TFOP 245 discusses a new camera purchase and a conversation about historical photos and gold-plating photography on glass || Neurapix is a German startup that has developed AI-based software that can learn from previously edited images and apply the same edits to new photos at a fast rate || Two lawsuits against AI || xkcd … Continue reading "928 One Minute Six Hundred Pics"

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A special episode with a special guest. Don Komarechka is back on the show. He and Chris discuss HP and their DRM, Samsung and their moon cheat and a German lawsuit involving a photo wallpaper. It’s also the week of the GPT-4 release and the two prove that they are geeks beyond photography. Topics: [OTHER] … Continue reading "931 The Moon Cheat"

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Yes, they have been tricking you. Millions of albums sold that were produced with cheap plastic gear. Inconceivable! Also on today’s show: a few words on dpreview’s demise (and resurrection), some thoughts (and a request for feedback) on guilt, fear and frustrations in photography. Plus thoughts on CJ Chilvers’ latest post about the gear race … Continue reading "932 You’ve Been Tricked!"

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Presenting jam-packed newsreel, a new book, French influencer law, semantic segmentation in real-time, dpreview’s archive, a new film by Fuji, the Mickey-Mouse-Leica and DALL-E coming to a browser near you. Special guest Allan Attridge of Two Hosers fame (he now also builds furniture on YouTube) and Chris talk about life, creating youtube videos and growing … Continue reading "933 Hawk Birdhouse and the Mickey Mouse Camera"

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In this episode, Chris explores a unique twist on street photography, discusses the challenges of auto white balance in wildfire conditions. He also delves into the world of AI with Uncrop and a quick GAN. There’s news from Nikon, a treat for Lego and Ansel Adams fans, a look at the viral AI-“Camera” Paragraphica, and … Continue reading "934 Facial Fakes, Fiery Frames"

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A colleague who works in a field that uses a lot of survey research asks: Can you recommend papers about detecting bad survey responses? We have some such methods where I work, but I’m curious what the Census Bureau and … Continue reading →

This is cranky linguist Bob. The lack of count markers is starting to bug me. To wit… Usage of “fewer” vs. “less” The prescriptive rule in English is that “fewer” applies to groups of countable objects whereas “less” applies to … Continue reading →

Richard Calvo, Vincent Pons, and Jesse Shapiro write: Many observers have forecast large partisan shifts in the US electorate based on demographic trends. Such forecasts are appealing because demographic trends are often predictable even over long horizons. We backtest demographic … Continue reading →

Sociologist Claude Fischer writes: Polarization has been less a matter of Americans becoming extremists—most remain centrists or oblivious to politics—but more that politically engaged Americans have increasingly aligned their views, values, and even their practices, from where they live to … Continue reading →

Data-share this, pal: As the man said, you have no obligation to share any of your data and I have no obligation to believe anything you say.

As forwarded to us by Max Shepsi: I’m starting to see a pattern here!

I was talking with an economist today about the recent prize given to the authors of the very influential 2001 article, The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation. According to my colleague, many economists have issues with that … Continue reading →

Someone pointed me to this news article with the delightful url, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/science/sam-yoon-columbia-cancer-surgeon-5-more-retractions.html: Columbia Cancer Surgeon Notches 5 More Retractions for Suspicious Data The chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University this week had five research articles retracted and … Continue reading →

Campos quotes a comment from a thread on RFK Jr. and his running mate: It’s a very short jump from believing kale smoothies are a cure for cancer to denying the Holocaust happened. He points to this link: The physiologist … Continue reading →

tl;dr. To the extent that healing is important, I think it’s important not to overstate evidence for speculative claims about what works. Individual and societal resources are limited. If you want to say something like, “Sure, this is pie-in-the-sky research, … Continue reading →

A frustrating aspect of science papers is that the methods section doesn’t fully describe what was actually done. It can take a lot of sleuthing to figure out how to reconstruct published results—and that doesn’t even get into all the … Continue reading →

Horrifying story here from Sharon Lerner how chemical products company 3M (which has successfully branded itself as the cuddly people behind Post-it notes) polluted the world’s water supply and covered it up for decades. It features several issues we’ve discussed … Continue reading →

This is Bob. Yes, but can it Stan? The first few instantiations of ChatGPT haven’t been so good at Stan. This is perhaps not surprising, because there’s relatively little written about Stan on the web compared to, say, Python, C++, … Continue reading →

Kiran Gauthier writes: I was checking the web pages for Active Statistics and Regression and Other Stories and although I saw that Active Statistics is meant to accompany Regression and Other Stories, I was wondering how you would recommend reading … Continue reading →

Laboratory assays are central to much of biomedical research. My colleagues and I recently received a research grant to do better assays using Bayesian inference. Beyond the usual challenges of fitting nonlinear hierarchical models to real data that can sometimes … Continue reading →

This is Bob. We’re hiring It’s that time of year again and we’re hiring at all levels at the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM) at Flatiron Institute (the in-house research arm of Simons Foundation). As they are listed, job ads … Continue reading →

tl;dr. Prediction markets give good forecasts because they attract “smart money” that will fix any gaps between current odds and best available information. The “smart money” is in turn motivated by the profits they can take from “dumb money” coming … Continue reading →

Shira writes: As an Appalachian Trail hiker, I always treat my clothes with permethrin. I’m a big fan of Sawyer products, but this claim caught my eye: Reduce likelihood of a tick bite by 73.6 times by treating shoes and … Continue reading →

A colleague pointed to this news article, “Do People in ‘Blue Zones’ Actually Live Longer?”, and wrote that I might find it blog-worthy. I replied that, yeah, the topic is blog-worthy enough that it’s already appeared on the blog, with … Continue reading →

From the team that brought you “good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son” and “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually … Continue reading →

A colleague writes: Have you seen this article by Nate Cohn at the New York Times? A few things in it seemed weird. For one, he writes: The tendency for recall vote to overstate the winner of the last election … Continue reading →

In the 1930s and 1940s, there were many prominent communist sympathizers: leading scientists such as J. B. S. Haldane and J. Robert Oppenheimer, powerful labor leaders, influential intellectuals, and various popular-front politicians, including at one period the vice-president of the … Continue reading →

(This post is by Charles) Art Owen (Stanford) read our paper on nesting Rhat to assess convergence in the many-short-chains regime of MCMC. He made a lot of great comments and asked some clarification questions. Notably: It wasn’t clear to me … Continue reading →

Harrison Siegel pointed us to this project with Maximiliano Isi and Will Farr on gravitational-wave analysis. The compare models using predictive evaluation, in particular leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO), as discussed here and here. Siegel writes: We discuss our implementation of the … Continue reading →

(This post is by Charles) The title says it all: recordings of StanCon 2024 are now available on Stan’s youtube channel. We’re happy to make the content of StanCon 2024 accessible, even to those who couldn’t make it in person. … Continue reading →

Just in time for Halloween, we have a scarily effective implementation of Stan on the web, full of a veritable haunted house of delicious treats. Brian Ward, Jeff Soules, and Jeremy Magland write: Stan Playground is a new open-source, browser-based … Continue reading →

Shane Frederick writes: Trivia question for you. I kept temperature records for 100 days one year in Boston, starting August 15th (day “0”). What would you guess is the correlation between day# and temp? r=??? Shane sends me this kind … Continue reading →

This is Jessica. I got through a long string of deadlines and invited talks and now I’m back to thinking about calibration and decision-making. In a previous post I was wondering about the relationship between calibration and Bayesian use of … Continue reading →

There’s some confusion regarding jumps in election forecasts. New information is coming in every day, so it makes sense that forecasts change too. But they don’t change very much. Each new piece of information tells you only a little bit. … Continue reading →

Paul Alper shares this horrifying news story by Laura Meckler: Brian Ray has spent the last three decades as one of the nation’s top evangelists for home schooling. As a researcher, he has published studies purporting to show that these … Continue reading →

There are actually two questions here: 1. Should pollsters share all the information on their design, data collection, and analyses? 2. If yes on question 1 above, should this information be made public ahead of time, before the survey is … Continue reading →

A political science colleague wrote in: We are all abuzz about the Harris +3 in that Iowa Poll with its great track record. When I check the write up of this poll I see a reasonably detailed description of their … Continue reading →

U.S. election day is tomorrow. So let’s talk about something else: 1. Encoding prior information using non-generative modeling I was talking with Hong Ge about the uses of non-generative models in probabilistic programming. An example I gave is the use … Continue reading →

There’s a lot of talk about how the polls can go wrong. Fair enough—I wrote an article a few years ago on failure and success in political polling and election forecasting, and a few years before that, Julia Azari and … Continue reading →

Continuing our election-eve counterprogramming, here’s another post with no political content. It comes from Constantine Frangakis, who writes: I think I have found something new and interesting. In studying the topic of “evidence” for my class, where the typical principles … Continue reading →

(Before going on, please read the last sentence of the P.P.S. below to put this post in context.) Blake McShane points us to this 1977 article, “Frequentist Probability and Frequentist Statistics,” by Jerzy Neyman, the statistician who made fundamental contributions … Continue reading →

These are my quick thoughts. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot, so feel free to add your perspectives in comments. 1. The outcome In 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly won the popular vote and lost in the electoral college. In 2020 … Continue reading →

I hadn’t thought about bee dancing for a long time, when someone pointed me to this post by Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter on a bit of data fraud in biology. Luebbert writes: Four years ago, during the first year … Continue reading →

I came across this blog comment from a couple years ago saying that, whatever was going on in the head of Brian “Pizzagate” Wansink when he wrote up those papers with the fake data, in any case his papers papers … Continue reading →

This is Jessica. Larry Hedges relayed a quote to me recently that I thought others here might appreciate. It appears in an old Annals of Mathematical Statistics paper by Tukey and Cornfield: In almost any practical situation where analytical statistics … Continue reading →

Several people pointed me to this news report on a successful bettor in an election prediction market: Not only did he see Donald Trump winning the presidency, he wagered that Trump would win the popular vote—an outcome that many political … Continue reading →

With news items such How the Trump Whale Correctly Called the Election and Prediction markets got Trump’s victory right; Betting markets predicted a Trump victory, while traditional polls were showing a tossup, prediction markets are having their coming-out party. Before … Continue reading →

This post is by Lizzie. I hope you like the cats photo from this summer. I do. I am looking for help. I decided to change my term course (12-14 weeks-long) on `introduction to Bayesian modeling with some hierarchical modeling’ … Continue reading →

I just learned about this paper from 2020, Specification curve analysis, by Uri Simonsohn, Joseph Simmons, and Leif Nelson: Empirical results hinge on analytical decisions that are defensible, arbitrary and motivated. These decisions probably introduce bias (towards the narrative put … Continue reading →

Quite often we hear in the news the lament that “if only we would have enough vaccine!”. In principal that is true, but more the theoretical claim, that only if we would have 170 Mio doses, everybody in Germany could get the two shots … Fact is, that being Germans and doing everything as thorough […]