【latex版】水贴

View photo

A general view of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington June 15, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a drug used by Oklahoma as part of its lethal injection procedure does not violate the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, dealing a setback to opponents of the death penalty.

The court, in a 5-4 decision, handed a loss to three inmates who objected to the use of a sedative called midazolam, saying it cannot achieve the level of unconsciousness required for surgery, making it unsuitable for executions.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote on behalf of the court’s conservative majority that the inmates had, among other things, failed to show that there was an alternative method of execution available that would be less painful.

In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said the court should consider whether the death penalty itself is constitutional. He was joined by one of his colleagues, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Forbes magazine’s annual Celeb 100 list, chronicling the world’s highest-paid entertainers over the past year featured a wide range of talents from all over the globe including a British chef, a Canadian rapper and a Russian tennis star – but only 16 women.

Escaped captives told BBC Panorama that some of the 219 girls flog those who can’t recite Qur’an and slit throats of captured males

Some of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram militants last year have been brainwashed to begin fighting for the Islamist group, with many carrying out public beatings and even killings, other captives have told the BBC.

Women who claim they lived in the same camps as some of the 219 girls who were taken from their school in the town of Chibok last April told the Panorama progamme that many are now administering punishments on behalf of Boko Haram.

Continue reading...

Here’s what Our Man Wilson has gone and got himself into this evening:

Above the memorial, a solid block of red. pic.twitter.com/a7yUynyC01

12.02am BST

Mike MacKenzie is rooting for the underdog, and doesn’t care who knows it:

“It would be great to see a Peru - Paraguay final but that still seems rather fanciful. More likely it will be Argentina vs the hosts. In that case, I hope Messi and friends win to help silence the ‘what has he won with his country’ critics.”

Continue reading...

Although the parameters in a finite mixture model are unidentifiable, there is a form of local identifiability guaranteeing the existence of the identifiable parameter regions. To verify its existence, practitioners use the Fisher information on the estimated parameters. However, there exist model/data situations where local identifiability based on Fisher information does not correspond to that based on the likelihood. In this paper, we propose a method to empirically measure degree of local identifiability on the estimated parameters, empirical identifiability, based on one’s ability to construct an identifiable likelihood set. From a detailed topological study of the likelihood region, we show that for any given data set and mixture model, there typically exists limited range of confidence levels where the likelihood region has a natural partition into identifiable subsets. At confidence levels that are too high, there is no natural way to use the likelihood to resolve the identifiability problem.

We consider estimation of the quadratic (co)variation of a semimartingale from discrete observations which are irregularly spaced under high-frequency asymptotics. In the univariate setting, results by Jacod for regularly spaced observations are generalized to the case of irregular observations. In the two-dimensional setup under non-synchronous observations, we derive a stable central limit theorem for the Hayashi–Yoshida estimator in the presence of jumps. We reveal how idiosyncratic and simultaneous jumps affect the asymptotic distribution. Observation times generated by Poisson processes are explicitly discussed.

Jim Cochran


In the sixth installment of the Amstat News series of interviews with ASA presidents and executive directors, we feature a discussion with 2003 ASA President J. Stuart (Stu) Hunter.

Stuart_HunterJ. Stuart Hunter is a statistician and professor emeritus in the school of engineering and applied science at Princeton University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1947, a master’s degree in applied mathematics in 1949, and a PhD in statistics in 1954—all from North Carolina State University. He is the founding editor of Technometrics and, in 1993, he served as president of the American Statistical Association. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, American Society for Quality, Royal Statistical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hunter became an honorary member of the American Society for Quality in 1999 and he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.
The first “Stu Hunter Research Conference” was held in 2013 at the Chateau Marquette, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The second of these conferences was held in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2014, and the third was held in March of 2015 in Leuven, Belgium.

Hunter is a highly decorated statistician. He received the Shewhart Medal in 1970, U.S. Army S. S. Wilks Medal in 1987, Deming Medal in 1986, and Founders Award of the American Statistical Association in 1995. He also has been honored with the W.J. Youden, Ellis Ott, and Brunbaugh awards of the American Society for Quality. He received an honorary degree from his alma mater in 2006 and again in 2008 from The Pennsylvania State University. In 1996, the Environmetrics Society established an annual lecture in his honor.

Hunter has published extensively and is a co-author with I. Guttman and S. S. Wilks of Introductory Engineering Statistics (1965) and co-author with
G. E. P. Box and W. G. Hunter of Statistics for Experimenters (1979). In 1968, he was the instructor in the 32 one-half hour episode TV course “The Design of Experimenters with Structured Text” and, in 1971, a similar program, “Statistics for Problem Solving and Decision Making,” all sponsored by Westinghouse Learning. He remains active as a consultant and lecturer.

Q: Stu, thank you for taking time for this interview. You earned your undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and you master’s degree in engineering mathematics, but then studied statistics for your doctorate. What factored into your decision to move into the field of statistics?

A: In 1940, after graduating from high school, I worked for the Prudential Insurance Company as junior clerk, and I ended up in its actuarial department working with IBM punch cards. Later, while in the Army, I took engineering courses at North Carolina State University and took calculus from R. L. Anderson. After the war, I returned to NC State to finish a degree in electrical engineering and found Andy (Professor Anderson) in the statistics department. My formal statistics education began then and there.

Q: What motivated you and George Box to write Statistics for Experimenters?

A: I had the good fortune to be one of George’s first (of two) graduate students—Sigurd Andersen the other. There was great interest in fractional factorial and response surface designs, and I had many opportunities to give short courses and lectures. This included 32 half-hour TV tapes sponsored by Westinghouse Learning and later, when I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, I was declared to be the “Johnny Appleseed” of industrial experimental design. When George returned to the USA to head up the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton, it seemed the most logical thing in the world to have a book. Bill Hunter, who was then an undergraduate student at Princeton, was a great help in getting mimeo copies made for a course on design of experiments that both George and I gave in the chemical engineering department. When Bill later went to Wisconsin to work on his PhD, he became a natural added author.


Q: You were the founding editor of Technometrics. What motivated you to establish this journal? Who else worked on the founding of Technometrics?

A: A lot of early conversations at the Gordon Conferences argued the need for a statistics journal for the engineering sciences. Cuthbert Daniel and George were particularly avid advocates. My many short courses for the Chemical Division of the ASQC had fattened its treasury, and launching a technical journal seemed a natural use for this resource. While a graduate student at NC State, I had occasionally helped Sarah Porter and Gertrude Cox proofread and edit early issues of Biometrics, and I just selected myself to be the editor. R. A. Fisher named the journal Technometrics.

Q What accomplishment as president of the ASA did you find most gratifying?

A: I initiated the drive to establish certification for statisticians while president. The motion to begin certification was tabled at the last meeting of my presidential year. Serious family illness forced me to be absent.

William Li, SPES JSM Chair

The Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) program for JSM 2015 will feature three invited, three topic-contributed, and five contributed sessions.

Invited

Scaling Up Response Surface Models for Big Geostatistical and Computer Simulation Data, organized by Robert Gramacy of The University of Chicago

Design and Analysis of Mixture Experiments: New Methods with Applications, organized by Scott Cooley of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Complex and High-Dimensional Inference in Astrostatistics, organized by Jessi Cisewski of Carnegie Mellon University

Topic-Contributed

Physical Sciences, organized by David Jones of Harvard University

New Developments and Applications in Design of Experiments, organized by Julie Zhou of the University of Victoria

Statistical Innovations in Failure Time Modeling of Complex Systems: Pathway to a Better Decision, organized by Sanjib Basu of Northern Illinois University

Awards for Outstanding Presentations

Michael Crotty, SPES Awards Chair

The section is also pleased to announce the results of its annual competition for contributed papers presented at last year’s JSM in Boston, Massachusetts. The outstanding presentation awards encourage excellence in presentation and help raise the SPES contributed sessions to a higher level.

All awards are based on audience evaluations of each speaker.

Outstanding Presentation Award

Christine Anderson-Cook, Los Alamos National Laboratory: “Identifying the Best 16-Run Regular or Non-Regular Screening Design for 6 to 8 Factors Using Multiple Objectives”

Runner-Up, Outstanding Presentation Award

Hernando Ombao, University of California, Irvine: “Modeling Neuronal Cross-Interactions”

Honorable Mentions

Andrew Robinson, University of Melbourne: “ML vs. MRR: Weibull Parameter Estimation for Making Decisions”

Shan Ba, Procter & Gamble: “Optimal Sliced Latin Hypercube Designs for Computer Experiments with Continuous and Categorical Factors”

Maria Weese, Miami University: “Powerful Supersaturated Designs When Effect Directions Are Known”

Gwendolyn Eadie, McMaster University: “Measuring the Mass of a Galaxy: An Evaluation of the Performance of Bayesian Mass Estimates Using Statistical Simulation”

Winners received a certificate recognizing their accomplishment and a cash award.

The awards for the JSM 2014 best presentations will be presented at the SPES mixer during the 2015 meetings in Seattle. Those who assisted with the evaluations are Po-hsu Chen, Elizabeth Claassen, Stephanie DeHart, Emily Griffith, Laura Lancaster, Rajneesh Rajneesh, and Liz Schiferl.

Visit the section’s website for more news and announcements.

http://r14---sn-aigllney.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?initcwndbps=1120000&ip=2a02%3A2498%3Ae002%3A88%3A59%3A%3A2&key=yt5&signature=C6B672F52E9F377B89628283199DBABD4730AAB4.E03F004C7E25DDA08B9337C13E0A6E68C60E8A97&sparams=dur%2Cid%2Cinitcwndbps%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Clmt%2Cmime%2Cmm%2Cmn%2Cms%2Cmv%2Cnh%2Cpl%2Cratebypass%2Csource%2Cupn%2Cexpire&mn=sn-aigllney&mt=1435802827&mv=m&id=o-AMrjelqrLTl_2HFrgTpqQmoM7NMKFmqHCju7RQE0LaX1&ms=au&source=youtube&lmt=1435389068286857&dur=62.972&sver=3&mime=video%2Fmp4&fexp=901816%2C9407141%2C9407146%2C9407573%2C9407662%2C9408142%2C9408420%2C9408710%2C9415077%2C9416126%2C9416215%2C9416655%2C9417191%2C952640%2C966300&itag=22&upn=bQH1Ja7LBek&nh=IgpwcjAyLmxocjE0KgkxMjcuMC4wLjE&pl=32&ipbits=0&ratebypass=yes&mm=31&expire=1435824476&title=Play+Of+The+Day+-+Badminton+Finals+-+Yonex+US+Open+C%27ship+2015

(This article was first published on Data Driven Security, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)
We are happy to announce that the iptools package is now on CRAN. Formerly only available on GitHub, iptools now compiles under Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/CentOS/RedHat and Mac OS X (we’re still working on that other operating system).

Oliver (the package co-author and on-CRAN instigator) wrote some excellent vignettes that cover the functionality of the package in-depth, but here’s a short-list of what you can find/expect in iptools: