On Wednesday 13 June, researchers from
the Cabot Institute will talk at Big Green Week about the changing world, from large-scale
environmental trends in ice sheets and oceans to social and economic patterns,
and changes in the built environment and its resilience to hazards. Speakers are from the University’s
engineering, science and social science faculties, making this a truly
interdisciplinary event. Speakers from
Cabot include Professors Jonathan Bamber, Colin Taylor, Wendy Larner, Kathy
Cashman, and Bronwen Morgan. The event is sold out and we will be updating our blog after the event. More info about the event.
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...