Oct
12
FREE PUBLIC LECTURE "STATISTICS IN THE HEADLINES" by Jeffrey Rosenthal (http://probability.ca/jeff/aboutJSR.html) Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 4:00-5:30 pm Room 2117, Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St George Street, Toronto Statistics and probability have appeared in major news stories with greater and greater frequency. Recent examples include heated political debates about whether violent crime is increasing, opinion polls about the upcoming mayoral election, the spike in Toronto pedestrian deaths last January, fascination with the odds of winning huge Lotto Max jackpots, unexpected outrage about excessive lottery "insider wins", a recent television documentary about mysterious coincidences, and the surprisingly high-profile summer controversy about cancelling the long-form census. This talk will consider such questions and controversies from the perspective of a statistics professor who conducted numerous media interviews upon the success of his general-interest book "Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities". This event is presented in conjunction with the United Nation's designated "World Statistics Day" (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/wsd/). Absolutely no mathematics or statistics background is required to attend.
no comment as of now