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Certainty
From xkcd: http://xkcd.com/263/ Question: How can we trust ourselves (or scientists) to know the truth about anything? Answer: We look at the evidence. Scientists back up their claims with evidence....
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Thinking like a scientist
Nearly every day, newspapers report on new scientific breakthroughs. Scientists provide measures of their uncertainty in the results, expressed as a p-value. The p-value is a statistical measure of...
View ArticleWanted: Cause of the End of “Snowball Earth”
A new study has been published disproving the previous explanation for the end of the Marinoan ice age, also known as “Snowball Earth.” That ice age ended abruptly about 600 million years ago. The...
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Causality: How to Interpret Graphs
Graphs are often used to show data; they provide a very powerful way to show numerical trends. But graphs can also be done poorly and be misinterpreted. (Source: http://xkcd.com/925/) In the comic,...
View ArticleWhat makes scientists more certain?
For the past five days, Hurricane Irene affected the weather for residents on the East Coast. For the Northeastern United States, the forecasts of the storm’s intensity turned out to be wrong; the...
View ArticleGood Science/Bad Science
How can you tell when a scientific claim is bad? Look at the results. Compare the results from the models with what happened in real life. An August 2010 study published in Science claimed that...
View ArticleAbsolute Certainty Is Not Scientific
That’s the title of an editorial by Daniel Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus at the University of California, in today’s Wall Street Journal. With...
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