The Statistical Society is pleased to announce the following webinar:
Communicating risk and uncertainty with Sir David Spiegelhalter
on 3 December 2019 from 8:00pm - 9:00pm AEDT via Zoom.
About this webinar
The claim of a 'post-truth' society, in which emotional responses trump balanced consideration of evidence, presents a strong challenge to those who value quantitative and scientific evidence: how can we communicate risks and unavoidable scientific uncertainty in a transparent and trustworthy way?
Communication of quantifiable risks has been well-studied, leading to recommendations for using an expected frequency format. But uncertainty about facts, numbers, or scientific hypotheses needs to be communicated without losing trust and credibility. This is an empirically researchable issue, and I shall describe some current randomised experiments concerning the impact on audiences of alternative verbal, numerical and graphical means of communicating uncertainty.
About the presenter
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the University of Cambridge, which aims to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policy-makers. He advises organisations and government agencies on risk communication and is a regular media commentator on statistical issues, with a particular focus on communicating uncertainty.
His background is in medical statistics, and he has over 200 refereed publications and is co-author of 6 textbooks, as well as The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland), and Sex by Numbers. He works extensively with the media, and presented the BBC4 documentaries "Tails you Win: the Science of Chance", the award-winning "Climate Change by Numbers", and in 2011 came 7th in an episode of BBC1's "Winter Wipeout".
He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005, and knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics. He was President of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017-2018. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics, was published in March 2019.
He is @d_spiegel on Twitter, and his home page is http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/
To register
This is a free event, but you will need to register. Click here to save your place. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Would you please note that this event will be held at 8:00 PM AEDT? Please check your time zone!
A recording of this webinar will be available a couple of weeks after the event for SSA members. Check the December newsletter for the link.
If you have any questions, please contact Mark Wicht.
@StatSocAus
