On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Next to counting, averaging is the most basic and important practice in statistics. For over 150 years it was thought that nothing was uniformly better than the sample average for the purposes of estimation or prediction. In 1955, Charles Stein proved this wasn’t true when considering three or more independent unobservable quantities. In 1961, Willard James and Charles Stein proposed an alternative estimator – the James-Stein estimator – which improved on the simple averaging approach no matter what the true values of the unobservable quantities. Although Stein’s work was initially met with resistance and was slow to be accepted among statisticians, its principal idea is now used widely across statistics and evidence-based medicine.
In this talk, I will explain Stein’s work, the paradox and some of its more controversial results and consider the implications for evidence-based medicine.
