When checking for the origin of “garbage in, garbage out” on Wikipedia, I came upon this citation from Charles Babbage:
“On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
following earlier quotes from him on this ‘Og.
With most of the World being more or less confined at home, conferences cancelled one after the other, including ABC in Grenoble!, we are launching a fortnightly webinar on approximation Bayesian computation, methods, and inference. The idea is to gather members and disseminate results and innovation during these coming weeks and months under lock-down. And hopefully after!
At this point, the interface will be Blackboard Collaborate, run from Edinburgh by Michael Gutmann, for which neither registration nor software is required. Before each talk, a guest link will be mailed to the mailing list. Please register here to join the list.
The seminar is planned on Thursdays at either 9am or more likely 11:30 am UK (+1GMT) time, as we are still debating the best schedule to reach as many populated time zones as possible!, and the first speakers are
| 09.04.2020 | Dennis Prangle | Distilling importance sampling | |
| 23.04.2020 | Ivis Kerama and Richard Everitt | Rare event SMC² | |
| 07.05.2020 | Umberto Picchini | Stratified sampling and bootstrapping for ABC |
 | Pierre Jacob on MCMC for conditional Bern… |
| Is sqrt(2) a normal… on the Ramanujan machine | |
 | xi'an on Mars attack [live] |
 | ecoquant on Mars attack [live] |
| xi'an on Mars attack [live] |
