At Last, I’ll listen to my favoriate musicians: Ian Bostridge and Europa Galante

Tomorrow, Nov. 4th, 2011 at the LG Art Center, I’ll enjoy a great performances by Ian Bostridge and Europa Galante. I heard his beautiful voice in Boston at the auditorium of New England Conservatory. I heard the beautiful sounds of baroque instruments at the Avery Fisher Hall of the Lincoln Center. Europa Gallante played music with Andreas Scholl, another my favorite singer in 2001.

I’m so excited that I’ll see these performers tomorrow. After the concert… by waiting in the line about 30 minutes, I got to get signatures and asked a few questions. Ian was very English and Fabio was very Italian, based on their replys to my questions. I briefly wonder how I would sound when a unexpected asks me questions.

a conversation between lab researcher and statistician

This is a hilarious conversation. Interdisciplinary studies are always hard. So many obstacles laid out. Groups of scientists must get over one at time. Some may think working within a group can be more efficient. Well, to make a long story short, just watch it (click

[ISSPR] International Summer School on Pattern Recognition

The 7th ISSPR was the worst Summer School I’ve ever attended.

Lecture-wise, it was o.k. Some lecturers were good, some lecturers looked a bit careless. Overall, the lecture quality was somewhat comparable to those summer schools I attended in the US. The rest, it was really bad. This summer school was the worst compared to those summer schools I attended or I helped. Always, small things matter. Once I have time, I’ll list what was good and what were bad. You can expect a long list of bad part but an extremely short list of good part.

1. The reception at the residence hall was too careless. I had to stay longer because transportation schedule didn’t fit to the conference schedule. The housing included the breakfast but they didn’t guide me a place to eat. Later, I asked and they only told a place that is closed.
2. The conference housing never replaced towels during the week stay. It cost 40 pounds and the room was small. No amenities and no fresh towels. DRATS!!!

Asia’s lonely hearts

The Economist featured this article:
The decline of Asian marriage

Asia’s lonely hearts

Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious”

I’m definately partaking this trend. I’m just scared to take over all the duties that Asian women are expected/supposed to do without outspeaking traditionally while working full time.

Great Readings from C.P.Robert

Statistical Classics has a list of some important papers that contributed to the advance of statistics as a science. I recommend reading them not only for myself but for you if you use statistical methods in your work.

postcards from the NSF

Postcards from the NSF is something you’ll want to read if you like to get a glimpse of proposal writing.

Reading it reminds me a popular quote from the art of war:

if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.

Paper accepted on calibration uncertainties in X-ray data analysis

I got the acceptance notification early this year. Being so busy (I went home at 1:30 am last night and got out from home at 6:30am for swimming), it’s hard think about something academic. Unfortunately, there are so many interesting researches and tremendous events of preaching them. I miss them thoroughly but I’m glad to know that I made a little contribution to the academics.

Frankly, I wanted to go pattern recognition summer school but the bureaucratics (to be exact, lack of understanding of needs for methodologies from machine learning for an interdisciplinary research and a bit of igorance and aloofness) hinders me from going.

Anyway, the title is

Accounting for Calibration Uncertainties in X-ray Analysis: Effective Areas in Spectral Fitting

Hyunsook Lee and many others

The full paper is currently available at ArXiv:1102.4610.

Paper accepted, introducing the Jackknife Information Criterion

A jackknife type approach to statistical model selection

Hyunsook Lee, G. Jogesh Babu, and C.R. Rao is accepted.

Not knowing the policy of the publisher, I’m not posting the pdf copy. Let me know if you are interested.

Procedures such as Akaike information criterion (AIC), Bayesian information criterion (BIC), Minimum description length (MDL), and Bootstrap information criterion have been developed in the statistical literature for model selection. Most of these methods use estimation of bias. This bias, which is inevitable in model selection problems, arises from estimating the distance between an unknown true model and an estimated model. Instead of bias estimation, a bias reduction based on jackknife type procedure is developed in this paper. The jackknife method selects a model of minimum Kullback-Leibler distance through bias reduction. It is shown that
(a) the jackknife maximum likelihood estimator is consistent,
(b) the jackknife estimate of the log likelihood is asymptotically unbiased, and
(c) the stochastic order of the jackknife log likelihood estimate is $O(\log \log n).$ Because of these properties,
the jackknife information criterion is applicable to problems of choosing a model from separated families especially when the true model is unknown. Compared to popular information criteria which are only applicable to nested models such as regression and time series settings, the jackknife information criterion is more robust in terms of filtering various types of candidate models in choosing the best approximating model.

Frequentist methods are like a black box.

I have many many unpublished posts related to Astrostatistics. This is one of them.

Atsu on KBS Special

This is Atsu Ennyu, one of residents at the University Club during my stay. As his name says, he is japanese.

We meet people. They come and go. It is very likely that we will never encounter them as our life changes its stage. Atsu graduated and went back to Japan, which country I have no connection to.

Facebook connected us like many others all over the world. Because of its large and broad network structure, the weight of our linkage is mediocre. Yet, it made me find his appearance at a Korean TV documentary aired on the largest broadcasting company (I thinkg KBS is still public).

By the way, the name of the show is “KBS Special: 대지진 100일 – 흔들리는 일본.”

Lastly, it is strange to see him on TV. What’s the odds that a japanese person appears on a Korean National TV program???

Using Dimension Reduction and Model Fitting for the Efficient Government R&D Spending

It is the title of my presentation (pdf) at the Spring 2011 Korean Statistical Society Meeting. I was invited to replace someone who couldn’t come to the Model Fitting through Dimension Reduction session. Being not an academical statistician, I decided to present what I’ve been working on at KISTEP focusing Model Fitting and Dimension Reduction

A Sad Weekend

On the past weekend, my family were on a short trip. What made me so sad from this trip is that I couldn’t help notice my mom’s feable shrunk stature while she’s slowly walking. The way she walks was similar to old ladies in their 70ies and 80ies. And she hasn’t reached 65 yet. Such fragile feature made me so heartbroken. When she become looking so old? What made her change from a radiant beautiful woman to still beautiful but no more young lady? Her face is beautiful. Much prettier than me even if she complains her wrinkles and drooping eyes.

Even though she had a hard time to walk, we managed to stop by various places. One of them was a deserted(? closed, perhaps) railway station. The place was full of red ananemos. My mom loved this flower, which I didn’t know before.

Home ownership

I’ll not make this story long. I, finally, become a proud home owner. However small it may be, it belongs to me and I’ll pay my share of the property tax.

Lots of trouble happened. I’m sure every one who moves one place to the other experiences similar difficulties. Thanks to my mom, I’m lucky that my share is less. Nonetheless, replacing old stuffs and removing a decade old dust has been tough to me. Even a lady upstairs had a clogging drainage issue and asked me a favor to use my bathroom ceiling to drain dirts. It spoiled my newly renovated bathroom when sewage splashed from the ceiling. Instead of her cleaning it out, since she has two small children to take care of and a husband who does not care all the difficulties, I let her go.

During all these processes, even if I indebted everything to my mom, there was one thing I couldn’t live without from moving out to moving in. Reaching things above, removing dust on shelves, putting stuffs away, and replacing bulbs, I couldn’t think of accomplishing these activities without this stool.

I’m so glad that I brought this with me from the US. This stool clicked when I saw its image from the IKEA website and I went Stoughton,MA three times to get it. Since the day one, the stool has been so helpful for a long time. It makes worthy of every gas money, my time, my efforts, and other people’s efforts fixing my home.

Until I make my home a livable place with furniture and appliances, I’ll continuously make most out of this stool. I will thank this stool whenever manual labor is needed. I will thank my mom whenever I have a mintues to rest.

Legally Blonde, a Korean Musical

Its Korean title is “금발은 너무해” meaning more like helpless blondie. I saw this musical only for my company’s good.

The musical is so pathetic. It’s a complete waste of money. If you are fond of pretty girls, perhaps it’s worth while to watch their jumping up and down and their sexual appeals (I cannot say they danced because there were no proper dance moves). They didn’t vocalize before they stood for the opening song. The sound was horrible. It did improve a little but their horrible voice were not qualified for musical actors except one actress who played Paulette. Only thing they dominant is their fragile body line, which is sought after by many Korean men.

Completely disappointed. I’ll never watch a western musical that translated into Korean unless the traslation is proven to be suitable. I’m happy that I had some opportunities of visiting NYC and watched some (historical) broadway musicals.

Colin Firth’s movies

Hurrah! It seems like Colin Firth grabbed an Oscar. I didn’t expect that but I know he deserves it. He has been my favorite actor more than a decade. It’s hard to recall what made me be dragged toward movies featured by Colin Firth. Yet, I found myself finding movies that bear his name in their end credits. Here are those movies: