Submissions must be made by midnight on Monday 8 April.

Meanwhile registration for the conference has now opened with a 20% discount available until 31 May.

The deadline will now be midnight on Monday 8 April.

Conference manager Paul Gentry comments, “Although current submission rates are encouragingly running ahead of last year’s level we wanted to give those considering presenting at the conference some extra time to complete their submission.”

Submissions must be made using the online system on this site.

Joining the previously announced Sir Mark Walport (Chief Scientific Advisor, UK Government) will be:

• Doug Altman (Centre for Statistics in Medicine, Oxford)
• Sharon Bertsch McGrayne – who will give the Significance plenary
• Sheila Bird (MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge)

More information on their topics and the exact scheduling will be made available shortly.

In the meantime don’t forget that submissions are open for contributed talks and posters – deadline 25 March.

David Hand (Imperial College, UK)

Audio (MP3) – Slides (PDF)

Martine Durand (Director of Statistics and Chief Statistician of the OECD)

Audio (MP3) – Slides (PDF)

Audio (MP3) – Kate Pickett slides (PowerPoint) – Alison Park slides (PowerPoint)

Kate Pickett (University of York)
Understanding the effects of inequality in the UK: data from the Spirit Level

Kate Pickett draws on the work that she put forward in the well known book ‘The Spirit Level’ which looks at the relationships between inequality and societal outcomes in a variety of areas.

Alison Park (Head of Society and Social Change, NatCen)
What the British Social Attitudes Survey tells us about our attitudes to inequality

This talk uses data from the British Social Attitudes survey to explore public attitudes towards inequality and the government’s role in alleviating it, focusing particularly on people’s attitudes to the welfare state. It explores how and why attitudes in this area have changed since the early 1980s, as well as how views vary between different sections of the population.

Chair: Hetan Shah (Executive Director, RSS)

Slides (PDF)

Over the last decade private companies have invested in building real-time data warehouses. Now that they have all that data accessible, the challenge is to figure out what to do with it. As George Box has said “you can improve almost anything” and companies are trying to use that great data to improve their operations. Hal Varian discusses how statistics are used at Google in a number of areas, what kind of skills Google finds valuable, and what the future might hold for data analysis in technology-intensive industries.

As usual the first day (Monday 2 September) will see a number of short courses and workshops take place with the welcome reception for the main conference scheduled for the evening.

The main conference programme will be begin on the morning of Tuesday 3 and will run through to the afternoon of Thursday 5 September.

Following a successful introduction at the RSS 2012 Conference the Society’s Awards Ceremony will again form part of the conference programme.

More details will become available shortly.

PSI debate: This house believes that pharmaceutical drug development and regulation should become fully Bayesian.

Speakers: Scott Berry, Berry Consultants; Rob Hemmings, Head of Statistics, MHRA; Karen Lynn Price, Principal Research Scientist, AdvAn Hub – Bayesian Expert Team, Eli Lilly and Company

The use of Bayesian statistics in adaptive learn phase trials holds great promise and has been readily accepted in many avenues. Adaptive trials have also brought out many advantageous of the Bayesian approach. The use of Bayesian methods in confirmatory trials has been more controversial and they have been used less. This debate discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the Bayesian approach in confirmatory trials.

The three discussants have different backgrounds. One is from regulatory, one from a pharmaceutical company, and one a consultant. This will bring a wide range of experience and lively discussions about using Bayesian Statistics in confirmatory trials.

Stats has a media problem. Journalists can distort numbers, exaggerate risk and ignore basic rules of sampling and data handling. Things are improving, but the price of accuracy is constant vigilance. This video doesn’t just look at how statisticians can protect themselves against misreporting. It’s also about exploiting opportunities to get statistics into the public domain through the media, through more imaginative presentations and user-friendly releases. We’ve put together a panel of people who work with stats, who are in constant contact with the media. What do they recommend, both pro-actively and defensively? Can media organisations be pushed into greater care with stats? Are there new rules of the road for social media?

The panel is moderated by David Walker, director of RSS getstats and former journalist with the Guardian, Times and BBC. Panel members are Penny Young, director of NatCen, the independent social research organisation, Aleks Collingwood, head of statistics for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Naomi Givens, statistics manager with GSK and promoter of the Science Media Centre’s Behind the Headlines project.