Today, I am off to Chennai (aka Madras) for a… Banff workshop! As one of its several branches and associated institutions (incl. Oaxaca), BIRS has the Chennai Mathematical Institute hosting the workshop “Game-theoretic statistical inference: Optional Sampling, Universal Inference, and Multiple Testing based on e-values”, which I attend in an attempt to better ascertain e-values. (Obviously, George Pérec could not have been invited!)
Nature of 18 July 2024 ran a story about predatory conferences, with an actual reporter on the ground! More precisely in the vicinity of Heathrow where they interviewed victims of this scam. Which reminded me of earlier instances, like when I had to explain the concept of a predatory conference to a Master student who was so excited to be invited to a conference. Or when I almost went to a Montparnasse hotel in Paris to check on the actual audience of a superposition of OMICS conferences on every imaginable topic, all happening together in the same room of that hotel. Which is exactly the situation reported in that article… A scary figure inside is that these predatory conferences are becoming “now more plentiful than legitimate ones”. Although this does not mean more people attend fake conferences than legit ones (Nature advances the figure of 10% researchers attending these pseudo-conferences.). The journal also address the elephant in the room, namely as to why people attend such conferences. Very junior researchers may get confused if this is their first invitation, but then why don’t they get a proper warning from their funding bodies or their senior colleagues?! And there is the acknowledgement that some researchers do attend fake conferences in full knowledge of the scam.
“They might be flattered to be invited or attracted by a glamorous location; questionable conferences often take place in tourist hotspots. Or they might attend simply to add a line to their CV.”
The examples chosen by Nature are obviously predatory in that they are run by an only-for-profit company, without a scientific board or society at the helm, and cramming talks about unrelated topics in a single hotel conference room (or online). One could think of extending the definition, though, to conferences without a clear scientific purpose, witness a yearly series I can think of (!) merging statistics and econometrics sub-conferences without an active scientific board, each session being the responsibility of its organiser. The one occasion I attended, both the sessions I talked in and I organised were only attended by the speakers…
I was reading an opinion piece in The Guardian about the sorry state of public pools in England. With more and more closing for lack of proper funding, this being aggravated by the explosion in heating costs, as pools are excluded from governmental help. And the resulting impact on public health (and the NHS), since providing one less opportunity for exercising. And on general safety, since nowadays less children can swim… Which reminded me of the difficulty to find a pool in Oxford and Oaxaca. And of the cost of entering one in Roma and Milano. And of the relative accessibility of French pools, at least in cities, as shown by the estimation that 95% of the French high school students can swim to some extent.
This book by Arkady Martine is a sequel to the Hugo Awarded Memory called Empire, which I appreciated, pverall. I also did enjoy this one, no matter how different the settings are.
“The statistical chance of imago-integration failure leading to irreversible psychological and/or neurological damage is 0.3%”
Indeed, this second (and last?) volume is much more space-opera-esque in that most of the action takes place on a spatial fleet trying to fight an incomprehensible and invading alien force (whose mindset is rendered through an initially obscure chapter!). And subject to internal tensions, despite its military hierarchical structure. While the attempts at communicating with this unknown enemy are central to the story, they echo the main theme of the Teixcalaanli series (duology?), which is on how to reach the delicate balance between complete assimilation into a rich and fascinating culture and isolationism in order to preserve one’s original culture and way of life, doubled by the dilemmas caused by falling in love with someone from this other culture. (This may be the strongest aspect of the novel.) The related theme is the opposition between collective and individualistic societies, even though power competition is described in both the Teixcalaanli and the space station societies. (All three groups have achieved a way to operate as a collective. I actually wondered whether the “desolation” in the title was itself an intended collective, as in a murder of crows, esp. since a major character is nicknamed Swarm, but I could not find this collective ever being used.) It brought back some memories of Ender’s Game, in the sense of facing a radically different but still sapient species and backing away from complete annihilation. (The futuristic component of the book is as sketchy as in the previous one, with USB sticks being carried by spaceships as the only way to communicate, for no clear reason… But this is far from being of importance.) As an aside, the author linked her Teixcalaanli construct with the Mixtec civilisation, from Oaxaca.
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