Events

In celebration of Women in Mathematics Day, the School of Mathematics and Statistics has the pleasure of presenting a public talk by Professor Barbara Holland. The talk is open to anyone from the public, including teachers, school students, and families. RSVP is not required to attend.

Title: Learn to be a killjoy: How to think like a statistician

Abstract: People love to see patterns. People love to tell stories. Most people that is. Statisticians have a different way of looking at the world. In this talk I will introduce three guiding principles so that you too can become a killjoy.

1. Garbage in Garbage Out. Statistics tries to generalise from data to answer questions about a population of interest. With your “stats hat” on the first questions you should ask are: Where did the data come from? Did it select itself? Are some of the data missing?
2. First rule out the boring explanation. As a statistician a big part of your job is to ask the killjoy question “But couldn’t that just be due to chance?”
3. Correlation doesn’t imply causation. Of course, we all know this, but why is it so hard to know when things cause other things? Is that glass of wine with dinner good for us or not?

The clean energy transition will occur on vast tracts of Australian Traditional Owners’ Country. Much has been written on this trend, yet until now exactly how Traditional Owners are managing and benefiting from large-scale wind, solar and green hydrogen projects on their Country has been known only to the handful of people who negotiate the commercial-in-confidence agreements for these projects.

This seminar presents recently completed qualitative research that looks behind this wall of confidentiality to present startling and very welcome findings, including that, unlike for mining, oil and gas projects, Traditional Owners have a legal veto over large-scale clean energy projects.