Yesterday Gareth pointed me to this article on the BBC website. The underlying story has to do with Meredith Kercher's murder and the subsequent trial involving mainly her flat-mate Amanda Knox, in Perugia (Italy). As often in these grue... [Read more...]

Karl Saliba writes with some queries about our football paper, which I have already discussed on the blog here. He says:Thanks to the code in the appendix I could easily replicate (by using WinBUGS) a similar analysis on any football league of my ... [Read more...]

We finally got around to prepare everything we needed to advertise the position which will be available in the MRC grant we've been awarded last year.The project will run for 30 months and we're looking for a post-doctoral candidate to work on the Rese... [Read more...]

Mart Janssen writes me that he's tried to run the examples for BCEA and pointed out a problem $-$ it all boiled down to a missing script, really, but thanks Mart (if you're reading this)!I've now fixed the problem by updating the file Ut... [Read more...]

You'd think that the last week before the holidays would be very quiet and not much would be going on. Well, if you did, you'd be wrong, I guess, as the last few days have been quite busy (for many reasons). Anyway, I managed to track down some be... [Read more...]

Effectively, the Italian election campaign is already in full swing, so I tried to start collecting some data to see what we are about to face. If I have time and manage to get some good data, I'll try to replicate the analysis I made for the US election (surely ... [Read more...]

The other day I was talking to a friend at work, who was rather annoyed that one of his papers had been rejected by a journal, given the negative comments of the reviewers. This is, of course, part of the game, so you don't really get annoyed just because a ... [Read more...]

Just like James Morrison and Nelly Furtado say, you really can't play a broken string. And quite similarly, you just can't use a broken link.I always find it very annoying when, while browsing a website, I find a broken link. You fall victim to the pro... [Read more...]

I should start this with a disclaimer, ie that I'm not really claiming any "success" with this post. But I find it quite interesting that the estimations I produced with this very, very simple model turned out to be quite good.The idea was to use the e... [Read more...]

Given that Sampdoria have lost their fourth game in a row, I am not really interested in football any more (as of yesterday, I actually find it a very boring game and think we should focus on real sports $-$ of course if we manage to break the cra... [Read more...]

I couldn't resist getting sucked into the hype associated with the US election and debates, and so I thought I had a little fun of my own and played around a bit with the numbers. [OK: you may disagree with the definition of "fun" $-$ but then again, i... [Read more...]

Great as it is, Google does not always give the "best", or "right" (ie "most appropriate") results on a given search. For example, if you google "jags" (using google.co.uk), the first results are a girls' independent school and a sports club. The real JAGS (OK: real in a ... [Read more...]

I've had a quick look at this article on R-bloggers $-$ I don't think I've followed the whole exchange, but I believe they have discussed what models should/could be applied to estimate football scores (specifically, in this case they are using the Dut... [Read more...]

This links back to previous posts here and here. Earlier today, I had a quick chat with Michela (by email, actually) on this topic. In particular, she was trying to use the function I've written to compute summaries from the posterior distrib... [Read more...]

I've prepared a document (which I've put on the website here, together with some scripts at this page) which I think is helpful, if you're trying to work out BCEA. I have never really thought of this, but I believe that when you write an acad... [Read more...]

I have polished up one of the two functions I've thought of implementing for INLA and it's now available in the development version of the R package. So if you've got INLA installed in your R version (see how you can do it here, if you don't), you... [Read more...]

Probably sooner than I expected, I have managed to also upload the codes for the examples in Chapter 5 of the book, which deals with doing Bayesian health economic evaluations. Basically, there are 3 examples, which sort of represent the main clas... [Read more...]

I finally (nearly) got around to prepare the R code to replicate the examples in the book. I divided the examples by chapter and then linked to the R scripts and, for those involving Bayesian analysis, the associated JAGS models.At the moment, the scri... [Read more...]

Getting closer to my personal Euro2012 derby: England v Italy. I find amusing that both sets of media think that their respective team have been gifted a good tie. The English are very happy to have avoided Spain, while the Italians don't mind not... [Read more...]

The process is relatively smooth, I think - especially if you start off with a Linux machine. However, when I had to compile the package and documentation for BCEA, I still had a couple of blips. The first problem was in the documentation. R tries... [Read more...]