September 11, 2013

Some stats talks

If you’re in Palmerston Nth, next Tuesday 17th, James Curran is talking as part of the Royal Society’s 10×10 series of maths presentations around the country

Advances in science have allowed forensic practitioners to recover and quantify evidence from crime scenes in more ways than ever before. As a consequence, judges, lawyers, and juries struggle to decide or understand what the value of scientific evidence might be, and how it impacts on the case at hand. This talk will look at how statistics is being used to aid in the legal process.

And if you’re in Auckland on October 1, I’m presenting at Nerdnite again, (6:30 for 7pm, Nectar bar, above the Kingslander)

“The game of rock, paper, scissors was known in Asia millennia ago. At about the time of Captain Cook, a French political scientist discovered that it isn’t always possible to construct an ordering by considering things two at a time.  In the 1970s a statistician showed how to cheat at dice using this idea. The implications for experiments with a treatment group and a control group are still underappreciated.”

 

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »