XL Files
Xiao-Li Meng finds it harder to escape statistics than he thought…
The 2014 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Annual Meeting (held February 13–17) has given me a new meaning to “Valentine’s Escape”. February is always jam-packed with most of the 57 graduate program admissions meetings, many starting…
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…
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,…
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…