Apologies for any cross-posting but here are the announcements for the RSS
Manchester meetings in December 2k, January and February 2.001k:

DECEMBER:
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Speaker:  Barry Quinn, UMIST

Title:  Statistical Inference for Sinusoidal Regression Models

Time: 5.00pm  (tea 4.30 pm) Wed 13th December 2000
Location: Room E32, John Dalton Building, Manchester
Metropolitan University

We all have some notion of `periodicity'. Some phenomena are more periodic
than others. A biological population may fluctuate with apparent
regularity, but this may as a result of a predator-prey relationship and
not associated with, say, an annual weather cycle. This behaviour
contrasts with, say, the noise generated by a motor because of constant,
or near-constant, rotation.

In many situations, the periodicity is unknown, and the problem of
interest it to estimate it accurately. This talk will mainly be concerned
with statistical inference for the frequency parameters in sinusoidal
regression models. It is natural to consider such models since any
periodic function can be arbitrarily approximated by sums of sinusoids
with frequencies that are multiples of a fundamental frequency. The talk
will be illustrated and partly motivated by problems arising in
(underwater passive sonar) signal processing. Because the analysis of such
data has to be done almost as soon as the data is received, techniques are
often needed that are sub-optimal with respect to statistical efficiency,
but orders of magnitude faster than optimal techniques.

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JANUARY:
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Speaker:  Gilbert MacKenzie, Keele University

Title:    Windscale - The Unanswered Questions Answered

Time: 5.00pm  (tea 4.30 pm) Wed 24th January 2001
Location: Room E32, John Dalton Building, Manchester
Metropolitan University

The story of sustained contamination of West Cumbria is not widely known
although most people are aware of the 1957 Windscale fire.  The extent of
contamination prior to 1957 was concealed even from the 1984 Black Inquiry
into childhood leukemia.

We trace the history of these events, examining the epidemiological and
statistical evidence, before discussing the interpretation and social
implications.

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FEBRUARY:
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Speaker: David Hand (Imperial College, London)

Title: Data Mining

Time: 5.00pm  (tea 4.30 pm) Wed 7th Feb 2001
Location: Room E32, John Dalton Building, Manchester
Metropolitan University

Data mining is defined as the process of seeking interesting or
valuable information in large datasets. This presents novel
challenges and problems, distinct from those typically arising in
the allied areas of statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition
or database science. A distinction is drawn between the two data
mining activities of model building and pattern detection. The
discussion is illustrated with a variety of real examples.


John Logsdon