YSM

The Young Statisticians Meeting (YSM) 2008 was held in Newport, Wales, near Cardiff. Dave had been sent there to give a talk. The same talk he had given in Exeter a few weeks prior, though he would have to shorten it's length from an hour to 15 minutes. Easy.

On arrival he was surprised to discover a very small proportion of the people there were students. In fact, almost everyone there was working for the office of national statitics (ONS), with the majority of the remainder also working for various stats places. He was also surprised to see some people who had been to the meeting the previous year giving exactly the same talk a year later. One project in particular had been dated 2002 and had seemingly made no progress since.

The fact that there were very few students around changed matters. For a start, the standard student greetings of "So, what/where are you studying?" were met with confusement and shock. More worryingly for Dave, the real world had very little use for the type of statistics he was doing and non-students would have a much smaller chance of understanding any of it. On speaking around, Dave quickly found this assumption to be confirmed.

Onwards to the talk. Knowing his audience, Dave decided he would have to explain a bit about the background info first. Unfortuantely, 15 minutes is a rather short amount of time. He was still explaining the background when the 5 minute warning sign was held up. That gave him 5 minutes to explain 3 years of research. Easy.

5 minutes later, he summed up.

"...In conclusion, old method bad, new method good."

A few giggles and smiles and looks of relief confirming that last sentence to be the only one of the talk any of them would remember.

Still, good job.