statistical significance

6 posts

The problem with rooting for science

10 min read
Analysis Scicomm 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

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 not-so-obvious obvious

4 min read
Scicomm Science Brian Wansink Cornell University data torturing Higgs boson Ig Nobel Prizes incremental research Large Hadron Collider Marc Abrahams modelling ozone p-hacking Ronald H Coase scientific research statistical significance University of Exeter

If your job requires you to pore through a dozen or two scientific papers every month – as mine does – you'll start to notice a few every now and then couching a somewhat well-known fact in study-…

The nomenclature of uncertainty

4 min read
Uncategorized blackholes Forbes futurism gravitational waves headlines high-energy physics LIGO nature science journalism Scientific American statistical significance The Wire 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?…