With more deviation than is standard

In a recent blog (click here ) I illustrated how to conduct Bayesian inference by applying it to a toy fishing prediction problem. This blog post hopes to offer an improvement. For a full understanding you'll need to read the original post, although you can skip over the description of my fishing trip. There is revised code too for this blog, which runs in Matlab or Octave; you can get the code here . The earlier blog was intended to show how easy it is to execute this form of inference and to provide some example code. Although I said the model was not to be taken too seriously, there were some “ugly” features of the model which were very awkward and gave paradoxical results. The purpose of this blog is to provide a neater version of the model and so avoid the inherent contradictions of the previous version. In the model we tried to infer or predict the number of available fish, denoted v , in the swim which an angler is fishing. The “swim” is the part of the water in front of the...

Having finished reading my first book of 2023 (reviewed in detail here ) I was able to set out to catch the first species of the planned target of 25 species for the calendar year. For personal and logistical reasons that I'll explain below, t here was only one species that I would set out to catch first: the zander ( Sander lucioperca ). As will also become clear, having zander as species #1 allowed me a direct way to illustrate some statistical concepts and techniques. So, if you are here for some stats, you will have to read some nonsense about fishing first. Similarly, anyone interested in fishing can skip the long middle section of this post concerning statistical matters. I was a keen angler in my childhood and teenage years but there were limited places to fish in the part of Kent where I grew up in the 1970s. Within biking distance of my home there were just a couple of gravel pits. I could fish these pits because I was a member of the local angling club; but the pickings w...

This was the first book I read, very early in 2023, as part of my self-imposed, year-long challenge that I explained in an earlier blog . The page numbers I give below relate to the hardback version. As a psychologist who spent a lot of his career studying individual differences, I naturally have taken an interest in most offshoots of this broad field; including how, in some hands, interest in individual differences segued, via studying the inheritance of those differences, into a set of socio-political ideas which Francis Galton called " eugenics " (see Rutherford's  footnote, p.40, which quotes the passage where Galton's first used the term, in 1883).  Even if I hadn't had a special interest in this topic, then Rutherford's book would have been an enjoyable, informative and thought-provoking read. He writes with a fluid style that many scientists struggle to attain. He also tries to emulate J.B.S Haldane's use of the witty (and cutting) footnote, and he ...