The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 6 (of six, for now)
Part Six – The Light at the End of the Tunnel is a Thunderstorm Decisions need to be made. A building must be declared inside, or outside, of a flood…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 5
Part Five – Back to Where It All Started Some weeks ago, this author began looking into how weather history relates to “100-year flood” numbers that are used in many…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 4
Part Four – Pretending to Be Super Smart Probability theory is full of theorems that work “for very large n”, the number of samples in a sequence. Taken to the…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 3
Part Three – An Enormous Data Set (and small bites of it) We’ve come to the question of how well or badly we can make estimations of future severe weather…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 2
Part Two – Sampling the Longest Available Data Set Looking for information about rare events, we naturally gravitate toward records with a long history. In this section we try to…
The “100-year Flood”, A Skeptical Inquiry, part 1
Part One – Are the 100-Year Flood Maps We Use Any Good? Anyone who has tried to buy a house has probably seen a form somewhere in the closing packet…
How Science Really Works
Don’t get me wrong, science does work. Innumerable concepts from insights to inventions have found their way into human experience at depth and scale in our history. Most are trivial…
Shouting at the Wind
This week we read a piece from a frustrated researcher and teacher. One of the regulars at thenewstatictics.com recounted stories from others on finding serious mistakes in published research and…
Cheese Is Addictive as Cocaine – SCIENCE SAYS
There is plenty written in the research literature about bad research. Sometimes that bad work is cited by a number of other researchers, before it gets corrected or retracted (if…