Last year at Crans-sur-Sierre he led by four shots going into the final round but missed a short putt for victory and lost in a play-off to Frenchman Jean-Francois Lucquin.
In his lecture, Ball presented a number of cases like this, from Kosovo, Guatemala, Sierre Leone and Timor-Leste, where sound and verifiable data was used effectively to answer a small question, then stretched to answer a broader question for which it was not suited.