This is all very surprising – nobody from nature network seems to be an elitist bastard.
They even have a special badge for Henry:

My excuse for not joining in is I’m just a pleb with pretensions. The Beast, on the other hand…

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David Basanta pointed out a provocative article in Wired, in which the author claimed that we won’t need to think about it any more, we can just throw it into a big computer along with an SVM¹ or a NN². His reasoning is that we are getting so much data that any patterns in the data will leap out at us, if we just prod it in the right way. And of course the computer scientists have all the right prods. This will then totally change the way science is done – we won’t have to worry about thinking up hypotheses and experiments to test them, we just mine the computer for results; in a manner reminiscent of The Library of Babel. Or perhaps it is closer to Dave Langford’s The Net of Babel.

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Just a few things, as it’s Friday and I have The Beast sat on me.

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Yesterday I found a long tube in my departmental pigeonhole. This was something of a surprise. Luckily it all became clear.
The tube contained a poster, and this certificate:

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In 1972, Prof. Sir. David R. Cox F.R.S. and statistical deity published one of the all-time great papers¹, where he introduced a neat idea into survival analysis which is now called the Cox Proportional Hazards model. Because survival analyses are so important (think medical trials and epidemiology, folks), and because the idea was so good, it has been cited over 21 000 times. In fact, its is do popular that, as Stephen Senn pointed out², it has amassed a good number of mis-citations too.

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Now this is fun for a Friday evening¹. Apparently the good (and possibly not so good) people of Washington D.C. have discovered that the quickest way to manage the commute near the airport there is to buy a cup of coffee. That, apparently, is equivalent to going to the airport.
Hence, “airport business” has become a euphemism. In Minnesota, the politicians may use it to mean something else.

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This morning I got the usual update from arXiv (that’s a chi, not an X, folks!) with the list of newly uploaded manuscripts. Including this one:

Bandit Exploration

How could you not be interested?

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Just because I’m in a maths and stats department

Of course, statistics is a part of all of these subjects, so we get to choose how pure we want to be.
Oh, I should also point out that our department is in a building called Exactum. The physicists are in Physicum (Hey I didn’t think up the names), and are most upset at the implication that they are imprecise.
When it gets dull around here, we pop over to have lunch in the meteorologists’ building, Dynamicum. Never a dull moment there.

One of the better books about statistics is Abelson’s Statistics as Principled Argument“. Amongst the many words of wisdom, he gives us this useful dictum:

Chance is Lumpy

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I’ve been sat in a project meeting for a Finnish Centre of Excellence that I lurk in. We have heard that swallows are more stressed when in Africa than in Finland (presumably because in Africa they are constantly being asked how fast they fly when unladen). There is also now a zombie student lurching around Finland saying “Braiiins … Stickleback braiiins”.

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