Archive for Ireland
celebrating the career of Adrian Raftery
Posted in Books, Mountains, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags ABCDE, Adrian Raftery, applied statistics, Bayesian statistics, computational Bayesian methods, Environmental Statistics, Ireland, JSM 2024, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, Oregon, Pacific North West, Paris 6, Portland, Seattle, statistical demography, United Nations, University of Washington, USA, UW, Washington State on July 28, 2024 by xi'an
Shane MacGowan (1957-2023)
Posted in Kids, Wines with tags Celtic music, Dirty Old Town, England, Gaelic, Guinness, Ireland, Irish nationalism, NeurIPS, punk rock, Salford, Shane MacGowan, Thomas Bayes, Tunbridge Wells, youtube on December 4, 2023 by xi'an
The punk singer Shane MacGowan has died a few days ago. He formed the fantastic Pogues Celtic punk band in the early 1980’s, mixing punk raw energy with Celtic tunes and instruments, and Irish nationalism. (In true punk fashion, the name of the band come from the Gaelic póg mo thóin that I let readers check for translation! In the same spirit, his earlier band was called the Nips with no connection with the Neural Information Processing Systems conference! However, he could have claimed a connection with Bayes since he was raised in Tunbridge Wells.) His early death is sadly unsurprising given his lifelong issue with alcohol, which started as a young boy when he started drinking Guinness… (As a minor trivia, the Dirty Old Town song was originally written about Salford, near Manchester, England, although adopted by several Irish bnds.)
the unapologetic brilliance of Sinéad O’Connor
Posted in Statistics with tags Celtic music, child abuse, death notice, Ireland, Irish music, punk folk, Roman Catholic Church, Sinéad O'Connor on August 7, 2023 by xi'an
Poisson-Belgium 0-0
Posted in Statistics with tags Belgium, Brazil, data-analytics, Denmark, FIFA, football World Cup, Galway, Germany, Glasgow Celtics, Glasgow Rangers, Ireland, Mexico, Nature, prediction, Scotland, Switzerland, University of Glasgow, University of Oxford, Uruguay, Warwick Mathematics Institute on December 5, 2022 by xi'an“Statistical match predictions are more accurate than many people realize (…) For the upcoming Qatar World Cup, Penn’s model suggests that Belgium (…) has the highest chances of raising the famous trophy, followed by Brazil”
Even Nature had to get entries on the current football World cup, with a paper on data-analytics reaching football coaches and teams. This is not exactly prime news, as I remember visiting the Department of Statistics of the University of Glasgow in the mid 1990’s and chatting with a very friendly doctoral student who was consulting for the Glasgow Rangers (or Celtics?!) on the side at the time. And went back to Ireland to continue with a local team (Galway?!).
The paper reports on different modellings, including one double-Poisson model by (PhD) Matthew Penn from Oxford and (maths undergraduate) Joanna Marks from Warwick, which presumably resemble the double-Poisson version set by Leonardo Egidi et al. and posted on Andrews’ blog a few days ago. Following an earlier model by my friends Karlis & Ntzoufras in 2003. While predictive models can obviously fail, this attempt is missing Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Uruguay, and Denmark early elimination from the cup. One possible reason imho is that national teams do not play that often when players are employed by different clubs in many counties, hence are hard to assess, but I cannot claim any expertise or interest in the game.
Domhnach na Fola
Posted in Statistics with tags 30 January 1972, British Army, demonstration, Derry, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Sunday bloody Sunday, the Troubles, U2, United Kingdom on January 30, 2022 by xi'an
Xi'an's Og 