XL Files
Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes. No, this was not inspired by my recent Ig Nobel experience. The idea has been around for a long time but it particularly inspired me when I was asked to contribute to a volume celebrating the 50th anniversary of COPSS. The first few paragraphs…

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Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng recently officiated at the wedding of two young colleagues. He writes: The International Year of Statistics seems to have brought me some unusually exciting, and challenging, speaking opportunities. The last XL-Files documented my 24 second Ig Nobel fame, which came with the grand challenge of…

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Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes: Life sometimes takes funny turns. Literally. The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is an annual event organized by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), which is devoted to “research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK” (www.improbable.com). Since I love laughing and thinking,…

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Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes: As an assistant professor in late 1995, working on a unit-root AR(1) model, I came across a cute way of calculating moments with negative or fractional powers by integrating—not differentiating—a moment-generating function (MGF). Like many junior researchers, I was eager to turn my findings into…

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Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes: Giving a banquet speech after a whole conference day is never easy—few people long for yet another speech. My recent speech also faced an extra challenge. The speech was scheduled after as many karaoke performances as the number of Chinese dishes, except that the former…

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