The mystics in statistics

It's May. The football league tables are all finished and they don't lie: top team wins the league, bottom teams get relegated.  But during the season, the "official" ranking is often misleading. It neglects games in hand, which teams have played more matches at home than away; and that some teams have faced easy or hard fixtures just by chance. David has created a maths recipe that produces the "right" league table, week by week during the season. David will show how it works, and why it's the best way - both mathematically and intuitively - to make football league tables more informative.

Statistics has a pretty bad reputation among the sciences -  questions like 'Can you trust the decisive evidence that appears to solve the murder trial?' and 'How risky is it to eat your bacon sandwich in the morning?' can lead to statistics being often thought of as manipulative or untrustworthy as a result. Through various true statistical stories, Liam's interactive talk explores why the world may not be as it first appears, whether you can really trust the figures, and how statistics could mean the difference between life and death. 

We’re hearing more and more about the plight of pollinating insects, especially bees. Their decline in numbers are a threat to our food supplies. But how do we know what is our best strategy to reverse the decline? It is hard to collect data on pollinators because they are hard to find, hard to count, hard to identify and cannot be experimented on in the way crops and human subjects can. So is there anything we can do? In this talk, Martine will show how bringing together pollinator experts and the power of mathematics we can plot a pathway through this thorny problem to a brighter future.