On Saturday, I got a glimpse into a very special niche of urban culture, namely a roller derby competition. If you have never heard of this, a derby opposes two teams of roller-skaters on a small loop, the goal being to let one designated member of the team (the jammer) get ahead while preventing the other team from doing the same by blocking the way and bumping into other skaters..
. I find roller derby rather interesting as a sociological phenomenon, if not as a sport (it relates more to role-playing than to sport, esp. when considering the pseudos chosen by the players, from Sweet enemy to La Mort Rouge [classy reference to Poe], to Florence Fightingale [my favourite!]) and I was thus glad to be able to attend this 
competition. I actually found the game itself a bit boring (and much less aggressive than I thought!) because one of the teams (SSRG for Sun State Roller Girls) was way above the other (BCR for Brisbane City Rollers) and very strategic in its accumulation of points, which meant the game was rather static once the jammer had found her way through the pack, but the whole event was definitely hilarious, from the players to the referees, to the jury, to the audience.
Archive for Brisbane
Brisbane City roller derby
Posted in Kids, Travel with tags Australia, Brisbane, Edgar Poe, roller derby, roller-skating on August 22, 2012 by xi'anAMSI Lectures #8-10
Posted in Statistics, Travel with tags ABC model choice, AMSI Lecture, Australia, Brisbane, dumplings, Queensland, QUT, Rao-Blackwellisation, simulation, University of Queensland on August 21, 2012 by xi'an
This is the last series of lectures for my AMSI Lecture tour: in Brisbane, I gave the Rao-Blackwellisation talk this afternoon at the University of Queensland and will give tomorrow both the public lecture (for the second time) and the ABC for model choice at QUT. This will then see the end to this (almost) exhaustive if exhausting tour of Eastern Australian university towns… Brisbane has this great feature of connecting QUT with UQ by a fast boat, which meant I could work with Kerrie Mengersen on the revision of our ABCel paper in the morning and be at UQ ½ an hour later. A good thing as there are only three days left till I leave Australia after this seven week visit… (I am afraid there is no free time left for sampling the Brisbane dumplings!)
Canberra-Goulburn
Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags ABC, ANU, Brisbane, Cairns, Canberra, Goulburn, Kyoto, Rao-Blackwellisation, University of Wollongong on August 16, 2012 by xi'an
After a short two-day visit to Canberra, I am now heading to Brisbane, last stop of my Australian Tour… I gave my Kyoto talk at ANU, failing to convince my guest Alan Welsh that ABC was a completely justified Bayesian inference method (with the sound argument that it failed the conditionality principle), had a great run in the morning to the top of Black Mountain, witnessing a very nice inversion shown below,
ate a great Indian dinner, and was driven by Alan the next morning to Goulburn for a joint meeting (“Goulburn 19”) between the statisticians of Canberra and of the University of Wollongong. This was a fairly interesting meeting, taking place in a motel conference room. Luxury, luxury!, the room even had a log fire (with the foreseeable consequence of inducing one of my customary and embarrassing dozes!) Actually, this seemed to be a signature of the place as the terrific Trapper’s Bakery across the street also had a fireplace… This meeting was very informal, friendly, and interactive, making me regret I had given there my most technical talk on Rao-Blackwellisation instead of one on ABC model choice.
