Xiao-Li Meng

Professor of Statistics and Department Chair

Harvard University

Date: Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Time: 6:00 - 6:30 PM: Social
6:30 - 7:00 PM: Dinner
7:00 - 8:00 PM: Presentation 

Cost: Dinner is $30 for chapter members, $25 for students, and $35 for others
The presentation is free.

Location: Simmons College
300 The Fenway
Boston, MA 02215

 
The event will take place in Room M501 which is on the fifth floor of the School of Management Building at Simmons. The parking garage is immediately below this building. Enter the parking garage from Avenue Louis Pasteur. Be sure to retain the white ticket that they take on entry; You will get an additional blue ticket at the event. You will need both tickets to exit the campus. 

Abstract:         Can terrorists be caught with a probability larger than one?

Xiao-Li Meng

Department of Statistics, Harvard University

In the December issue of Significance, Press (2010) presented a “square-root sampling” scheme for picking out passengers for an enhanced airport screening (e.g., a pat-down), with the assertion that “Surprisingly, and bizarrely, this turns out to be the most efficient way of capturing the terrorist.”   The result was used as a pure mathematical argument to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of ethnic profiling.  Whereas there are profound reasons that ethnic profiling is unethical and unacceptable, the “square-root sampling” reasoning turns out to be a distraction rather than a supporting argument.  This is because it is a result of an incorrect optimization (allowing probabilities to exceed one) of an inappropriate criterion (permitting terrorists to be “sampled with replacement”).   The appearance of such elementary oversights in a statistical publication reminds us vividly that the grand task Fred Mosteller devoted his entire career to, that is, to raise general statistical literacy and to promote sound statistical and probabilistic reasoning in scientific investigations and policy making, is still very much in front of us.

Award History:    In 1989, at the 150th celebration of the founding of the American Statistics Association in Boston, Fred Mosteller was the first recipient of the Boston Chapter of the ASA Statistician of the Year Award.  Professor Mosteller received the award for his excellence in teaching and mentorship, influential research, and his service to the statistics profession.  The award was later renamed in his honor.  This honor is awarded annually to a distinguished statistician who has made exceptional contributions to the field of statistics and has shown outstanding service to the statistical community and to the Boston Chapter.