Rare events

A lecture announcement from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Dalhousie University said that “this year our Distinguished Speaker is Professor Srinivasa Varadhan,” who will give a talk on RARE EVENTS on October 11. The abstract of the talk says that “we often have to make a quantitative assessment how rare event (sic) really [...]

Accident stats don’t tell you much about safety

On April 9, 1992 the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum awarded the Westray Mine the coveted John. T. Ryan Award. The Institute grants the award every year to the mine that had the lowest accident frequency per 200,000 hours worked during the previous calendar year in Canada. On May 9, 1992, the mine [...]