Daniel Simpson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4324126 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Simpson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Simpson |
| SIGNATURE | SIMPSON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4819-2868 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Seabed geomorphology, substrate and benthic habitats informing long-term conservation of the Ascension Island Marine Protected Area
The Ascension Island Marine Protected Area (AI-MPA) is one of the largest areas of protected ocean, safeguarding a unique ecosystem in the South Atlantic Ocean. This study presents the first seabed geomorphology, substrate and benthic habitat maps of the AI-MPA, produced using high-resolution bathymetry data acquired by the British Geological Survey, the Royal Navy and the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. Mapping combined a semi-automated appr…
Social dimensions of shark–human interactions in a large remote marine protected area
The impact of shifting marine conservation policy, including marine protected area (MPA) designation, in shaping interactions between humans and imperilled species, such as sharks, remains understudied, despite its importance in determining the success of these interventions. We investigated perceptions of shark–human interactions (SHI) among the community in a remote, large‐scale MPA (Ascension Island) where two recent shark attacks and perceive…
Navigating the Customs House, Then and Now
Amid growing public and academic interest in the identification and return of Aboriginal objects acquired by Britain from Australia after 1788, enquiries into the disputed origins of the British Museum's 'Gweagal shield' have highlighted the need for new and better forms of provenance research. This article explores a novel methodology and source of information: British Treasury and customs records detailing the descriptions, values, and duties p…
Will my boomerang come back? New insights into Aboriginal material culture of early Sydney and affiliated coastal zone from British collections
Aboriginal material culture of the Sydney region has been analysed extensively by Australian archaeologists, notably Vincent Megaw and Val Attenbrow, yet many new insights can be obtained through the examination of hitherto unidentified and unexamined museum objects and dispersed archival documentation in Britain and Ireland. Close engagement with these sources permits a more informed explication of the variety of objects in use in colonial Sydne…
Rank-Normalization, Folding, and Localization
Markov chain Monte Carlo is a key computational tool in Bayesian statistics, but it can be challenging to monitor the convergence of an iterative stochastic algorithm. In this paper we show that the convergence diagnostic Rˆ of Gelman and Rubin (1992) has serious flaws. Traditional Rˆ will fail to correctly diagnose convergence failures when the chain has a heavy tail or when the variance varies across the chains. In this paper we propose an alte…
Potens per accidens sine accidentibus
Medieval scholastics share a commitment to a substance-accident ontology and to an analysis of efficient causation in which agents act in virtue of their powers. Given these commitments, it seems ready-made which entities are the agents or powers: substances are agents and their accidents powers. William of Ockham, however, offers a rather different analysis concerning material substances and their essential powers, which this article explores. T…
The Royal Navy in Indigenous Australia, 1795-1855
Visualization in Bayesian Workflow
Bayesian data analysis is about more than just computing a posterior distribution, and Bayesian visualization is about more than trace plots of Markov chains. Practical Bayesian data analysis, like all data analysis, is an iterative process of model building, inference, model checking and evaluation, and model expansion. Visualization is helpful in each of these stages of the Bayesian workflow and it is indispensable when drawing inferences from …
Ethnographic collecting and the despotism of Joseph Banks
Joseph Banks has been considered an unproblematic agent of imperial science; a figure unique for his ability and willingness to direct British expeditionary exploration and the collection of natural history. Borrowing from claims, first made in 1784, that Banks’s influence and power might better be described as a form of ‘despotism’, this article instead contends that Banks consciously subverted the expansive system of imperial collecting then fa…
Medical collecting on the frontiers of natural history
Very little is known about the Royal Navy’s Haslar Hospital Museum, located in Gosport, near Portsmouth, and yet the now defunct institution was one of the nineteenth century’s principal sites of medical, natural history and ethnographic investigation. Here, imperial specimens were collected, studied and used as tools in the education of generations of Naval surgeons, servicemen and scientific explorers, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley. Although…
Gaydar and the Fallacy of Decontextualized Measurement
Recent media coverage of studies about 'gaydar,' the supposed ability to detect another's sexual orientation through visual cues, reveal problems in which the ideals of scientific precision strip the context from intrinsically social phenomena. This fallacy of objective measurement, as we term it, leads to nonsensical claims based on the predictive accuracy of statistical significance. We interrogate these gaydar studies' assumption that there is…
Penalising Model Component Complexity
In this paper, we introduce a new concept for constructing prior distributions. We exploit the natural nested structure inherent to many model components, which defines the model component to be a flexible extension of a base model. Proper priors are defined to penalise the complexity induced by deviating from the simpler base model and are formulated after the input of a user-defined scaling parameter for that model component, both in the univar…
The Prior Can Often Only Be Understood in the Context of the Likelihood
A key sticking point of Bayesian analysis is the choice of prior distribution, and there is a vast literature on potential defaults including uniform priors, Jeffreys’ priors, reference priors, maximum entropy priors, and weakly informative priors. These methods, however, often manifest a key conceptual tension in prior modeling: a model encoding true prior information should be chosen without reference to the model of the measurement process, bu…
From me to we
The practice of mindfulness adapts Buddhist meditation to everyday life. It seems effective at managing depression and anxiety, and is taught in schools to boost resilience and grades. Mostly, this prioritises calm. Students learn to focus on themselves, without Buddhist teachings on ethics or interdependence. This limits the scope for transformation. Whilst it can help to share techniques to cope with stress, it would be more insightful to targe…
An intuitive Bayesian spatial model for disease mapping that accounts for scaling
In recent years, disease mapping studies have become a routine application within geographical epidemiology and are typically analysed within a Bayesian hierarchical model formulation. A variety of model formulations for the latent level have been proposed but all come with inherent issues. In the classical BYM (Besag, York and Mollié) model, the spatially structured component cannot be seen independently from the unstructured component. This mak…
Asia
Gaydar and the Fallacy of Decontextualized Measurement
Recent media coverage of studies about 'gaydar,' the supposed ability to detect another's sexual orientation through visual cues, reveal problems in which the ideals of scientific precision strip the context from intrinsically social phenomena. This fallacy of objective measurement, as we term it, leads to nonsensical claims based on the predictive accuracy of statistical significance. We interrogate these gaydar studies' assumption that there is…
The Royal Navy in Indigenous Australia, 1795-1855
Ethnographic collecting and the despotism of Joseph Banks
Joseph Banks has been considered an unproblematic agent of imperial science; a figure unique for his ability and willingness to direct British expeditionary exploration and the collection of natural history. Borrowing from claims, first made in 1784, that Banks’s influence and power might better be described as a form of ‘despotism’, this article instead contends that Banks consciously subverted the expansive system of imperial collecting then fa…
Asia
An intuitive Bayesian spatial model for disease mapping that accounts for scaling
In recent years, disease mapping studies have become a routine application within geographical epidemiology and are typically analysed within a Bayesian hierarchical model formulation. A variety of model formulations for the latent level have been proposed but all come with inherent issues. In the classical BYM (Besag, York and Mollié) model, the spatially structured component cannot be seen independently from the unstructured component. This mak…
Penalising Model Component Complexity
In this paper, we introduce a new concept for constructing prior distributions. We exploit the natural nested structure inherent to many model components, which defines the model component to be a flexible extension of a base model. Proper priors are defined to penalise the complexity induced by deviating from the simpler base model and are formulated after the input of a user-defined scaling parameter for that model component, both in the univar…
The Prior Can Often Only Be Understood in the Context of the Likelihood
A key sticking point of Bayesian analysis is the choice of prior distribution, and there is a vast literature on potential defaults including uniform priors, Jeffreys’ priors, reference priors, maximum entropy priors, and weakly informative priors. These methods, however, often manifest a key conceptual tension in prior modeling: a model encoding true prior information should be chosen without reference to the model of the measurement process, bu…
From me to we
The practice of mindfulness adapts Buddhist meditation to everyday life. It seems effective at managing depression and anxiety, and is taught in schools to boost resilience and grades. Mostly, this prioritises calm. Students learn to focus on themselves, without Buddhist teachings on ethics or interdependence. This limits the scope for transformation. Whilst it can help to share techniques to cope with stress, it would be more insightful to targe…
Medical collecting on the frontiers of natural history
Very little is known about the Royal Navy’s Haslar Hospital Museum, located in Gosport, near Portsmouth, and yet the now defunct institution was one of the nineteenth century’s principal sites of medical, natural history and ethnographic investigation. Here, imperial specimens were collected, studied and used as tools in the education of generations of Naval surgeons, servicemen and scientific explorers, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley. Although…
Gaydar and the Fallacy of Decontextualized Measurement
Recent media coverage of studies about 'gaydar,' the supposed ability to detect another's sexual orientation through visual cues, reveal problems in which the ideals of scientific precision strip the context from intrinsically social phenomena. This fallacy of objective measurement, as we term it, leads to nonsensical claims based on the predictive accuracy of statistical significance. We interrogate these gaydar studies' assumption that there is…
Visualization in Bayesian Workflow
Bayesian data analysis is about more than just computing a posterior distribution, and Bayesian visualization is about more than trace plots of Markov chains. Practical Bayesian data analysis, like all data analysis, is an iterative process of model building, inference, model checking and evaluation, and model expansion. Visualization is helpful in each of these stages of the Bayesian workflow and it is indispensable when drawing inferences from …
Ethnographic collecting and the despotism of Joseph Banks
Joseph Banks has been considered an unproblematic agent of imperial science; a figure unique for his ability and willingness to direct British expeditionary exploration and the collection of natural history. Borrowing from claims, first made in 1784, that Banks’s influence and power might better be described as a form of ‘despotism’, this article instead contends that Banks consciously subverted the expansive system of imperial collecting then fa…
The Royal Navy in Indigenous Australia, 1795-1855
Rank-Normalization, Folding, and Localization
Markov chain Monte Carlo is a key computational tool in Bayesian statistics, but it can be challenging to monitor the convergence of an iterative stochastic algorithm. In this paper we show that the convergence diagnostic Rˆ of Gelman and Rubin (1992) has serious flaws. Traditional Rˆ will fail to correctly diagnose convergence failures when the chain has a heavy tail or when the variance varies across the chains. In this paper we propose an alte…
Potens per accidens sine accidentibus
Medieval scholastics share a commitment to a substance-accident ontology and to an analysis of efficient causation in which agents act in virtue of their powers. Given these commitments, it seems ready-made which entities are the agents or powers: substances are agents and their accidents powers. William of Ockham, however, offers a rather different analysis concerning material substances and their essential powers, which this article explores. T…
Navigating the Customs House, Then and Now
Amid growing public and academic interest in the identification and return of Aboriginal objects acquired by Britain from Australia after 1788, enquiries into the disputed origins of the British Museum's 'Gweagal shield' have highlighted the need for new and better forms of provenance research. This article explores a novel methodology and source of information: British Treasury and customs records detailing the descriptions, values, and duties p…
Will my boomerang come back? New insights into Aboriginal material culture of early Sydney and affiliated coastal zone from British collections
Aboriginal material culture of the Sydney region has been analysed extensively by Australian archaeologists, notably Vincent Megaw and Val Attenbrow, yet many new insights can be obtained through the examination of hitherto unidentified and unexamined museum objects and dispersed archival documentation in Britain and Ireland. Close engagement with these sources permits a more informed explication of the variety of objects in use in colonial Sydne…
Social dimensions of shark–human interactions in a large remote marine protected area
The impact of shifting marine conservation policy, including marine protected area (MPA) designation, in shaping interactions between humans and imperilled species, such as sharks, remains understudied, despite its importance in determining the success of these interventions. We investigated perceptions of shark–human interactions (SHI) among the community in a remote, large‐scale MPA (Ascension Island) where two recent shark attacks and perceive…
Seabed geomorphology, substrate and benthic habitats informing long-term conservation of the Ascension Island Marine Protected Area
The Ascension Island Marine Protected Area (AI-MPA) is one of the largest areas of protected ocean, safeguarding a unique ecosystem in the South Atlantic Ocean. This study presents the first seabed geomorphology, substrate and benthic habitat maps of the AI-MPA, produced using high-resolution bathymetry data acquired by the British Geological Survey, the Royal Navy and the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. Mapping combined a semi-automated appr…
Archaeology (6 works) · Bayesian probability (5 works) · History (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Colonialism (3 works) · History (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works)