http://engineering.ucsc.edu Events - Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz en-us Copyright 2008, UC Regents 2000-08-23T07:00+00:00 webmaster@soe.ucsc.edu webmaster@soe.ucsc.edu Events - Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz 1901-01-01T00:00+00:00 1 hourly http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/_images/slug-new.gif http://engineering.ucsc.edu/ webmaster@soe.ucsc.edu http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/events/seminars/ams/2008/04/04/index.html Modes of climate variability such as variations in El-Nino, mid-latitude storms, the Gulf Stream, and the thermohaline circulation have a significant human impact, yet their response to climate change is poorly captured by climate models. Empirical stochastic models of climate variability have been extensively developed and, despite their simplicity, have similar predictive skill to detailed dynamical models. Completely separately, the past decade has seen considerable progress in the area of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, where the emphasis has been on microscopic, typically biological and chemical, systems. In this talk we review stochastic climate models, describe the recent developments in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, apply and extend the statistical mechanics to climate fluctuations. webmaster@soe.ucsc.edu 2008-05-12T16:00:00 Applied Math & Statistics Research Seminars - Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/events/seminars/ams/2008/05/08/index.html The advent of powerful computing resources has lead to a surge in the development and use of Bayesian methods. The Bayesian method begins with a prior distribution which is then updated to the posterior distribution using data. The sequence of posterior is consistent at a parameter value "theta" if, when "theta" is ``true'' then for observations on a set of probability 1, the sequence of posterior converges to the point mass at "theta". Consistency of posterior distribution presents an initial theoretical framework to assess the behaviour of the Bayesian model and is a kind of frequentist validation of the Bayesian method. This talk will give an overview of some of the theoretical issues related to consistency for priors on densities. We will discuss some methods useful in establishing consistency and application of these methods in the context of some popular models. webmaster@soe.ucsc.edu 2008-05-19T16:00:00 Applied Math & Statistics Research Seminars - Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz