RSSeNEWS to be determined...

The Society's 175th anniversary celebrations reached their climax at its annual conference in Edinburgh in September.

A record number of participants, over 500 from more than 30 countries, assembled in Scotland's capital during the second week of September to listen to 11 plenary addresses and a choice from 195 invited and contributed papers, presented in up to six parallel sessions, and to partake in a variety of social events.

Since the Society started to hold annual conferences in 1994, they have alternated between general ones and those devoted to a particular theme. Themed conferences have been held in odd-numbered years, usually in July, while general conferences have been held in the September of the even years.

But this year ‘we cheated', as our president, David Hand, admitted in his introductory remarks just before the opening plenary session of RSS 2009 in Edinburgh. It was the year for a themed conference, but being the main activity of our 175th anniversary celebrations, the ‘theme' was a general one ‘Statistics in a changing society: 175 years of progress'.

Monday 7 September

Following the usual short courses, proceedings proper commenced on the Monday evening with a reception in the magnificent setting of Edinburgh Castle. We were welcomed by Jim Mather, a member of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish minister with responsibility for statistics.

We were in the home territory of David Finney, president of the Society 35 years ago, and it was a great pleasure to have David present throughout the conference and at some of the social events. On this occasion, he accepted the president's invitation to say a few words of welcome and revealed that he might be partly ‘to blame' for RSS conferences as it was largely as a result of his insistence that the Society had held a conference back in 1948. He used the opportunity to express his concern about the use of imprecise language by the media in describing numerical comparisons, a theme that this publication has supported over many years.

Tuesday 8 September

After formally opening the conference on the Tuesday morning, David Hand introduced the first plenary speaker. For this special conference celebrating 175 years of progress, it was highly appropriate that this should be one of the Society's most eminent past presidents, Sir David Cox. David gave a personal view of the way the Society and the discipline had developed over the years. A video recording of his talk was made and this will be able to be viewed via RSSeNEWS.

In the afternoon, Sir Iain Chalmers from the James Lind Library in Oxford gave a plenary address in which he took us on a wonderful trip through some of the history of evidence in medicine and particularly the concept of medicine exploiting ‘the numerical method'. Pandering to his statistical audience, he showed us many names from history who were statisticians (of a formal kind or otherwise) who have made great contributions to our understanding of medicine over the last 175 years. Early examples relied upon careful and systematic observation and recording of data, with more recent examples moving in the direction of technical and methodological contributions ultimately to improve the quality of research and the reporting of that research.

In the evening it was back to the Royal Mile for a social at The Hub, featuring the poster presentations, a buffet supper and the now traditional ceileidh (a video of RSS fellows performing the Dashing White Sergeant may be seen on the conference blog.)

Wednesday 9 September

Wednesday morning's plenary was given by government chief scientific advisor John Beddington. John first of all outlined the diverse areas of responsibility of his office. He then turned to reviewing statistical evidence for the likely climate changes and their impact. He stressed the inevitability of global warming even if the international community were to take drastic steps immediately. He stressed the important role that statisticians might have in the coming years in bringing their expertise to bear on the careful monitoring of climate events and evaluating impacts of international action.

Particularly worrying to John were related predictions of a ‘perfect storm' of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources. All these operating on the same time frame as climate change threatened to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions. The whole talk was stimulating, with vivid use of graphical presentation, thought provoking and left the audience more than a little disturbed about the prognoses.

The day closed with a Significance session,  chaired by its editor Julian Champkin and featuring contributions from John Haigh and former editor Helen Joyce. After this participants chose from a range of social activities, including a river boat trip, guided walking tours of the Royal Mile and tracing Scottish roots at Scotland's People Centre.  

Thursday 10 September

The Thursday plenary session commenced with the president conferring honorary fellowship of the Society on Colonel Clive Fairweather and Sir Michael Rawlins, neither of whom had been able to be present to receive their awards at the ceremony which followed the AGM in July. He then introduced Stephen Stigler, of the University of Chicago, whom he had invited to deliver the Campion Lecture.

Stephen spoke on Darwin, Galton and the statistical enlightenment. He gave a new account of how Francis Galton invented multivariate analysis in 1885, starting from a problem implicit in his cousin Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. What was new in the account was the story of how Galton started with the intention of mathematising Darwinian evolution but ended up discarding almost all that was Darwinian with a method that was much more general and had no need for natural selection. He also made the provocative assertion that Galton was the first proper Bayesian (after Bayes himself). It was fitting that this address was delivered on 10 September, the 124th anniversary of Galton's announcement of his results at a meeting in Aberdeen.

The late afternoon session featured a talk on ‘The flavour of whisky' by David Wishart which was followed by the opportunity to taste over 40 malt whiskies. Later in the evening, David ‘addressed the haggis' prior to its serving as the starter at the conference dinner held at Our Dynamic Earth.

Friday 11 September

The closing plenary session on the Friday directed attendees to consider the future, both of statistics and of the Society. The four speakers, Karen Dunnell, Sara Hughes, Denise Lievesley and David Leslie, presented their own perspectives. Despite these perspectives being from very different areas (government, pharmaceuticals, the statistical societies and academia, respectively), the similarity of challenges was compelling. It was clear that we needed to continue to build trust in our statistics, to strive to present our work in better ways and to facilitate the change from statisticians being enablers to being leaders.

With accommodation separated from the conference venue and social events held all over the city, a considerable average walking mileage was achieved, though free bus tickets provided some assistance for the less mobile. This was a departure from the policy at recent conferences where all had remained in a compact location, but it was generally considered to be a small price to pay for the splendour of the whole occasion.

Thanks are due to Mary Sweetland and her local co-ordinating committee and to Paul Gentry and other members of the RSS staff.