NMC stratospheric analyses during the 1987 Antarctic expedition

Stratospheric constant pressure analyses of geopotential height and temperature, produced as part of regular operations at the National Meteorological Center (NMC), were used by several participants of the Antarctic Ozone Expedition. A brief decription is given of the NMC stratospheric analyses and the data that are used to derive them. In addition, comparisons of the analysis values at the locations of radiosonde and aircraft data are presented to provide indications for assessing the representativeness of the NMC stratospheric analyses during the 1987 Antarctic winter-spring period

Bayes: Radical, liberal, or conservative?

This study analyses the effect of pollution to the optimal taxation and public provision. Environmental deterioration is modelled to be created by a harmful externality of consumption. It is assumed that there are two types of households with high and low productivity, endogenous wages and a government using a mixed taxation scheme. As a result of the asymmetric information the government needs to take the self-selection constraint into account when designing the optimal tax policy. It will be shown that the social valuation of the externality consist of terms indicating the effects directed on consumers, producers, the government and the labour markets respectively. It turns out that in the consumer side the direct effect and the self-selection effect have opposite signs indicating that the environmental and the redistributive objectives are inconsistent. However, in the producer side the direct effect and the indirect effect from wage adjustment in the labour markets have both positive signs indicating consistence between these two goals of the government. Another considerable result comes from the commodity taxation: it is shown that Dixit\'s principle of targeting continues to hold unless the endogeneity assumption is enlarged to apply all factor prices

Rejoinder: Struggles with survey weighting and regression modeling

I was motivated to write this paper, with its controversial opening line, "Survey weighting is a mess," from various experiences as an applied statistician

Comment: Bayesian Checking of the Second Levels of Hierarchical Models

Bayarri and Castellanos (BC) have written an interesting paper discussing two forms of posterior model check, one based on cross-validation and one based on replication of new groups in a hierarchical model. We think both these checks are good ideas and can become even more effective when understood in the context of posterior predictive checking. For the purpose of discussion, however, it is most interesting to focus on the areas where we disagree with BC

Bayes, Jeffreys, Prior Distributions and the Philosophy of Statistics

I actually own a copy of Harold Jeffreys's Theory of Probability but have only read small bits of it, most recently over a decade ago to confirm that, indeed, Jeffreys was not too proud to use a classical chi-squared p-value when he wanted to check the misfit of a model to data (Gelman, Meng and Stern, 2006). I do, however, feel that it is important to understand where our probability models come from, and I welcome the opportunity to use the present article by Robert, Chopin and Rousseau as a platform for further discussion of foundational issues. In this brief discussion I will argue the following: (1) in thinking about prior distributions, we should go beyond Jeffreys's principles and move toward weakly informative priors; (2) it is natural for those of us who work in social and computational sciences to favor complex models, contra Jeffreys's preference for simplicity; and (3) a key generalization of Jeffreys's ideas is to explicitly include model checking in the process of data analysis

Discussion of the Article "Website Morphing"

The article under discussion illustrates the trade-off between optimization and exploration that is fundamental to statistical experimental design. In this discussion, I suggest that the research under discussion could be made even more effective by checking the fit of the model by comparing observed data to replicated data sets simulated from the fitted model

Global atmospheric circulation statistics: Four year averages

Four year averages of the monthly mean global structure of the general circulation of the atmosphere are presented in the form of latitude-altitude, time-altitude, and time-latitude cross sections. The numerical values are given in tables. Basic parameters utilized include daily global maps of temperature and geopotential height for 18 pressure levels between 1000 and 0.4 mb for the period December 1, 1978 through November 30, 1982 supplied by NOAA/NMC. Geopotential heights and geostrophic winds are constructed using hydrostatic and geostrophic formulae. Meridional and vertical velocities are calculated using thermodynamic and continuity equations. Fields presented in this report are zonally averaged temperature, zonal, meridional, and vertical winds, and amplitude of the planetary waves in geopotential height with zonal wave numbers 1-3. The northward fluxes of sensible heat and eastward momentum by the standing and transient eddies along with their wavenumber decomposition and Eliassen-Palm flux propagation vectors and divergences by the standing and transient eddies along with their wavenumber decomposition are also given. Large interhemispheric differences and year-to-year variations are found to originate in the changes in the planetary wave activity

Matter formed at the BNL relativistic heavy ion collider

We suggest that the "new form of matter" found just above $T_c$ by RHIC is made up of tightly bound quark-antiquark pairs, essentially 32 chirally restored (more precisely, nearly massless) mesons of the quantum numbers of $\pi$, $\sigma$, $\rho$ and $a_1$. Taking the results of lattice gauge simulations (LGS) for the color Coulomb potential from the work of the Bielefeld group and feeding this into a relativistic two-body code, after modifying the heavy-quark lattice results so as to include the velocity-velocity interaction, all ground-state eigenvalues of the 32 mesons go to zero at $T_c$ just as they do from below $T_c$ as predicted by the vector manifestation (VM in short) of hidden local symmetry. This could explain the rapid rise in entropy up to $T_c$ found in LGS calculations. We argue that how the dynamics work can be understood from the behavior of the hard and soft glue.Comment: Final versio