This afternoon, I completely botched my talk at the workshop “Méthodes de Monte Carlo pour les problèmes inverses bayésiens en traitement des signaux et des images” thanks to a weird mishap on slideshare. As Og’s readers are aware, I am a big fan of slideshare as a public depository for my slides. However, when I uploaded my talk this morning, “something” happens with the pdf file in that, while I was seeing a regular talk on my own computer (using acroread Paris.pdf), the output of the file on slideshare was missing integrals, sum and products! This was most embarrassing for me and most inconvenient for the audience as I had to explain over and over the meaning of the missing symbols… I could have stopped the talk and gathered the pdf file from my laptop, of course, but this was the last session of a busy day, I was not sure the original was all-right ,and I had no USB key nor power plug with me… The audience was much sympathetic than I would have been myself. Apologies to all! The most bizarre thing is that I have been trying to reproduce the phenomenon since then, but to no avail. Every version I have downloaded from this afternoon onwards contains the right symbols (on my screen). Maybe it was due to the resolution of the local computer I was using for my presentation as it could not produce a full screen output… Anyway, an embarrassment I could have done without! (The title of this post is inspired from a famous crime story in southern France where the victim supposedly wrote “Omar m’a tuer” on a wall with her blood, committing a very unlikely grammatical mistake… This erroneous sentence became almost immediately part of the urban culture. I once got a “Robert m’a tuer…” as a course evaluation the only year I gave a course on classical testing!!! A movie on the crime came out recently.)
Archive for talk
Trip to Lyon
Posted in Mountains, pictures, R, Statistics, University life with tags JAGS, La Meije, Lyon, parallelisation, Rao-Blackwellisation, seminar, talk on January 21, 2011 by xi'an
This was my first trip to Lyon in about… 35 years, I think, but I did not have much time to tour the city! My original plan was to go climbing with Ivan near La Meije right after the talk, but our respective knees were hurting for the past week at least (since Utah in my case…), so we decided to postpone. I think the talk itself went on rather ok (?!), with good questions for possible extensions at the end. And Martyn Plummer (the creator and maintainer of JAGS) came with a most relevant question about the difficult comparison with completely independent MCMC chains, a point Colin also raised a while ago.
Savage-Dickey re-rejected
Posted in Statistics, University life with tags Benidorm, Dickey-Savage ratio, ISBA 10, poster, talk, Valencia conferences on January 17, 2010 by xi'an
This morning I found this email in my mailbox,
Dear colleague,
I regret to inform you that your abstract has not been chosen for a talk. We had 164 submissions for only 36 talks, so the competition was quite high and many good abstracts were not able to be selected. We thank you for your submission, and we hope that you will instead present it as a poster. If you do want to present a poster, we will need the abstract in the proper format, so please see http://www.bayesian.org/events/isba2010/abstructure.html for format instructions, and then submit your poster abstract to isba10-poster@im.ufrj.br by February 20.
Sincerely,
Herbie Lee, on behalf of the ISBA 10 program committee
which means that our Savage-Dickey paper has been rejected as a topic for a talk at the ISBA 10 conference. Rejected twice in a week, this is not a very promising prospect! (I will obviously resubmit the paper as a poster to ISBA 10, as this is an even better opportunity to argue about our point than a talk. Especially in an environment such as the Valencia meeting where posters occupy a central place in the meeting.)
Post-scriptum: I just registered on the Valencia 9 site and I am rather taken aback by the astounding 485 euro registration fees… Which only cover the fees and the banquet, not the lodging nor the food. There is no reduction for students so it constitutes a big draw on our research funds, maybe justified because this is clearly a major event students should be exposed to, but a big draw nonetheless. Frankly, I cannot explain the amount, except for the unfortunate choice of the location. If we could have the meeting in a mountainous region like Picos de Europa, we would gain both sides by avoiding the clutter of a mass tourism coastal town and saving on our research money!
