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Career interview: IT project manager - Olympic Games

Travel, money, meeting new people, living in new cultures, and a whole lot of sport — that's where maths has lead Jamie Clarke, an IT project manager who specialises in international sport projects such as the recent Winter Olympics in Torino. Jamie tells Plus how he went from engineering to the Olympics.
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Career interview: Financial modelling

David Spaughton and Anton Merlushkin work for Credit Suisse First Boston, where they provide traders in the hectic dealing room with software based on complicated mathematical models of the financial markets. PASS Maths interviewed them at their offices in Canary Wharf in London.
Monkey peering at a computer screen
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Understanding uncertainty: Infinite monkey business

David Spiegelhalter explains that waiting for an infinite number of monkeys to produce the complete works of Shakespeare is not just a probabilistic certainty, it also gives us an insight into how long we can expect to wait for a rare event to happen.
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On the ball

If your team scores first in a football match, how likely is it to win? And when is it worth committing a professional foul? John Haigh shows us how to use probability to answer these and other questions, and explains the implications for the rules of the game.
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Do you know what's good for you? — The maths of infectious diseases

Infectious diseases hardly ever disappear from the headlines — swine flu is only the last in a long list containing SARS, bird flu, HIV, and childhood diseases like mumps, measles and rubella. If it's not the disease itself that hits the news, then it's the vaccines with their potential side effects. It can be hard to tell the difference between scare mongering and responsible reporting, because media coverage rarely provides a look behind the scenes. So how do scientists reach the conclusions they do?
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Understanding uncertainty: The Premier League

This is the second part of our new column on risk and uncertainty. David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, continues examining league tables using the Premier League as an example. Find out just how much — or how little — these…