This April and May, I gave a series of five lectures on Artificial Intelligence at The Abelard School in Toronto. These lectures are aimed at high school students, but may be of interest to others as well. I cover not just the current state of AI, but some of its history, and some fundamental concepts […]
I have a new paper on Modifying Gibbs sampling to avoid self transitions. The idea is that an ordinary Gibbs sampling update for a variable will often choose a new value that is the same as the old value. That seems like a waste of time, and would better be avoided. It’s not a new […]
Click on image for larger version. Toronto, March 2022. Fujica G690 with Fujinon S 100mm 1:3.5 lens, Ilford HP5 Plus film, developed with Ilfosol 3, Nikon Coolscan 9000.
I’ve forked the GNU ‘plotutils’ package, written mostly by Rob Maier, which contains the ‘graph’ program. I’ve added new features to ‘graph’ to make it a better tool for producing plots from the Linux/Unix/macOS command line. My main motivation is to use it with my Software for Flexible Bayesian Modeling (FBM), which consists of a […]
I’ve released pqR-2020-07-23, a new version of my variant implementation of R. You can install it on Linux, Windows, or Mac as described at pqR-project.org. Installation must currently be from source, similarly to source installs of R Core versions of R. This version has preliminary implementations of automatic differentiation and of arithmetic on lists. These […]
In this post, fourth in a series (previous posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), I’ll finally talk about some substantive conclusions of the following paper: Kissler, Tedijanto, Goldstein, Grad, and Lipsitch, Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period, Science, vol. 368, pp. 860-868, 22 May 2020 (released online 14 April 2020). The […]
This is the third in a series of posts (previous posts: Part 1, Part 2, next post: Part 4) in which I look at the following paper: Kissler, Tedijanto, Goldstein, Grad, and Lipsitch, Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period, Science, vol. 368, pp. 860-868, 22 May 2020 (released online 14 April 2020). The […]
This is the second in a series of posts (previous post: Part 1, next post: Part 3) in which I look at the following paper: Kissler, Tedijanto, Goldstein, Grad, and Lipsitch, Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period, Science, vol. 368, pp. 860-868, 22 May 2020 (released online 14 April 2020). The paper is […]
UPDATES: Next post in series: Part 2. Minor fix at strikethrough before last figure. I’ve been looking at the following paper, by researchers at Harvard’s school of public health, which was recently published in Science: Kissler, Tedijanto, Goldstein, Grad, and Lipsitch (2020) Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period (also available here, with supplemental…
Will the incidence of COVID-19 decrease in the summer? There is reason to hope that it will, since in temperate climates influenza and the four coronaviruses that are among the causes of the “common cold” do follow a seasonal pattern, with many fewer cases in the summer. If COVID-19 is affected by season, this would […]