Skip to main content

Cabot office weekly roundup – 20 July 2012

Image
By

Herbert Huppert
This week we have been holding our Cabot Summer School on risk and uncertainty in natural hazards.  The week has gone very well and I have received some very positive comments from attendees.  We had some fantastic speakers including Herbert Huppert, Jonty Rougier, Steve Sparks, Willy Aspinall, Li Chen, Tamsin Edwards, Philippa Bayley and Thorsten Wagener.  Cabot would like to say a great big thank you to all of you for making the Cabot Summer School such a success.  We’re very much looking forward to next year.
Paul F. Hoffman

This week, Cabot member Rich Pancost secured Paul F. Hoffman of Snowball Earth fame as the next Science Faculty Colloquium speaker in September. 

I saw the new templates for our website today.  Its all looking good and I’m quite excited about the implementation of its new look.  By the end of the summer I hope to have it all up and running.

We would like to congratulate Cabot member Professor Mark Eisler and his team who evaluated the effectiveness of a low-cost decision support tool as a diagnostic aid by observing whether its introduction to veterinary and animal health officers undertaking primary animal health care in Uganda could lead to changes in clinical practice.  Improved diagnosis is necessary for the effective management of endemic cattle diseases in sub-Saharan Africa.
 
We would also like to congratulate Gareth Jones, Stephen Harris and Emma Stone who received £559,705 from NERC for a project on ‘Experimental approaches to determine the impacts of light pollution: field studies on bats and insects’.


Popular posts from this blog

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

By
This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment.  If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For exa...
Read more

1-in-200 year events

By
You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve...
Read more

The Global Goals: How on Earth can geologists make a difference?

By
Image credit: Geological Society On the 30 th October the Bristol Geology for Global Development (GfGD) group trekked off to London to the grandeur of the Geological Society  for the 3 rd annual GfGD conference . Joel Gill, the director of GfGD, opened the conference with the bold claim: “Probably the world’s first meeting of geologists to discuss the Global Goals.” And it’s not an overstatement. Despite first appearances, geology has a crucially important role to play in many of the 17 goals internationally agreedby World Leaders in September this year . So why aren’t we talking about it? The conference acted as a platform for these discussions, it gave geologists a chance to learn how they can actually contribute to the success of these international development targets and it introduced us to new ways in which geology can help make a difference. . @JoelCGill describing the importance of geology & geologists in meeting UN Sustainable Development Goals #GfGDConf p...
Read more