Being a subscriber on Flickr to Duke University Archive’s “Duke Yearlook” photostream, some pretty cool stuff comes up on my home page at Flickr. Today I learned about the 1969 takeover of the Allen Building, which is today (and presumably was then, too) an epicenter for the University administration. Apparently black students on campus were tired of the University dragging their feet – tired of going through the so-called “proper channels” for over 2.

I’m taking a course by Jim Berger on Objective Bayesian Analysis. It begins with the motivation and history behind 250 years of objective Bayesian analysis, and today he shared an interesting tidbit. It won’t be published publicly on my blog (yet) because Jim mentioned it could be an interesting reveal at Duke Statistical Science’s upcoming conference celebrating the 250 year anniversary of the publishing of Bayes’ Theorem. Statistician / statistics historian Stephen Stigler was wondering why Bayes was interested in the problem which led to the 1763 paper.