Baltimore via Toronto

Indian Line (July 28), Baltimore (July 29)

After the Bruce Peninsula, we headed to Toronto again, so that I could fly to Baltimore to attend the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM).  Last fall, when we were planning our trip, we had decided to spend July in State College.  Since Baltimore is only a few hours drive away, the logistics of attending the JSM seemed simple.  However, due to finding a renter who wanted to start his lease in July, we decided instead that we would head back to Canada where we will attend a wedding in early August.  It turns out that the most convenient way to get to Baltimore is to fly out of Toronto Airport, which is only 10 minutes from Indian Line Campground, where we have stayed previously on this trip.

In what follows, I am going to drop a lot of names. These are all statistical friends who were at the meetings. Last names will be given when I have several stats friends with the same name. Affiliations are to help me remember for a few people I am just getting to know.

We pulled into Indian Line in the mid-afternoon, giving us plenty of time to meet up with my brother Don and his wife Judy at the Mandarin Restaurant, which has long been a family favorite.

The next morning,  it was no problem for Chuck to drop me off at Toronto Airport.  He tells me that he spent the time until my return reading, playing guitar, watching TV and (of course) walking Rumple.  (Did I mention that Rumple is our personal trainer and is relentless about us getting our exercise?)

As we had been warned that increased security on flights to the US made it wise to arrive up to 3 hours early, I was there at least 2.5 hours before departure time.  It took about 20 minutes to get my boarding pass and go through security and immigration.  (You go through US immigration at the airport before leaving Canada.)  Fortunately, I had plenty of reading material.  Unfortunately, I did not use the time to proof-read my talks.

As I boarded the flight, I ran into Richard Lockhart, who had been visiting Toronto (from Vancouver) and therefore like me was taking a detour to the meetings. It was nice to get a chance to chat, as I have known Richard (although not well) since my sojourn in Vancouver around 1979.

The flight went smoothly. Richard got picked up by a friend, and I headed for the Baltimore Convention Center on the light rail line, which runs directly between the airport and the center. I had a bit of trouble due to a temporary scheduling change which had the train turn around one stop before the center. Had I only turned on Google, I would have realized that I was actually at one end of the center. However, I stayed on the train and went back one stop before disembarking.  After some discussion with another passenger, I decided to walk to my hotel from there – a pleasant enough walk despite the rain.

By 4:00 I was checked into my hotel. With nothing to do until 6 or so, and with the weather clearing, I took a walk around the inner harbor, which is quite nice. There is a ship museum, which allows you to visit several ships, like this submarine, of various eras.  I had planned to visit the Baltimore aquarium, but it was very crowded, with a wait until 6:15 for entry. Instead, I walked along the harbor, toured this historic lighthouse, and walked through the Italian district. I also dropped off a prescription.

At 6:00 I met Li-Xuan, a statistician from Sloan-Kettering, for dinner. We ate in the Italian section. Apparently it was “restaurant week” for which many restaurants had fixed price specials. We both had the same entrees and main courses, but we split 2 different desserts. We came away quite stuffed.

At the hotel, I ran into David Banks. Since I was talking with Jonathan, and David was quite tired from a long drive, we agreed to meet for breakfast.

The following day, I had a nice chat with David, registered for the conference and uploaded my two talks, without proof-reading.   I also managed to forget about my prescription (and managed to leave Baltimore without picking it up!)

Meandering through the conference center, I ran into Jim Ramsay. As always, he was bubbling with new projects and enthusiasm, and polishing off a paper with a young faculty member. The said young woman had just started a new position in Kings College, Dublin, and was delighted to learn that we had loved our trip to Ireland and Irish food.

I ran into Jiayang just before lunch, and she convinced me to come be a docent at the “First Time Attendee” lunch. I did not get much of a meal (mostly crackers) but it was fun chatting with these first timers, who were mostly recent graduates or current graduate students.  On the other hand, did I mention that I did not proof-read my talk?

My talk was in the first session of the meeting. (These meetings are huge and there are usually at least 12 sessions going on simultaneously.) The topic was on p-values and reproducible research, which are hot topics these days. I thought the other two talks, which were about the “replicability”, why it might not be achievable, and some ways to handle the irreproducibility of studies, were quite interesting. I was not so happy with my own talk – not just because of all the typos, but also because the mathematical level was very low. I have been asked several times to give variants of this talk, because there has been a lot of controversy over the use of p-values but I don’t feel like I have that much to say that is interesting. Over all, the session was well-received, and I felt that the discussant, Val Johnson, did a nice job of pulling everything together (and besides, he said nice things about my talk). Several people asked to talk with me later, so I guess at  least some things that I have been thinking about are not entirely obvious.

I did not have much time to chat after the session, however, as I was the discussant for the next session, which was on reproducible research in biology studies. For that, I just needed to put wrap some philosophical comments around the 3 talks presented by others (and organized by Li-Xuan). None of the talks directly addressed reproducibility or replicability, but they had enough variety that it was not difficult to put them into context, and I felt the session went well.

One of the features of the JSM are receptions held by various companies, organizations, subgroups of the statistical associations, etc. These usually have some snacks and are an opportunity to schmooze. Due to my short time at the meetings, I had not planned to go to any of these this year, but I had my arm twisted by the person organizing the reception for Significance Magazine.

Off I went to the Significance reception, which had enough food to hold me over.  I took my student, Frank, with me, which gave him a chance to network, too. Oddly, two of the people we met were PSU graduate students from other departments.  I met enough old friends there, that I stayed a bit longer than I planned. One nice thing was that I ran into Hugh Chipman, whom I had a met a few times previously. He is at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, and I will call him for a hike or other social activity when we are there in the fall.

En route to the reception, I ran into Sally Thurston. We agreed to meet up after the reception (me) and dinner (her). We ended up having a nice chat in the balcony garden of the hotel.

In the late evening, there was the opening reception for the meetings. I had planned to meet Christian and we also got a chance to catch up.

I was also supposed to meet up with Kim at the reception, but she was a no-show. Once the staff shooed us out of the hall, I took another turn around the conference area and ran into Sesa. I ended up walking her back to her hotel and we had quite a talk about things going on in the department, as she has taken on a lot of administrative roles. (I might have volunteered to help her out when I get back.  )

Oddly, just as Sesa and I decided to pack it in for the night, I ran into Kim. We ended up talking for several more hours.

I always find it hard to sleep at conferences – even more so when I have had a lot of socializing well into the night. I did not get a lot of sleep. And I had committed to (wo)manning the “Caucus for Women in Statistics” (WCIS) information table for a couple of hours in the morning.

Given that most of what I had eaten the previous day had been crackers, I decided to have the breakfast buffet at the hotel (which was pretty good). When I got to the CWIS table, I discovered a discrepancy between the on-line and local schedule, and decided I could go to a set of talks.

In this era of Trump, I decided to go to a session on “Statistics and Alternative Facts”. The first speaker had been the head statistician for Greece, and is now facing death threats and official legal prosecution, for his role in cleaning up Greece’s official statistics, which had been required for the EU bailout. This talk was followed by the former head of Statistics Canada, explaining some of the fiascos, but also improvements, there. In the end, he resigned due to the government’s insistence on central control of the computing facilities which has caused many problems. The next speaker was an investigative reporter for Reuters, talking about the difficulties of obtaining government statistics at all levels in the US. He did not even talk about the gun statistics (which are withheld by law), but gave several examples of data he was not able to obtain, such as the number of nitrate fertilizer storage facilities in residential neighborhoods (much more than zero) and some of the strategies he employed to get information (e.g. asking for the emails referring to his official requests for data).   The final speaker was the head statistician for the US. I cannot comment whether she was forth-coming, as I needed to return to the CWIS table.

It is always fun to sit at the information tables, as a lot of people come by to chat. I was sitting with a new graduate from demography, and she was quite lively and fun. Most of the people who dropped by were either graduate students wondering if they should join CWIS or senior people trying to find the CWIS lunch or evening reception.

For my second shift, I was joined by two people, Bertrand, who had been at my talk and wanted to talk about statistical inference, and a bioinformatician who was also manning the table. It evolved into a rather weird conversation, because I was trying to explain to Bertrand how various ideas from bioinformatics had made their way into my thinking about assessing statistical significance, while the  bioinformatician was eager to explain to him why so many people are doing bad bioinformatics. I could have enjoyed either conversation, but being between the two was agonizing.

When my shift was over, we all left, and I began to look for lunch. Fortunately I found Snehalata and Asha, who dragged me to Lexington Market. Only about half a mile from the conference center, it is a real market, in a more historic (and less savory) part of town. We (and many other people from the conference) found a seafood restaurant there, which served Maryland specialties – i.e. crab cakes and soft-shell crab. I had my first and last soft-shell crab. To me the shell tasted like cellophane and there was not enough meat in the shell to make it worthwhile. Others consider it a delicacy.

I had just enough time to go to one more session of talks before heading out to the airport. Since I had the LRT figured out, the trip back to the airport went smoothly. The flight was somewhat delayed due to a thunderstorm near Toronto airport, but otherwise the trip was uneventful. I got back to the RV with a slice of pizza for dinner, in time to watch Game of Thrones before heading for bed.

We decided to stay at Indian Line for one more day to deal with practicalities like banking and laundry.  This gave me a chance to go birding there.  A flock of Caspian terns had moved in.  These birds are about the size of sea gulls, but are very striking, with bright white bodies, black caps, and large bright orange beaks.  What makes them fun to watch is that they fish by dive-bombing into the water.

Our next stop is Orangeville, half-way between Toronto and Owen Sound.  We plan to visit some of the beautiful parks in the area and attend a wedding.