Archive for 1984
the thought police
Posted in Statistics with tags 1984, baby Trump, biases, diversity, equity, ethnicity, George Orwell, homophobia, LGBT, LGBT rights, Native Americans, Newspeak, Ninety-Eighty-Four, NYT, race, racial profiling, stereotypes, The New York Times, Tought Police, transphobia, Trump administration on March 31, 2025 by xi'an
1984 or 2025 [newspeak]
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags 1984, AfD, anti-abortion organisations, Chornobyl, conservatism, democracy, Чорнобиль, far-right, George Orwell, JD Vance, Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz, MSC 2025, Munich, Munich Security Conference, Newspeak, nuclear power plant, reproductive rights, safety zones, Scotland, Solidarity with Ukraine, Stand Up To Trump, The Guardian, Trump administration, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, welcome to Scotland on February 28, 2025 by xi'an
[Quotes from J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, on 14 Feb 2025, a perfect Orwellian achievement in newspeak!]
“It looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way, or, even worse, win an election”
“…when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. (…) If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with”
“There is no room for firewalls [against the far-right AfD] People dismissing voters’ concerns, shutting down their media, protects nothing. It is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”
“I look to Brussels, where E.U. Commission commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they judge to be ‘hateful content,’ or to [Germany], where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny.’”
“in Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat (…) the United Kingdom backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs”
“The Scottish government has begun distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. The government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime in Britain and across Europe.”
Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí
Posted in Statistics with tags 1984, Czechoslovakia, Eastern block, former Soviet republics, L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être, Milan Kundera, Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, Paris, Prague, Prague Spring, The Unbearable Lightness of Being on July 13, 2023 by xi'an
Just heard that Milan Kundera, Czech-French author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other fantastic books had passed away on Tuesday in Paris. I still remember from the mid 1980’s the deep impression this book left on me, both as a bitter-sweet love story with the Prague Spring and its aftermath as its background, and as a philosophical existentialist reflection on the absurdity of life. I have not reread any of his novels since the 1980’s, but they still stand on my bookshelves and in a lighter (and bearable) future, I will likely get back to them. May the lightness of unbeing be more bearable to him!
“It would be senseless to try to draw its borders exactly. Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate.”
a [counter]example of minimaxity
Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags 1984, cross validated, Geometric distribution, George Orwell, least favourable priors, minimaxity, negative binomial distribution, Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis, The Bayesian Choice on December 14, 2022 by xi'an
A chance question on X validated made me reconsider about the minimaxity over the weekend. Consider a Geometric G(p) variate X. What is the minimax estimator of p under squared error loss ? I thought it could be obtained via (Beta) conjugate priors, but following Dyubin (1978) the minimax estimator corresponds to a prior with point masses at ¼ and 1, resulting in a constant estimator equal to ¾ everywhere, except when X=0 where it is equal to 1. The actual question used a penalised qaudratic loss, dividing the squared error by p(1-p), which penalizes very strongly errors at p=0,1, and hence suggested an estimator equal to 1 when X=0 and to 0 otherwise. This proves to be the (unique) minimax estimator. With constant risk equal to 1. This reminded me of this fantastic 1984 paper by Georges Casella and Bill Strawderman on the estimation of the normal bounded mean, where the least favourable prior is supported by two atoms if the bound is small enough. Figure 1 in the Negative Binomial extension by Morozov and Syrova (2022) exploits the same principle. (Nothing Orwellian there!) If nothing else, a nice illustration for my Bayesian decision theory course!
doublespeak [маскировка]
Posted in pictures with tags 1984, apology of war crimes, doublespeak, Kyiv, NATO, Russian Federation, Russian invasion, Solidarity with Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, war crimes on July 18, 2022 by xi'an
“Our plans are not to occupy Ukraine, we do not plan to impose ourselves on anyone.” V. Putin, 22 Feb.
“You Ukrainians are always worried about what you can steal and you think everyone thinks that way.” S. Lavrov, 8 June
“If the US and NATO are really interested in resolving the Ukraine crisis, then first of all, they should wake up and stop supplying the Kyiv regime with arms and ammunition” S. Lavrov , 30 April
“Our goals there are clear, we want to save people from the pressure of the neo-Nazi regime.” S. Lavrov, 8 June
“We didn’t invade Ukraine.” S. Lavrov, 15 June
