Do you remember the notorious hurricane / himmicane study (Jung et al., PNAS, 2014)? At the time, there was a heavy backlash against the study, and probably rightly so, as the statistical analysis turns out to be highly unstable against a change of the regression formula. You can find some links here. Over the years,…
As announced a while ago, we had moved our now already traditional summer school in Bayesian Statistics to Bergen, Norway this year. Maybe fitting for such a course, the weather turned out to be very different from the long-term frequency, in what must be the upper 1% quantile of sun intensity for the region at…
Update 2, 6.6.14: Due to the criticism of this study on the web, I have reanalyzed a part of this study. See my comments here. We should by now know that that which we call a rose; by any other name would smell as sweet; but it seems we still haven’t quite internalized the message.…
Since a few years, various subsamples of Jörn Pagel, Joseph Chipperfield, Björn Reineking and I have been teaching an introductory summer school in Bayesian statistics. In previous years, we were in Bayreuth 2011 Bayreuth 2012, Göttingen 2013 and Freiburg 2013. This year, we will be in a beautiful field station close to Bergen, Norway. The…
Yesterday, I gave my first webinar, or online lecture if you want. The occasion was that a few people from another university asked me if I could give an introductory lecture about Bayesian statistics, and because traveling would have cost me a full day, I suggested doing a “virtual visit” instead. It’s a funny coincidence…
“Wilson’s Principle No. 2: For every scientist, there exists a discipline for which his or her level of mathematical competence is enough to achieve excellence.” EO Wilson As some might recally, this quote stems from an essay by EO Wilson entitled “Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math “ published half a year ago in the…
We are looking for a PostDoc who doesn’t mind teaching. Details here at NatureJobs.
I just returned from our Summer School on Bayesian Statistics that we held in the mountains around Freiburg. Thanks to all the participants as well as my fellow lecturers Jörn Pagel and Joe Chipperfield for the really amazing time up there in the hut, hope to see you all soon!
I know, lectures are so old fashioned – MOOCs are the new thing. And as I said before, I do think MOOCs, or more general “computer teachers” have a tremendous potential. Yet, I have to admit that I am still waiting to find an online course that really gets me excited and inspired. I don’t…
As in the last years, we organize a course in Bayesian statistics this summer. See invitation below, feel free to distribute widely. 3rd International Summer School An Introduction to Bayesian Modeling for Ecologists in Freiburg (Germany) 28th July to 2nd August 2013 Motivation Bayesian inference is an increasingly used statistical framework in ecology, but…
I just returned from teaching a workshop on Bayesian statistics together with Joe Chipperfield in Göttingen. The workshop was organized by the Biodiversity, Macroecology and Conservation Biogeography group in the aftermath of the Macroecology meeting, so quite a few people stayed over the weekend after the meeting, and it generally turned out to be a…
Two weeks ago, for the second time in this semester, I taught a block course on “research skills” for students in our international master programs here at the faculty. Topics were how to develop a hypothesis, design experiments, do analysis, write it down, do graphs etc. It believe these courses have been a quite a…
The last two weeks, I was serving as a teaching side-kick for a course on agent-based modeling at the Global Sustainability Summer School 2012, which was jointly organized in Potsdam close to Berlin by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), in partnership with the Santa…
As last year, we’ll do a summer school on Bayesian modeling in Bayreuth. See the invitation below, and feel free to circulate widely!!! Motivation Statistical modeling with Bayesian methods has become increasingly popular in ecology, but the techniques required for doing so are not part of the standard curriculum in most Universities. Our aim for…
The Zeit (one of the flagships of the German press) foresees a “tsunami” revolutionizing the way academic education takes place within the next 5 years. They refer to the success of websites such as Udacity, Coursera, or edX that have been launched by a number of prestigious unis (btw, Harvard and MIT – edX, are…
theoretical ecology 