement cdf on the positive half-line, and between mean and quantile function, as
![\mathbb E[T(X)]=\int_0^1 T(Q_X(u))\text{d}u](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cmathbb+E%5BT%28X%29%5D%3D%5Cint_0%5E1+T%28Q_X%28u%29%29%5Ctext%7Bd%7Du&bg=000000&fg=B0B0B0&s=0&c=20201002)
since it nicely expands to
![\mathbb E[T(X_{(k)})]=\int_0^1 \frac{u^{k-1}(1-u)^{n-k-1}}{B(k,n-k)}T(Q_X(u))\text{d}u](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cmathbb+E%5BT%28X_%7B%28k%29%7D%29%5D%3D%5Cint_0%5E1+%5Cfrac%7Bu%5E%7Bk-1%7D%281-u%29%5E%7Bn-k-1%7D%7D%7BB%28k%2Cn-k%29%7DT%28Q_X%28u%29%29%5Ctext%7Bd%7Du&bg=000000&fg=B0B0B0&s=0&c=20201002)
but I remain bemused by the excitement..! (Including the many answers and the lack of involvement of the OP.)
total bullXit
Posted in pictures, Travel with tags Boris Johnson, Brexit, Britain, EU, European Community, Great-Britain, no deal, Parliament, PM, prime minister, running bulls, Scotland, UK politics, UKIP on October 31, 2019 by xi'an
“Of course there will be an attempt to try to obfuscate the effect of this Act, but it does – the capitulation act, or the surrender act or whatever you want to call it – it does, I’m sorry, but it greatly enfeebles, it greatly enfeebles this government’s ability to negotiate.”
“But what I will say is that the best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done.”
“There’s a terrible kind of collaboration as it were, going on between people who think they can block Brexit in Parliament and our European friends.”
“What will synthetic biology stand for – restoring our livers and our eyes with miracle regeneration of the tissues, like some fantastic hangover cure? Or will it bring terrifying limbless chickens to our tables?”
“I can hardly condemn Ukip as a bunch of boss-eyed, foam-flecked euro hysterics, when I have been sometimes not far short of boss-eyed, foam-flecked hysteria myself.”
“We will leave the EU on 31 October, deal or no deal. The way to get a good deal is to prepare for a no deal.”
Bayesian Inference, at £1400 per chapter…
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags An Introduction to Bayesian Statistics, book publishing, IntechOpen, open access, publishing fees, UK politics on June 1, 2019 by xi'an
Another unsolicited email (“This is a friendly reminder that….”) from a UK operator called IntechOpen about publishing a chapter in an Open Access book about Bayesian Inference. And edited by Tang Niansheng. As detailed on the publisher page
“The aim of this book is to introduce the newly developed Bayesian methods, including Bayesian variable selection (e.g., fixed-dimensional data analysis and high/ultrahigh dimensional data analysis), Bayesian influence analysis (e.g., case deletion method and local influence analysis), Bayesian estimation and clustering methods (e.g., fixed dimensional data, high/ultrahigh dimensional data analysis, Bayesian network, and Bayesian clustering for big data), Bayesian hypothesis test including discrete and continuous random variables, variational Bayesian analysis and Bayesian clinical trials including design and dose-finding algorithm”
which is neither off the mark nor particularly innovative, as Bayesian (hand?)books go. With the slight impediment of a £1400 fee per chapter. Even at the current exchange rate, this is far from “free of charge” (which only applies to the book being “free to download, read and share”. (Given the on-going upheavals of UK politics, it may soon become affordable, though!)
