The field of statistics has a very rich and colourful history with plenty of interesting stories. Milton Lim describes his personal favourite – Carl Friedrich Gauss’ discovery of the method of least squares and the normal distribution to solve a particularly thorny problem in astronomy. So where did the ubiquitous bell curve originate from?
In a recent survey of general insurance actuaries from the Asia-Pacific region, Kon Makris and Mudit Gupta noted some interesting results from participants that we wanted to share for comment and discussion.
The last fortnight has been all about vaccines with the UK, US and Canada all commencing roll-out of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine after emergency use authorisation in all three countries. Research in the University of Queensland’s vaccine has been halted after study participants registered false positive HIV results. In case numbers, globally numbers of new cases continue to break new records and death numbers also increasing. Australia, however, continues to do extremely well, registering no locally acquired cases for the first time since March!
The ABS has released the weekly mortality statistics up to 25 August in Australia (for doctor-certified deaths only, excluding coroner-referred deaths). This analysis is the fourth in a series of monthly updates on Australian mortality in 2020.
