Month: November 2019

Dr Craig McNeile, Dr Phillip Buckhurst, and Dr Hetal Buckhurst
have been awarded £32,000 from the company Bausch and Lomb for the
project:

A prospective multicenter, post market observation study to evaluate
rotational stability and visual actuity of the envista one-piece
hydrophobe acrylic toric IOL MX60ET following cataract surgery

Next week Craig McNeile is presenting a talk in Cornwall as part of the Data Science Cornwall group.

Using Supercomputers to Search for the Breakdown of the Standard Model of Particle Physics

Craig will give a short overview to some of the open questions in particle
physics. He will then discuses the use of High Performance Computing
(HPC) to solve the equations of QCD (one of the theories behind
nuclear physics), and how these calculations are required in searches
for novel fundamental physics theories. He will describe some of the HPC infrastructure, such as the HPC cluster at the University of Plymouth
and the national systems run by the Distributed Research utilizing
Advanced Computing (Dirac) consortium. He will talk about the size
of the data sets generated, and briefly touch on the role of visualisations.

One piece of mathematics that important to businesses is called operational research (OR), because it has a number of tools to help efficiently organize the production of goods for example. Every year the OR society organizes a careers fair in Birmingham, where students get to meet with employers. Today, the second year mathematics students went with some staff members from Plymouth to the OR career fair in Birmingham, inorder to help them prepare to apply for placements and jobs in the final year.

The Oklahoma actor Will Rogers said “When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states.” This statement has led to the “Will Rogers phenomenon” which, in its basic form, takes place when an increase in the average value of each of two sets is achieved by moving an element from one set to another.  This leads to the conclusion that there has been an overall improvement, when in fact essentially nothing has changed. Versions of the Will Rogers phenomenon can occur in cancer epidemiology, especially when changes are made to the definition of cancer stages.

Julian Stander and his cousin Mark who is a scientist based in industry have just had a paper accepted for publication in the Biometrical Journal in which they discuss a method for correcting for the Will Rogers Phenomenon. The Standers apply their method to data from breast cancer patients and also explain how to take account of uncertainty associated with published survival rates.

Yesterday Dr. Yinghui Wei took the first year mathematics students to visit the Met office in Exeter. The prediction of weather requires a lot of mathematics and computing.

Last week, Professor Deborah Ashby presented the public lecture: Pigeon-holes and mustard seeds: Growing capacity to use data for society at the University of Plymouth.

Speaker: Professor Deborah Ashby OBE, Imperial College London, President of the Royal Statistical Society

The Royal Statistical Society was founded to address social problems ‘through the collection and classification of facts’, leading to many developments in the collection of data, the development of methods for analysing them, and the development of statistics as a profession. Nearly 200 years later an explosion in computational power has led, in turn, to an explosion in data. We outline the challenges and the actions needed to exploit that data for the public good, and to address the step change in statistical skills and capacity development necessary to enable our vision of a world where data are at the heart of understanding and decision-making.