I am in the middle of covering the 2009 annual conference in Edinburgh over three and a half days at Edinburgh University for The Royal Statistical Society which is an international membership organisation with members in over 50 countries worldwide.

This is the Society’s 175th year.

Another fascinating conference that actually I thought might have been quite boring. But we the public are provided with the results of statistics in pretty well every facet of life today and without which the human race would very messy affair. One session was about the movement of flies, another about bananas and manure, and in aother I learnt that in some parts of South America massive fields being harvested by rows of around 50 machines are followed 30 minutes later by another row of machines planting the next crop. The machines were fueled from bio fuels from sugar beet so all eco- friendly. No talk though of any use of fertiliser though that would be in the equation somewhere.

I never did get to grips with algebra at school but some of what I saw today was just incomprehensible to the lay person.

Will comment more after the conference.

www.rss.org.uk