[Statlist] Talks on statistics

[Christina Kuenzli]

                  ETH and University of Zurich 

                           Proff. 
         A.D. Barbour - P. Buehlmann - F. Hampel - L. Held
                  H.R. Kuensch - S. van de Geer

***********************************************************    
           We are glad to announce the following talks
***********************************************************

                     
     Friday, November 9, 2007,  15.15h  LEO C 6
 
     Space-Time Models for Soil Moisture Dynamics
    
     Valerie Isham, University College, London, UK

Soil moisture provides the physical link between soil, climate 
and vegetation. It increases via the infiltration of rainfall and decreases 
through evapotranspiration, run-off and leakage, all these effects being 
dependent on the existing soil moisture level. During wet periods, soil 
moisture tends largely to be driven by the topography, while 
evapotranspiration has more influence in dry periods. In this talk, I will 
describe models for soil moisture dynamics in which marked Poisson 
processes are used to model the temporal process of rainfall input to the 
soil moisture dynamics, and storms are allowed to have both spatial and 
temporal extents. Losses due to evapotranspiration depend on vegetation 
cover and the models allow for variable, and possibly random, vegetation 
processes. Under arid/semi-arid conditions, many transient and equilibrium 
properties of these models can be determined analytically and used for 
comparison with data on soil moisture dynamics.

***********************************************************
      Friday, November 23, 2007,  15.15h - 16.00h LEO C 6

      Oracle inequalities for individual sequences
      Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi, Universita degli Studi di Milano

and

      Friday, November 23, 2007,  16.15h - 17.00h LEO C 6

      The Hyperbolic and Related Distributions
      David Scott, Universioty of Auckland, NZ

***********************************************************      
________________________________________________________
Christina Kuenzli            <kuenzli at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Seminar fuer Statistik      
Leonhardstr. 27,  LEO D11      phone: +41 (0)44 632 3438         
ETH-Zentrum,                   fax  : +41 (0)44 632 1228 
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland        http://stat.ethz.ch/~