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Tag Archives: uncertainty
Climate change and the coastline paradox
A friend recently told me about a tool called climate.you that shows “temperature change, over land and sea”, at all points on the earth’s surface in a bid “to show how warming is already affecting people everywhere”. You can enter … Continue reading
A little ignorance can be a good thing
Picture a city where most drivers use the same navigation app. At 9 am, the app says one side street is the quickest shortcut to get from area A to area B. Thousands of commuters accept this option and drive … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Scicomm
Tagged game theory, ignorance, machine meaning, noise, route planning, stochastic resonance, uncertainty, urban planning
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The problem with rooting for science
The idea that trusting in science involves a lot of faith, instead of reason, is lost on most people. More often than not, as a science journalist, I encounter faith through extreme examples – such as the Bloch sphere (used … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Scicomm
Tagged arrow paradox, biopolitics, Bloch sphere, common English, emergent properties, expertise, faith, mathematical physics, pseudoscience, quantum superposition, reason, science communication, science journalism, Social Psychology, statistical significance, trust, uncertainty, wave function
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The clocks that used atoms and black holes to stay in sync
You’re familiar with clocks. There’s probably one if you look up just a little, at the upper corner of your laptop or smartphone screen, showing you what time of day it is, allowing you to quickly grasp the number of … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged atomic clocks, caesium standard, caesium-133, Event Horizon Telescope, frequency comb, hydrogen maser, International Celestial Reference Frame, Kashima, Koganei, Medicine, microwave clocks, Milky Way, optical atomic clocks, quasars, radio telescopes, SI units, strontium clock, uncertainty, Very-Long Baseline Interferometry, VLBI, ytterbium clock
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There is more than one thunder
Sunny Kung, a resident in internal medicine at a teaching hospital in the US, has authored a piece in STAT News about her experience dealing with people with COVID-19, and with other people who deal with people with COVID-19. I … Continue reading
The nomenclature of uncertainty
Many science articles in the past year dealt with observations falling short of the evidence threshold but which have been worth writing about simply because of the desperation behind them. Has this prompted science writers to think about the language they use? Continue reading