Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Suppose you have some location or small area, call it location A, and you have decided for this location the 1-in-100 year event for some magnitude in that area is ‘x’. That is to say, the probability of an event with magnitude exceeding ‘x’ in the next year at location A is 1/100. For clarity, I would rather state the exact definition, rather than say ‘1-in-100 year event’. Now suppose you have a second location, call it location B, and you are worried about an event exceeding ‘x’ in the next year at either location A or location B. For simplicity suppose that ‘x’ is the 1-in-100 year event at location B as well, and suppose also that the magnitude of events at the two locations are probabilistically independent. In this case “an event exceeding ‘x’ in the next year at either A or B” is the logical complement of “no event exceeding ‘x’ in the next year at A, AND no event exceeding ‘x’ in the next year at B”; in logic this is known as De Morgan’s Law. This gives us the result: Pr(a...

As plant science PhD students, we feel it is vital to share our research with other scientists to generate new ideas for collaborative projects. For this reason we decided to organise the ‘Innovations in Plant Science to Feed a Changing World’ workshop, which was held in the University of Bristol Biological Sciences department in February 2017. The delegates included early-career scientists from Kyoto University, Heidelberg University and of course the University of Bristol. Figure 1. The Conference Poster The University of Bristol has a long-standing partnership with Kyoto University and more recently, Heidelberg University, as our plant science groups share overlapping research areas. The main aim of the workshop was to encourage novel collaboration opportunities between the plant science groups, which would give rise to future projects, publications and ultimately funding. Last year, Kyoto University hosted a highly engaging and productive workshop (see Sarah Jose’s blog pos...

The paradox of probability Probability is a quantification of uncertainty. We use probability words in our everyday discourse: impossible, very unlikely, 50:50, likely, 95% certain, almost certain, certain. This suggests a shared understanding of what probability is, and yet it has proved very hard to operationalise probability in a way that is widely accepted. Uncertainty is subjective Uncertainty is a property of the mind, and varies between people, according to their learning and experiences, way of thinking, disposition, and mood. Were we being scrupulous we would always say "my probability" or "your probability" but never "the probability". When we use "the", it is sometimes justified by convention, in situations of symmetry: tossing a coin, rolling a dice, drawing cards from a pack, balls from a lottery machine. This convention is wrong, but useful -- were we to inspect a coin, a dice, a pack of cards, or a lottery machine, we would d...

Ever wondered what a career in aid and development is like? Or how the world’s current development programmes came into being? Look no further than this blog on Myles Wickstead who gave a Cabot Institute lecture and short interview on his reflections and experiences on a colourful career in aid and development. Among Wickstead’s notable achievements are a position as head of British Development Division in Eastern Africa, coordinating a British Government White Paper on eliminating world poverty and now being an advisor to the charity Hand in Hand International. An audio recording of Myles lecture can be found above. His talk focussed largely on the inception of the building blocks of international development; the UN, the World Bank and the International Monetary fund. He began by turning back time towards the end of the second World War, in which the atmosphere of global reconciliation bred the need for trans-border institutions such as the UN that had the oversight necessary f...