Archive for birthday
abandoned, one year ago…
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags birthday, p-values, statistical significance, Taylor & Francis, The American Statistician on March 17, 2020 by xi'an
Rao-Blackwellisation, a review in the making
Posted in Statistics with tags Andrei Kolmogorov, birthday, C.R. Rao, computational statistics, David Blackwell, Monte Carlo methods, Purdue University, Rao-Blackwell theorem, Rao-Blackwellisation, review, survey on March 17, 2020 by xi'an
Recently, I have been contacted by a mainstream statistics journal to write a review of Rao-Blackwellisation techniques in computational statistics, in connection with an issue celebrating C.R. Rao’s 100th birthday. As many many techniques can be interpreted as weak forms of Rao-Blackwellisation, as e.g. all auxiliary variable approaches, I am clearly facing an abundance of riches and would thus welcome suggestions from Og’s readers on the major advances in Monte Carlo methods that can be connected with the Rao-Blackwell-Kolmogorov theorem. (On the personal and anecdotal side, I only met C.R. Rao once, in 1988, when he came for a seminar at Purdue University where I was spending the year.)
Florence Nightingale´s 199th anniversary
Posted in Statistics with tags birthday, Crimean War, Florence, Florence Nightingale, infographics, rose diagram, statistical graphics, Tuscany on May 12, 2019 by xi'an
morning run [jatp]
Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel, Wines with tags birthday, Drôme, France, jatp, morning light, morning run, Rhone-Alpes, trail running, Vercors on April 30, 2017 by xi'an
dans le noir
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags birthday, blindness, Bordeaux, dans le noir, Languedoc-Roussillon, Les Halles, Minervois, Paris on August 27, 2014 by xi'an
Yesterday night, we went to a very special restaurant in down-town Paris, called “dans le noir” where meals take place in complete darkness (truly “dans le noir”!). Complete in the sense it is impossible to see one’s hand and one’s glass. The waiters are blind and the experiment turns them into our guides, as we are unable to progress or eat in the dark! In addition to this highly informative experiment, it was fun to guess the food (easy!) and even more to fail miserably at guessing the colour of the wine (a white Minervois made from Syrah that tasted very much like a red, either from Languedoc-Roussillon or from Bordeaux…!) The food was fine if not outstanding (the owner told us how cooking too refined a meal led to terrible feedbacks from the customers as they could not guess what they were eating) and the wine very good (no picture for the ‘Og, obviously!). This was my daughter’s long-time choice for her 18th birthday dinner and a definitely outstanding idea! So if you have the opportunity to try one of those restaurants (in Barcelona Paseo Picasso, London Clerkenwell, New York, Paris Les Halles, or Saint-Petersbourg), I strongly suggest you to make the move. Eating will never feel the same!
