Papers and reports

The controversial problem of prior probabilities, inverse inference, and the rule of Bayes-Laplace has recently been brought back into the limelight through Wilfred Perks’s interesting attempt to formulate a new indifference rule for the prior probabilities in the theory of inverse probability. The purpose of this paper is to subject this new theory to a critical appraisal from the point of view of the practical statistician.

In Great Britain it has hitherto been the custom to use upright roman type for the capital letters in actuarial notation, although the symbols in ‘lower case’ have been in italic type. The Council has decided that italic capitals should be adopted officially by the Institute as from the May 1952 examinations and the June 1952 number of J.I.A. The following historical information may be of interest to members.