Category: Tag: Nature of Science
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 the ongoing polarization of science in today’s political environment, it’s more important than ever to remember that science is filled with uncertainty. […]
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 drought induced a decline in global plant productivity during the past decade, posing a threat to global food security. Zhao […]
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 storm weakened more than meteorologists had expected. At the same time, the prediction of where the storm would go was very good. […]
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, the man in the hat has made a graph that shows the incidence of cancer in the United States with the number of […]
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 debunked explanation stated that methane bubbled up from the oceans and was consumed by microbes, which released carbon dioxide into the […]
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 the randomness of the results; a lower p-value indicates that the reported result is not likely due to chance. In scientific studies, a p-value of 0.05 […]
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. If the evidence doesn’t fit the claim, then the claim is rejected and revised. New evidence can result in changes to long-held understandings about how the […]