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s my most successful troll ever unlike most trolling it was however entirely true and was clearly vindicated within a few months posted by james annan at saturday february 25 2006 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday february 23 2006 spring time at last it feels like spring is here it was a warm bright day today so we took the day off to enjoy the ume blossom ume is usually translated into english as plum but it s not really a plum as eaten in the west in fact it is more of an apricot and the fruit are small hard and bitter often eaten as a sour pickle umeboshi we also heard some japanese nightingales singing today for the first time this year i didn t realise they were traditionally associated with ume blossom until reading the wikipedia pages apparently the japan meterological agency is thinking of officially naming the recent bad weather heisei 18 heavy snow heisei 18 is 2006 in the japanese naming system the 18th year of the current emperor s reign it s been the worst winter in decades there s more snow forecast tomorrow but warmer weather should be just around the corner posted by james annan at thursday february 23 2006 1 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday february 22 2006 retirement age should reach 85 it s interesting to see this idea getting more air time and also that people are starting to make more radical suggestions the uk govt s position is in comparison some rather feeble kite flying which talked of about a 3 year increase in retirement age starting some time after 2030 as a foreign researcher in japan i m compulsorily enrolled into the pensions system which means that money is automatically removed from my salary with no realistic possibility of my ever getting a payout i d have to contribute for 20 years continuously which considering it will take another 5 years of annually renewed contracts before it would be worth even bothering to apply for permanent residency rights let alone citizenship and there is virtually no chance of tenure here is hardly a serious possibility at this stage this state sponsored theft of my salary is just one of those minor niggles that no one is ever going to fix because a it would cost money and b there are no votes in it since i m not a taxpayer in the uk there is no incentive to contribute to a pension fund there either although i should be able to make some of the shortfall up if and when i return unless i m kicked out at age 60 or sooner which is currently the way things work in the uk research labs if retirement age is up to 85 by 2050 then i ve got plenty of time no i m not really stupid enough to think this is likely to be the case posted by james annan at wednesday february 22 2006 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday february 19 2006 73 000 000 1 this is the famously erroneous statistic quoted by roy meadow supposedly giving the odds of two children dying of sids cot death in the same family when appearing as an expert witness in a murder trial his evidence neatly illustrates two distinct fallacies in the same calculation and as well as resulting in some wrongful convictions which were eventually overturned he was struck off by the general medical council but has just been reinstated following an appeal firstly the fallacies he got his number by squaring the odds of a single child dying in this way of about 8 500 1 the implicit assumption is that such deaths strike entirely at random however if there are any genetic or environmental factors involved a the probability second death in the same family would be far greater ignoring this factor is known as the ecological fallacy in fact medical research suggests a second death happens in about 1 out of 100 cases where a first death has happened a second and more pernicious fallacy is the prosecutor s fallacy so called because it seems pretty near ubiquitous in the presentation of statistical evidence eg dna tests it is the incorrect interpretation of a probability of an event happening to an innocent person as implying the probability that this person is in fact guilty an example assume that you are a juror and you ve been told that dna testing provides a match to the suspect at the 1 000 000 1 level ie a random person will match with probability 1 in 1 000 000 what is the probability that this person committed the crime 999 999 1 000 000 no given a population of 60 000 000 in the uk there will be about 60 people whose dna matches that well a priori any match only indicates a 1 in 60 chance that a particular person did it if there s no other evidence this is all but worthless however it would be a rare juror who would understand this and probably a rare lawyer in practice matches are often quoted at a much higher level of significance but by the time we are up to billions to one the chances of accidental contamination or fraud must be higher than that anyway back to meadow he was reinstated recently with the judge ruling that expert opinion given in court should be priviledged in the sense that incompetence is not grounds for the gmc to punish the witness while that may seem rather bizzarre i note that no one has called for the defence lawyers to be themselves disbarred for failing to produce any expert witness who understood elementary statistics well enough to destroy that aspect of meadow s evidence that is surely incompetence on a similar level to meadow s posted by james annan at sunday february 19 2006 10 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday february 18 2006 probability prediction and verification vi verification at last and after getting slightly sidetracked in various ways i ll get back to the meat of things forecast verification is the act of checking the forecast against the reality to see how good it was the basic aim is to see if the forecast was valid in the sense that reality did not throw up any major surprises you don t want your forecast to be confident of sunshine and warmth but reality to be cold and rainy obviously for any current forecast this check cannot even be attempted before the valid time of the forecast has arrived so anyone who complains that today s multidecadal climate forecasts cannot be verified is merely stating a truism based on the definitions of the terms a weather forecast also cannot be verified in advance of its valid time say tomorrow but this in itself obviously does not mean that weather forecasts cannot be trusted and used on the contrary they prove themselves to be highly valuable on a daily basis with industries ranging from agriculture to the military depending heavily on them that s despite there being ultimately no objective rigorous basis for the way in which the epistemic uncertainty in weather prediction is handled as i ve explained in more detail here here and here in fact even after the valid time of the forecast has passed and even assuming that precise observations are available verification is still not a trivial matter returning to my previous example of a rain forecast if the forecast said 70 chance of rain then either a rainy or dry day is an entirely acceptable outcome so was that forecast inherently unverifiable the inevitable answer is that yes of course it was even for a quantitative forecast tomorrow will have a max of 12c with an uncertainty of 1c it will only be on the rare occasion that the observed temperature falls far enough outside the plausible range of forecast uncertainty that one might be able to say that the forecast failed to verify in fact if we assume the forecast uncertainty is gaussian or any other continuous unbounded function there is no threshold at which the forecast fails to verify in absolute terms you might simply have got the 1 chance in 1000 that the target was 3 standard deviations from the forecast mean indeed with one forecast every day you d expect to see this roughly once every 3 years note that we check whether the data lie within the uncertainty of the forecast not whether the central forecast falls within the observational uncertainty of the data see here for more on this once you have more than a handful of forecasts however you can usually make a realistic assessment of the reliability of the system as a whole if many days are 3 standard deviations from the mean you ll probably judge it more likely that the system is bad than that you happened to hit the 1 in 10 100 unlucky streak in a good system but the latter can never be truly proven false of course conversely if the forecast system has validated consistently over a period of time we will probably trust today s forecast but even if the system is known to be statistically perfect there is still a 1 in 1000 chance that it will be 3 standard deviations wrong tomorrow each day is a unique forecast based on the current atmospheric state which has not occurred before as i explained before the forecast uncertainty is fundamentally epistemic not aleatory so there is no sense in which there is a correct or objective probabilistic forecast in the first place the uncertainty is fundamentally a description of our ignorance not some intrinsic randomness obviously it would take a long time to collect adequate statistics from successive 100 year climate forecasts if we started now and given the rate of ongoing model development this approach could never tell us much about the skill of the most up to date model anyway since they are replaced every few years we can however use simulations of the historical record and the present to test how well the models can hindcast variations in the climate which are known to have occurred in its simplest form this sort of test provides only a lower bound on forecast errors since the models are largely built and tuned to simulate existing observational data when the models fail to reproduce the data of course it calls their validity into question at least it does if the data are reliable a striking example of models teaching us about reality is in the recent resolution of the tropospheric data model incompatibility in favour of the models ok i m over egging things a little perhaps looking back over the longer scale we have hansen s famous forecast from 1988 which has proved to be spot on over the subsequent 17 years in fact the simplicity of the physics means that one thing we really can forecast quite confidently is a continued global warming in coming decades the ipcc tar said it was likely to continue at 0 1 0 2c decade for several decades to come and although this perhaps could be nudged marginally higher we are getting close to the 0 2 limit it won t be far wrong a slightly more sophisticated general technique known as cross validation involves witholding some historical data training the model on the rest of the data and seeing if it correctly predicts the data which were witheld in order to avoid accusations of cheating it is necessary to use some sort of automatic tuning technique if the data take the form of a time series which is split into an initial training interval followed by a forecast interval then this accurately mimics the situation of a real forecast it is also how new versions of weather prediction systems are tested prior to introduction repeat the forecasts of the past year say and adopt the new system if it shows greater skill than the current one we demonstrated a simple example of this cross validation approach in this paper a few years ago and broadly similar methods can be found throughout the more prediction focussed corners of the climate research literature eg reto knutti used a neural network in this forthcoming paper training it on half the data and verifying it on the other half these sort of formal forecast methodologies have not been widely undertaken in the gcm building community in the past partly because until recently there were no computationally affordable automatic tuning methods and partly because most climate scientists don t have much of a background in prediction and estimation they are primarily physical scientists with an interest in understanding processes rather than forecasters whose main aim is to predict the future but there is now plenty of work going to bridge this gap and here s the obligatory plug for the modest contribution we re making in this area climate scientists may never get to the level that weather forecasting is at in terms of attaching clear and reliable probabilities to all of our predictions but we are definitely making progress posted by james annan at saturday february 18 2006 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday february 17 2006 tea tray tobogganing the uk doesn t have a winter really just a colder part of the annual 12 month rainy season so we don t take winter sports too seriously by which i mean things involving snow and ice football and rugby in the pouring rain is quite wintry enough for my tastes the one thing we do enjoy when a snowy day comes along is sliding down hills on tea trays so it is only fitting that our first medal in this year s winter olympics is a silver in the women s tea tray event ok they don t really call it that but they might as well she has to go abroad to do any proper training so it s really quite a feat the japanese are rather miffed as they have a serious winter sports industry and have yet to get a medal i m sure they will overtake us soon enough though the only other thing we do moderately competently is curling and there are two more medal chances there but i don t think there is anything else to hope for in fact britain has won an average of one medal per games since the winter olympics began in chamonix in 1924 posted by james annan at friday february 17 2006 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest alarming new research a report from the tyndall centre is getting some attention on the the bbc the uk could face major flooding and tropical temperatures by the year 3000 if greenhouse gas emissions are not sharply reduced a new study says the report from the tyndall centre for climate change research claims britain could look radically different with sea levels rising as much as 11 4m that s a rather garbled take on what is a very speculative bit of research the high end numbers are based on projections in which mankind burns not just all the oil and coal but even the exotic fossil fuel resources like methane clathrates at a rapidly increasing rate over the next few centuries they base the emissions on the old is92a from the ipcc sar which was already known to be an outdated and fairly extreme scenario at the time of the tar and then extrapolate up from that over the subsequent centuries while it is obviously fun to play around with ideas like this the suggestion that it has much to do with current policy decisions is tenuous at best i m sure tha...
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