Illinois Spring Weather….

Yes, it was chilly (40′s, or about 8 C), windy (13 mph with stronger gusts) and rainy, and yes, the wind shifted into my face as I ran my return leg. Total run: 8 miles in 1:23:28 or about 1 minute slower than last week’s “perfect weather” run. But strangely enough, this run was far easier; I spent more energy cursing the weather than I did running.
But this was one of those days were I (sort of) wished I had opted for the treadmill; ok, it wasn’t THAT bad except for the wind.
The good news: running is starting to get slightly easier.

Posts
Statistics: for those who enjoy this sort of thing, here is a nice synopsis of how those who do classical statistics differ from the more modern Bayesian statisticians. The differences, while obvious to them, are very subtle to non-experts like me:

Confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. I agree with Kass that confidence and statistical significance are “valuable inferential tools.” They are treated differently in classical and Bayesian statistics, however. In the Neyman-Pearson theory of inference, confidence and statistical significance are two sides of the same coin, with a confidence interval being the set of parameter values not rejected by a significance test. Unfortunately, this approach falls apart (or, at the very least, is extremely difficult) in problems with high-dimensional parameter spaces that are characteristic of my own applied work in social science and environmental health.

In a modern Bayesian approach, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing are both important but are not isomorphic; they represent two different steps of inference. Confidence statements, or posterior intervals, are summaries of inference about parameters conditional on an assumed model. Hypothesis testing–or, more generally, model checking–is the process of comparing observed data to replications under the model if it were true. Statistically significance in a hypothesis test corresponds to some aspect of the data which would be unexpected under the model. For Bayesians as for other statistical researchers, both these steps of inferences are important: we want to make use of the mathematics of probability to make conditionally valid statements about unobserved quantities, and we also want to make use of this same probability theory to reveal areas in which our models do not fit the data.

Here the word “conditional” is used in the sense of conditional probability, e. g., what is the probability that we’d get an observation in this range given our model parameters really were x, y and z verses the classical “given this outcome, we fail to reject that the model parameters were in these ranges.”

Science I had mentioned an article in the New York Times about the origin of languages (the claim that they came from Africa). Jerry Coyne also discusses this paper and discusses some of the details in a very readable fashion.

Politics
Paul Krugman seems to be enjoying Republican whining about President Obama pointing out that their plan was really nothing more than a “reverse Robin Hood” approach:

At the beginning of last week, the commentariat was in raptures over the Serious, Courageous, Game-Changing Ryan plan. But now that the plan has been exposed as the cruel nonsense it is, what we’re hearing a lot about is the need for more civility in the discourse. President Obama did a bad thing by calling cruel nonsense cruel nonsense; he hurt Republican feelings, and how can we have a deal when the GOP is feeling insulted? What we need is personal outreach; let’s do lunch!

The easy, and perfectly fair, shot is to talk about the hypocrisy here; where were all the demands for civility when Republicans were denouncing Obama as a socialist, accusing him of creating death panels, etc..? Why is it OK for Republicans to accuse Obama of stealing from Medicare, but not OK for Obama to declare, with complete truthfulness, that those same Republicans are trying to dismantle the whole program?

Beyond that, are we dealing with children here?

He goes on to point out that the Republicans have a very different agenda: they want to dismantle the New Deal programs and return to a pre-New Deal era.