Chercheur en pantoufles

J’ai eu l’immense plaisir, pendant mes premiers jours de vacances, de lire La lune est blanche d’Emmannuel et François Lepage. Des deux frères, le premier est illustrateur, et le second photographe. Et ils publient ici une bande dessinée (pour faire simple) narrant leur voyage en Antarctique. On peut d’ailleurs y voir une suite à Voyage aux îles de la Désolation qu’avait signé Emmanuel Lepage il y a quelques années (tant sur le thème que du point de vue chronologique).

Mais avant d’aller plus loin, je me dois de remettre un peu en contexte. Après quatre années passées à Montréal, au Canada, j’ai progressivement pris conscience de ce que peut être le Nord. Et à quel point ce Nord peut faire partie de l’identité canadienne (je conseille d’ailleurs Un Dit Du Nord, de Louis-Edmond Hamelin, qui revient longuement sur le concept de norditude). En plus, au printemps dernier, ma voisine (à l’UQAM mais aussi sur hypotheses) Elisabeth Vallet m’avait sollicité pour intervenir (en clôture) d’une soirée autour du thème à qui appartient le pôle nord. J’avais accepté car Philippe Réka était de la partie, et j’ai toujours un immense plaisir à le revoir (il a en plus une la gentillesse de venir chanter une berceuse – en norvégien – à ma fille). Et j’ai eu l’opportunité de beaucoup lire sur le sujet, et de découvrir un univers réellement fascinant.

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Back in Leuven, for a talk on Nonparametric Estimation

I am currently in Leuven for a few days. It is always a pleasure to be back to the place where I defended my PhD, a few years ago.

I will give a talk, tomorrow, at noon, on nonparametric (and kernel related) inference for quantiles and risk measures, inspired by recent work with Emmanuel Flachaire. Our first paper log-transform kernel density estimationof income distribution is online  on http://papers.ssrn.com/id=2514882, and should appear soon. Another one it able to be finalised, soon.

Names in the U.S., from James Smith to Jose Rodriguez

Two weeks ago, @mona published an interesting post on her blog, about a difficult question, What’s The Most Common Name In America? There were stats about first names, in the U.S., and last names, too. Those informations are – somehow – easy to get. But usually, it is more complicated to get the first and the last name together. For confidentiality issues ! Datasets – the ones I deal with – are supposed to be anonymized, so I never see the first and the last names.  In a previous post, a few years ago, I did mention the so-called Social Security Death Master File. In that file, we have Social Security numbers, with the date of birth, the date of death as well as the first and the last name. So I did use those files to get stats about the first and the last names of American citizens. Of course, it is very restrictive. I have only U.S. citizens that have a Social Security number (which is not compulsary in the U.S. as far as I understood) and who passed away (as mentioned in the name of the dataset: the death master file). Another great thing about that dataset is that I have the date of birth, so I can look at some cohort effect (see opendata.stackexchange for an interesting discussion on that dataset).

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Subjective Ways of Cutting a Continuous Variables

You have probably seen @coulmont‘s maps. If you haven’t, you should probably go and spend some time on his blog (but please, come back afterwards, I still have a story to tell you). Consider for instance the maps we obtained for a post published in Monkey Cage, a few months ago,

The codes were discussed on a blog post (I spent some time on the econometric model, not really on the map, by that time).

My mentor in cartography, Reka (aka @visionscarto) taught me that maps were always subjective. And indeed.

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