Archive for open water swimming

a journal of the COVID²⁵ year

Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 14, 2025 by xi'an

 Last week, I got COVID for the very first (detected) time! Although it took a while to realise this was COVID and not the common cold. It started with an overnight runny nose that I attributed to swimming outside the previous and cool morn, a minor temperature shock compared with the previous week in Guadeloupe. And did not spot the unusually high heart rate that night… The next afternoon, I was feeling a bit feverish (with no fever!) and definitely tired, but again attributed the feeling to faster bike rides to and from Paris Dauphine and the after-effect of Caribean jetlag. I then had a very long night and definitely felt okay the morning after (with nightly heart rate back to normal). It is only when my wife starting showing the same symptoms that I suspected more than a common cold. With confirmation from a COVID test two days later. By then I had unfortunately contaminated a few other people,  all of whom recovered reasonably fast (phew!). I have since taken back to wear a face mask in any close encounter and warned my students. I wonder if I got it in the plane back or at Dauphine on the opening day. Definitely planning the continuation of my yearly vaccine next November!!!

swimming the Seine (after the Aare, the Cher and the Willamette)

Posted in Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 29, 2025 by xi'an

Nice meeting!

Posted in pictures, R, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2024 by xi'an

The ICSDS 2024 meeting in Nice is quite impressive and not primarily because it is in Nice under a beautiful December sun. As other (numerous) IMS meetings I attended (since the initial one in Uppsala in 1990!), the program is of high quality and along topics that are currently moving fast or emerging. From the sessions I attended, e-values are strongly represented, although it remains unclear to me why they should constitute a major departure from p-values, as they stick to hypothesis testing, Type I error, power, and the whole paraphernalia of Neyman-Pearson formalism. If I manage to attend a BIRS workshop on the subject next Summer, I may manage to get a better e-derstanding!The MCMC (only!) session included a presentation by Guanyang Wang that generalised different approximate MCMC schemes into a unified one. And one by Filippo Ascolani on Gibbs beating the competition! I also attended the Bayesian prediction session, where my friends Sonia Petrone and Chris Holmes have presentations on their respective Series B papers. I discussed both on the ‘Og, on 15 March 2023 and 07 November 2022, respectively. This time, I found that both talks had a Bayesian bootstrap flavour, which is not surprising when considering the non-parametric nature of the approach. And they left me wondering at it being protected from overfitting.
My only plenary session was Cynthia Dwork’s on outcome indistinguishability, which, while related to the privacy topics I was topic, remained somewhat obscure as to its purpose. Meaning I have to get through the paper to get a more holistic perspective.
Of course, Nice in Winter is a very nice place, with the waterfront available for running an uninterrupted 15km as we found out with Jérémie Houssineau (at a brisk 4’09” pace I had not planned before starting!) and the sea all for myself (for a dozen minutes before losing digits!). Unfortunately I had to skip the final day due to examinations of the Paris Dauphine MASH master. And miss Stan receiving a student award. But I am looking forward the next iterations of ICSDS. (Not including Copenhagen, Madrid and many many other places in 2025, since ICSDS seemed a most common name for conferences, some presumably predatory! The true location is Sevilla, to keep up with the Mediterranean theme of ICSDS!)

Lake Washington sunrise [jatp]

Posted in Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 22, 2024 by xi'an

A river runs through it [jatp]

Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 21, 2024 by xi'an