Dear all,

1. On Tuesday 24th April 2012 as part of the RSS getstats campaign the RSS Leeds/Bradford local group will be hosting a talk on "How to get from pitch to plinth - the statistics of stadium statues". The meeting will be held at Leeds City Museum, Thoresby room, from 3:30-4:30, refreshments available from the museum cafe.
No registration required for this event, open to all as part of the RSS getstats campaign (http://www.getstats.org.uk/).

2. On Wednesday 2nd May 2012 the RSS Leeds/Bradford local group will be hosting two talks on the topic of "Statistics in Astrophysics". The meeting will be held at University of Leeds, EC Stoner Building, Level 8, Room 8.90, starting at 3:00pm with refreshments from 2:30pm. No registration required for this event.

Further details of these events can be found on our webpage:
http://tinyurl.com/rss-lba 
 
Thanks,
Sarah

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Dr. Sarah Fleming
Secretary/Treasurer, Royal Statistical Society Leeds/Bradford Local Group, Division of Biostatistics, LIGHT, School of Medicine, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.
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1. Tuesday 24th April 2012, 3:30pm, Leeds City Museum, A getstats event

Chris Stride (University of Sheffield)

How to get from pitch to plinth - the statistics of stadium statues

From an almost standing start at the beginning of the 1990s, the number of statues of US baseball and English soccer heroes has risen inexorably. By 1st September 2011, 33 soccer players and 67 Major League Baseball (MLB) players were, or were soon to be depicted by existing or commissioned subject specific statues inside or adjacent to the stadia they once performed in. Yet even amongst the very finest exponents of their sport, relatively few players are honoured in this way. 

This paper investigates and compares the defining characteristics of stadium statue subjects in these two national sports. We first developed a shortlist of potential causal factors likely to influence subject selection by considering the motivations behind statue building. The MLB Hall of Fame and the English Football League `100 Legends` list were then used as samples of the best performers from each sport. Logistic regression models were built to test the effects of potential predictors for the selection of statue subjects; these included loyalty, locality, longevity, performance of the player and their team, national recognition, sympathy and the effect of nostalgia or memory (i.e. the era a player performed in). 

The optimal models for baseball and soccer correctly identified depiction or non-depiction for 87% and 90.6% of the respective samples, and their significant constituent effects indicated the importance of club loyalty and era. Players who played most or all of their careers at one club or franchise, and those active in the 1950`s and 1960`s were most likely to be depicted. This latter finding in particular suggests that the role of a statue as a nostalgia/heritage marketing object impacts upon subject choice, which is thus dependent in part on the `chance` effect of birth era. Distinct characteristics of each sport, such as baseball franchise relocation and international soccer success were also found to have a significant effect upon the probability of depiction. Predicted probabilities were calculated for players with statues who were not part of the legends samples; these confirm the viability of the model outside of the elite performers it was constructed upon. 

The meeting will be held at Leeds City Museum (http://www.leeds.gov.uk/citymuseum/), Thoresby room, from 3:30-4:30pm, open to all as part of the RSS getstats campaign.
 
2. Wednesday 2nd May 2012, 2:30pm, University of Leeds, EC Stoner Building, Level 8, Room 8.90

Statistics in Astrophysics, 

Johannes Knapp (University of Leeds) 

Statistical analysis of ultra-high energy cosmic ray data - examples from the Pierre Auger Observatory

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays come to Earth from yet unknown sources at a challengingly low rate of less than about 1 particle per square km and century. With the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina we measure the CR energy spectrum, their arrival directions and their mass composition to detect hints of their origin. The inference of astrophysical results from this data relies on a number of statistical analysis methods. In this talk the methods, and the difficulties encountered, are described.

Ian Vernon (University of Durham) 

Galaxy Formation: A Bayesian Uncertainty Analysis

The question of whether there exists large quantities of Dark Matter in our Universe is one of the most important problems in modern cosmology. This project deals with a complex model of the Universe known as Galform, developed by the ICC group, at Durham University. This model simulates the creation and evolution of approximately 1 million galaxies from the beginning of the Universe until the current day, a process which is very sensitive to the presence of Dark Matter. A major problem that the cosmologists face is that Galform requires the specification of a large number of input parameters in order to run. The outputs of Galform can be compared to available observational data, and the general goal of the project is to identify which input parameter specifications will give rise to acceptable matches between model output and observed data, given the many types of uncertainty present in such a situation. As the model is slow to run, and the input space large, this is a very difficult task.

We have solved this problem using general techniques related to the Bayesian treatment of uncertainty for computer models. These techniques are centred around the use of emulators: fast stochastic approximations to the full Galform model. These emulators are used to perform an iterative strategy known as history matching, which identifies regions of the input space of interest. Visualising the results of such an analysis is a non-trivial task. The acceptable region of input space is a complex shape in high dimension. Although the emulators are fast to evaluate, they still cannot give detailed coverage of the full volume. We have therefore developed fast emulation techniques specifically targeted at producing lower dimensional visualisations of higher dimensional objects, leading to novel, dynamic 2- and 3-dimensional projections of the acceptable input region. These visualisation techniques allow full exploitation of the emulators, and provide the cosmologists with vital physical insight into the behaviour of the Galform model. 

The meeting will be held at University of Leeds, EC Stoner Building, Level 8, Room 8.90, starting at 3:00pm with refreshments from 2:30pm

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