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Þe terrifying prospect of an extreme-right wave swamping the European Parliament next June has never been more likely! Current projections give their parliamentary groups close to 25% of the seats… It alas particularly true in France with the (formerly) Nazional Front (now called RN) almost certain to get the highest percentage of the votes among all French parties, while keeping their anti-EU discourse, if vaguely stated but definitely around a disguised “Frexit” against more “federalism” and further expansion (as with the RN opposing Ukraine’s application) against European parliamentarism w ..read more

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Read The Big Wall (in French), a manga by Yoji Kamata & Kunihiko Yokomizo, which my wife bought me while visiting the mountaineering Éditions Guérin in Chamonix. This is in fact a collection of seven stories about climbing and mountaineering, in Japan, the Himalayas, and Canada, all related with the same central climber. It is a bit similar to The Summit of the Gods, another if much earlier gift from my wife!, in that an outstanding climber, Yasushi, faces extreme situations, saves lesser climbers’ live while trying to solve a personal dilemma. The similarity extends to the highly unrealis ..read more

“The World changed significantly since 1973.” (p.10) I read this book, The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy, by Ignacio Cofone, upon my return from Warwick the past week. This is a Cambridge University Press 2023 book I had picked from their publication list after reviewing a book proposal for them. A selection made with our ERC OCEAN goals in mind, but without paying enough attention to the book table of contents, since it proved to be a Law book! “People’s inability to assess privacy risks impact people’s behavior toward privacy because it turns the risks into unc ..read more

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This 2023 work on Slice sampler on manifolds, as presented in the algorithms seminar in Warwick during a recent visit of by Mareike Hasenpflug, consists in designing and validating slice samplers for distributions on manifolds. It is mildly connected to some current work on MCMC algorithms on manifolds through coupling techniques by [my friends & coauthors] Elena Bortolado, Pierre Jacob, and Robin Ryder (who escape temporarily the manifold at each step). As in Neal (2003), uniform draws from the (super)level sets are replaced there with one-step Markov moves within the level set,  th ..read more