SynTalk

Could traits trend? What do you want to detect? Are there many more rare species than common species? When is the past representative of the future? Are all models wrong and precarious? What, then, is evidence? Can surprises be modeled? Do unlikely events often happen in very likely ways? Are correlations higher on extremes? Are rare species more redundant? How might one find proxies for rarities? Is likelihood a comparative measure of ‘distance’ from the truth to the model? Is it trivial to select the most ‘likely’ model when given the data? Are inferences always highly model-dependent (especially for rare events)? What leads to thin or thick tails? Do rare events need sensitive (&, not robust) models? When does simulation help? Is extinction often followed by speciation? Why did a tree go extinct with the dodos? Do all elk have a certain (statistically significant) ‘elkness’? Do hyper-connected markets or systems increase the overall ruin risk? Would certain blackouts, shutdowns, collapses, and perfect storms be designed away in the future? &, will we continue to adapt and, somehow, escape our inevitable fate? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from applied probability (Prof. Sandeep Juneja, TIFR, Mumbai), statistics (Prof. Subhash Lele, University of Alberta, Edmonton), & conservation biology (Dr. Karthikeyan Vasudevan, CCMB, Hyderabad). Listen in...