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on or maybe he knows of some more details not reported here anyway us mere mortals will have to wait another month or so before we get to see the second draft even though i was listed as a contributing author on the first draft of one of the chapters it will be interesting to see how the lead authors attempt to reconcile the various opinions expressed in the literature further on in the article peter cox is quoted as making this strange statement the scientific agenda has moved from improving the predictions to thinking about what are the chances of something awful happening and dave stainforth talks about the destruction of society i think that amply vindicates my comment about people talking up the possibility of disaster posted by james annan at tuesday february 28 2006 9 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday february 26 2006 i m scottish since coming to japan i ve frequently been referred to as english it s not something i make a big fuss over particularly as japanese doesn t seem to have a clear distinction between british and english once or twice when i ve tried to explicitly describe myself as scottish people end up drawing maps and trying to place this small country somewhere in the vicinity of norway and sweden so i ve pretty much given up bothering but every so often i feel it s worth reminding people where i come from scotland is mostly famous for whisky haggis and deep fried delicacies such as mars bars pizza and the aforementioned haggis on the sporting front we specialise in curling and elephant polo unfortunately this time the curlers finished 4th and 5th in turin the women even lost to japan many famous scientists and inventors are actually scots including people like alexander graham bell who many usaians may think of as one of their own he emigrated and founded bell labs as well as his telephone probably all readers will have benefited from the work of john logie baird tv watt steam engine dunlop pneumatic tyre mcadam tarmac roads kirkpatrick macmillan bicycle napier logarithms fleming penicillin maxwell his equations and others too numerous to mention of course jingoistic nationalism isn t really a rationally defensible attitude these white men all died before i was born and i had precisely nothing to do with the scottish rugby victory but that won t stop me from enjoying it posted by james annan at sunday february 26 2006 7 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday february 25 2006 no of foreigners given refugee status hits record high japan granted 46 people refugees status last year a record high a further 97 were granted permission to stay the equivalent figure in the uk is generally in the region of 10 000 per year this is not particularly exceptional compared to other european nations in other news tottori prefecture gave up on its attempt to introduce legislation protecting human rights including outlawing racial discrimination the reason given is that the lawyers didn t like it just to clarify this they aren t merely giving up but are actually introducing a new bill to suspend enforcement of the hr legislation as one person here comments they could justifiably call this new bill the tottori inhuman rights act of 2006 posted by james annan at saturday february 25 2006 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest farmers response to bird flu i am struck by some similarities between the approaching bird flu epidemic and foot and mouth disease which hit the uk a few years ago at the start of the f m outbreak the national farmers union was strongly opposed to any basic biosecurity measures such as restrictions on movement of cattle instead they issued sterotypical get orf moi laaaaaand calls for tourists to stay away the economic value of tourism is massively bigger than farming and of course the disease isn t spread by tourists anyway but it was a good chance to flex their muscles the govt especially maff which despite officially having responsibility for the countryside was essentially ruled by farming interests went along with this and imposed various fines and restrictions the delay in cattle movement restrictions resulted in a massive national epidemic of this virulent and highly infectious disease which fortunately has no implications for human health and the entirely pointless shutdown of the tourist industry wasted billions of pounds eventually the govt realised that the shutdown of the tourist industry was a massive over reaction but by then the damage had been done the farmers got their compensation ok i m sure that plenty of them also lost some money but the tourism related industries are still struggling to recover maff deservedly ended up on the funeral pyre also and its replacement defra has a more explicit responsibility for rural affairs in general rather than the special interest of agriculture now we have bird flu approaching and what do the nfu do in response to a suggestion that it might be sensible to keep poulty indoors they call this a massive over reaction all we need is for them to do is to follow this up with exhortations for the townies to stay away and history will have repeated itself in only 5 short years if you ve got some time to kill you might enjoy this usenet thread from a few years ago at 1134 messages i think it 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...
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