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Public Lecture: Living with risk and uncertainty — we're all going to die (sometime)

At a Glance
Date: Monday 22 November
Time: 6:15pm
Location: Room MS.01, Zeeman Building
Open To: Everyone
Cost: Free
Summary: Free public lecture on using probabilities to measure ignorance by Professor David Spiegelhalter, University of Cambridge

This lecture, hosted by the Department of Statistics, will be given by David J Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS (Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, University of Cambridge).

Past experience and probability theory can be used to check the odds of your football team winning or judge the risks of activities such as riding motorcycles, taking illegal drugs, going into hospital or just living. Things get more difficult when we don't fully understand what is going on, like early on in the swine-flu epidemic, or when we are dealing with huge complexity, as in climate change. Then it can be helpful to admit what we don't know, and I shall show how we can use probability and statistics to measure how ignorant you are.