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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,…
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…
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…
Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes:
“How do you like your new job?” I keep getting asked. Like most jobs, mine has seen days I wished to forget before sunset and evenings I wanted to remember after sunrise. One of these evenings was a talk at our graduate student center, given…
Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes:
“Upstairs on the Square” is reputed in some circles to be the restaurant for dining and wining around Harvard Square. The probability therefore was not surprisingly small to find Ben Affleck and two statisticians there sitting only a few tables apart. It was September 15,…