JOINT ST ANDREWS/HIGHLANDS RSS GROUP MEETING

			     Wednesday 13th May

	Lecture Theatre C, Mathematical Institute, North Haugh, St Andrews



3:00 pm 	Dr Paul Baxter (University of Leeds)
		 "Adventures in Applied Statistics"


4:30 pm  	Dr Duncan Lee (University of Glasgow)
  	    "How does air pollution affect human health?"


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	Tea and biscuits will be available in the Staff Room between the talks.

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	The meeting will be followed at 6:30 pm by a 2-course meal at 
the Doll's House Restaurant in Church Square, St Andrews. The menu is 
available at http://www.dolls-house.co.uk/ (Click on "menus" and go 
to "early evening menu".) If you intend to come to the meal, please 
inform Janine Illian preferably by email ([log in to unmask]) by 
Friday 8th May.


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			      ABSTRACTS

		  Dr Paul Baxter (University of Leeds)

		    "Adventures in Applied Statistics"


	"The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to 
play in everyone's backyard", so said John Tukey. The most enjoyable 
aspect of my career so far has been the opportunity to work with 
different disciplines, using real-world problems to motivate new 
methodology and transfer existing ideas to new contexts. In this talk 
I will discuss work in three areas I have been involved with: 
criminology, ecology and environmetrics.


		Dr Duncan Lee (University of Glasgow)


	     "How does air pollution affect human health?"


	The relationship between air pollution exposure and human 
health has been extensively investigated during the last twenty 
years, focusing on both the acute and chronic health effects. Acute 
effects describe the impact that a few days of high exposure have on 
human health over the following week, and are estimated by population 
level studies. These studies regress daily counts of mortality or 
morbidity events from a given population, such as those living in a 
city, against air pollution concentrations and other risk factors, 
including measures of meteorology and longer-term trends. In 
contrast, chronic effects are the consequences of long-term exposure 
over numerous years, and can be estimated by cohort and population 
level studies. The latter regress yearly counts of mortality or 
morbidity events, from contiguous small areas, against average air 
pollution concentrations over the preceding few years, allowing for 
the effects of demography and socio-economic deprivation. This talk 
gives an overview of both acute and chronic air pollution and health 
studies, including the standard modeling approaches and the 
methodological extensions that have been proposed. A number of 
examples of these studies are presented, focusing specifically on 
data from Great Britain.

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	Please check http://www-maths.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/StatsSeminars/ 
shortly before coming, in case there are last-minute changes.



			Peter Jupp



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Professor P. E. Jupp
School of Mathematics and Statistics
University of St. Andrews
North Haugh, St. Andrews            tel: (44) 1334 463704
Fife, KY16 9SS                      fax: (44) 1334 463748
Scotland                            e-mail: [log in to unmask]

	         url:    http://www.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~pej/

The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland : No SC013532
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