Last morn, I had the surprise of receiving the following email: This is to inform you that the following abstract has been submitted to the 3rd International Conference of the ERCIM WG on COMPUTING & STATISTICS (ERCIM’10) Ab#: 114 Title: Goodness of Fit Via Mixtures of Beta distributions Keywords: nonparametric estimation, posterior conditional predictive p-value. 
Neil Gunther has pointed out on his blog that the prime number decomposition R package schoolmath contains mistakes in the function primes, listing 1 as a prime number but also including decomposable numbers like 133 in its list of prime numbers: > primes(100,140) 101 107 111 113 123 129 131 137 > primes(50,140) 
The recently arXived paper of Goldstein, Rinott and Scarsini studies the impact of refining a partition on the precision of a stratified maximising/integration Monte Carlo approach. Quite naturally, if the partition gets improved, simulating points in each set of the partition can only improve the quality of the approximation, whether the problem is in maximising 
In connection with the Valencia 9 meeting that started yesterday, and with Hedie‘s talk there, we have posted on arXiv a set of comments on particle learning. The arXiv paper contains several discussions but they mostly focus on the inevitable degeneracy that accompanies particle systems. When Lopes et al. state that is not of interest 
![Vanilla Rao-Blackwellisation [re]revised](http://l.wordpress.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cleft%7C+%5Cbegin%7Bmatrix%7D+%5Ctau+%26%5Ctext%7Bmedian%7D+%26%5Ctext%7Bmean+%7D%26q_%7B.8%7D+%26q_%7B.9%7D+%26%5Ctext%7Btime%7D%5C%5C+0.25+%260.0+%268.85+%264.9+%2613+%264.2%5C%5C+0.50+%260.0+%266.76+%264+%2611+%262.25%5C%5C+1.00+%260.25+%266.15+%264+%2610+%262.5%5C%5C+2.00+%260.20+%265.90+%263.5+%268.5+%264.5%5C%5C%5Cend%7Bmatrix%7D+%5Cright%7C&bg=000000&fg=B0B0B0&s=0)
Although the revision is quite minor, it took us two months to complete from the time I received the news in the Atlanta airport lounge… The vanilla Rao-Blackwellisation paper with Randal Douc has thus been resubmitted to the Annals of Statistics. And rearXived. The only significant change is the inclusion of two tables detailing computing 
This is the talk I am giving at the workshop on model uncertainty organised by the Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology (CRiSM) at the University of Warwick, on May 30-June 1. Careful readers will notice there is not much difference with my previous talk on the topic, as I only included the Savage-Dickey slides 
Matt Asher posted an R experiment on R-bloggers yesterday simulating the random walk which has the property of avoiding zero by quickly switching to a large value as soon as is small. He was then wondering about the “convergence” of the random walk given that it moves very little once is large enough. The values 
![Random sudokus [p-values]](http://www.r-bloggers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/morepvalues.jpg?w=450&h=450)
I reran the program checking the distribution of the digits over 9 “diagonals” (obtained by acceptable permutations of rows and column) and this test again results in mostly small p-values. Over a million iterations, and the nine (dependent) diagonals, four p-values were below 0.01, three were below 0.1, and two were above (0.21 and 0.42). 
Pierre Lecuyer is the new editor of the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) and he has asked me to become an Area Editor for the new area of simulation in Statistics. I am quite excited by this new Æditor’s hat, since this is a cross-disciplinary journal: The ACM Transactions on Modeling and 
![Random [uniform?] sudokus [corrected]](http://www.r-bloggers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/diagoku1.jpg?w=450&h=450)
As the discrepancy in the sum of the nine probabilities seemed too blatant to be attributed to numerical error given the problem scale, I went and checked my R code for the probabilities and found a choose(9,3) instead of a choose(6,3) in the last line… The fit between the true distribution and the 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
