Graphical models has expanded substantially over the past decade with the analysis of large data sets, in particular from bioinformatics and retail, with developments of inference in relation to causality, and with applications involving complex data structures. The ubiquitous nature of conditional independence has meant these models are applied in many different subjects. Computing for graphical models has always been difficult but recently user friendly open source software has become available.  This meeting provided a platform to review the current provision and to elucidate remaining challenges in making graphical modelling more accessible to the wider scientific community.

“Before she went to Australia Trish sent me a mix CD of bonkers pop music she compiled, I never thanked her. Its called Mind Bending Motorway Mix and I want to share it with you, please pass the link on, share it far and wide, its a little tribute to an (as a friend referred to her today) exhilarating woman…”

Trish Keenan :: Mind Bending Motorway mix / mediafire link

Live at Sonar 2010

Patricia Anne Keenan, musician, born 28 September 1968; died 14 January 2011

“There is much to be said for contentment and painlessless, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thankgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room.”

—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (thanks to an Atelopus varius.)

Fitter, happier, more productive,
comfortable,
not drinking too much,
regular exercise at the gym
(3 days a week),
getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries,
at ease,
eating well
(no more microwave dinners and saturated fats),
a patient better driver,
a safer car
(baby smiling in back seat),
sleeping well
(no bad dreams),
no paranoia,
careful to all animals
(never washing spiders down the plughole),
keep in contact with old friends
(enjoy a drink now and then),
will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall),
favors for favors,
fond but not in love,
charity standing orders,
on Sundays ring road supermarket
(no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants),
car wash
(also on Sundays),
no longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows
nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate,
nothing so childish – at a better pace,
slower and more calculated,
no chance of escape,
now self-employed,
concerned (but powerless),
an empowered and informed member of society
(pragmatism not idealism),
will not cry in public,
less chance of illness,
tires that grip in the wet
(shot of baby strapped in back seat),
a good memory,
still cries at a good film,
still kisses with saliva,
no longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick,
that’s driven into frozen winter shit
(the ability to laugh at weakness),
calm,
fitter,
healthier and more productive
a pig in a cage on antibiotics.

Radiohead, Fitter Happier

• Multiple Imputation with Diagnostics (mi) in R: Opening Windows into the Black Box by Yu-Sung Su, Andrew Gelman, Jennifer Hill, Masanao Yajima — I gave this one a try. Has a useful suite of functions for fitting linear regression, GLMs, and GLMMs (using lme4) to the imputed data, pooling the estimates.
• mice: Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations in R by Stef van Buuren, Karin Groothuis-Oudshoorn
• Amelia II: A Program for Missing Data by James Honaker, Gary King, Matthew Blackwell

You might also enjoy this lovely definition. (And this on problems with definitions.)

Basic emotions

(Table from Power & Dalgleish, 2008)

Where you can read about it

Oatley, K. & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1987). Towards a cognitive theory of emotions. Cognition & Emotion 1(1), 29–50.

Power, M., & Dalgleish, T. (2008), Cognition and Emotion: From Order to Disorder. Psychology Press.

A 12-Point Circumplex Structure of Core Affect

(A picture from Yik, Russell, & Steiger, 2011)

Where you can read about it

Yik, M., Russell, J. A., & Steiger, J. H. (2011). A 12-point circumplex structure of core affect. Emotion 11(4), 705–731.

Component Process Model

(Individual difference variables affecting appraisals; from Scherer 2009)

Where you can read about it

Scherer, K. R. (2009). The dynamic architecture of emotion: Evidence for the component process model. Cognition and Emotion 23(7), 1307–1351.

First, Craig Murray:

Let me summarise Nick Cohen’s book for you. ‘If you are against eating Muslim babies, you are a supporter of Islamofascism. If you are perturbed by Guantanamo Bay, you would not have fought in the Spanish Civil War, are probably a fan of Hitler and have no right to call yourself a Liberal. Neo-Conservatism is the New Left.’

There, now you don’t have to read it. Believe me, I have done you a favour.

Or how about  Peter Wilby?

Cohen appears to think this book shows he has put infantile leftism behind him and attained a new maturity. Alas, it shows that he is, and always was, a political innocent.

Johann Hari?

…once Cohen’s blind faith in neoconservatism becomes clear, many of the accusations he makes against the left begin to look like acts of psychological projection rather than serious political arguments.

What’s left?

Here are some examples elaborated in the book which might help you decide whether you want to read it:

• Companies from West Germany supplied Saddam Hussein with “one of the largest chemical weapons manufacturing industries in the world” (p. 47). East German communists provided Saddam’s forces training.
• France built a nuclear reactor for Saddam, which was blown up by the Israeli air force before the nuclear fuel arrived.
• The slow response  of Europe, including the then UK Tory government, to Slobodan Milošević, Butcher of the Balkans – leading to the Srebrenica genocide.
• Some evidence that Virginia Woolf might have been a “screaming snob” who hated the working class. Here’s an example, to give you a flavour of his argument, of what she said: “What rather appals me… is the terrible conventionality of the workers. That’s why — if you want explanations — I don’t think they will be poets or novelists for another hundred years or so.”
• A quotation from George Galloway saluting Saddam Hussein: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory until Jerusalem.”
• Evidence that the reason for war in Iraq was a lie, Cohen writes: “If Blair had levelled with the British people he would have said that he couldn’t be sure if Saddam was armed, and even if he was there was no imminent danger, but here was a chance to remove a disgusting regime… Instead he spun and talked about chemical weapons…”

I don’t agree with everything in the book, but I am deeply suspicious now of those who think leftish people should avoid it.

“My friend told me Chomsky said something very sad. He said that today we don’t need theory. All we need to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree: facts are facts, and they are precious, but they can work in this way or that. Facts alone are not enough. [...] I’m sorry, I’m an old-fashioned continental European. Theory is sacred and we need it more than ever.”

—Slavoj Žižek, interview in New Statesman, 29 October 2009

Nice quotation, but Chomsky isn’t completely against theory (spotted this thanks to a comment at NS):

QUESTION: Do you think intellectuals should free themselves from theory, from visions, such as Zapatistas, and Marcos?

CHOMSKY: Marcos’s own thoughts were interesting, but there is no such thing as an “absence of theory”, I mean, you always have a commitment to some set of beliefs, goals and visions and so on, or to some kind of analyses of society. That is true whether you are expressing your views on torture, or freedom of speech, or in fact any issue beyond the most utterly superficial.

“… no science, not even the most exact, starts out with [clear and precisely defined basic] concepts. The true beginnings of scientific activity consist, rather, in the description of phenomena, which are then grouped, classified, and brought into relation with each other. Even when simply describing the material, we cannot avoid applying to it certain abstract ideas, acquired from somewhere or other but certainly not just from the new observations alone.”

—Freud, Drives and their Fates