Anyone who looks in a bit of detail at scientific results may have come across p-values and sigmas being used to determine the significance of a outcome - but what are they, and why is there a huge disparity between practice in the social sciences and physics? These are statistical measures that determine the probability of the results being obtained if the 'null hypothesis' is true - which is to say if the effect being reported doesn't exist. The social sciences, notably psychology, usually consider the marker for statistical significance to be a p-value of less than 0.05, while in physics the aim is often to have a 5 sigma result. Both these measures depend on creating a probability distribution, showing the likelihood of different values occuring. The p-value is a direct measure of the probability of getting the reported results if the null-hypothesis applies. So, a p-value of 0.05 means there is one in twenty (1/20 = 0.05) chance of this happening. Sigmas effectively me...

This isn't the kind of book I usually read, but it piqued my interest when someone told me about it - and it certainly was worth getting into. If you are a BBC Radio 4 listener (or subscribe to the Americast podcast) you will be familiar with Justin Webb's soothing tones - this memoir of his childhood through to going to university gives a vivid picture of his bizarre upbringing. Webb never met his father (who would become a reasonably well-known BBC reporter), being brought up by his mother and stepfather, each of whom had quite serious problems. His stepfather had a form of mental illness that included paranoia, while his mother was intensely snobbish, insisting on every little social divider that would put a gap between her upper-middle-class-on-hard-times position and anyone she considered socially inferior.  Their home life seems to have consisted mostly of silence, though there was a strong bond between Webb and his mother, arguably an unhealthy one. He was then sent to a...

When I was 13, I sang in a performance of Mahler's third symphony with the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli. Our school's 'special choir' was a regular feature in Manchester performances of orchestral  pieces with children's parts - amongst other outings, I sang in Stravinsky's Persephone , Verdi's Otello , Malcolm Williamson's Our Man in Havana and Mussorgsky's Khovanschina . We performed Mahler 3 a total of three times - concerts in at the Free Trade Hall and the Festival Hall, and a BBC recording for broadcast. But what I didn't realise until a few weeks ago was that the BBC had issued that recording as an album. I managed to get hold of a CD copy and had the eerie experience of hearing myself and fellow choir members from 55 years ago. The (extremely long) symphony was quite a trial of patience for us. We had movement after movement marked 'tacet' on our copies, before featuring in the 4 minutes or so of the movement marked ...

I get a lot of press releases, but I have enjoyed few more than one I recently got from a book review website called Summary Guru , which site carries the headline 'GET INSPIRATION FOR YOUR PAPER WITH AI POWERED BOOK SUMMARIES & ANALYSIS – PLAGIARISM FREE' (Does inspiration need to be plagiarism free? Or just stuff you copy and paste?) To demonstrate the effectiveness of Summary Guru, the release tells us 'Before Watching Netflix's One Day , Know These Five Fascinating Details From The Book' - details produced by Summary Guru. Here they are, with a few of my comments: 1. It's about a single day... across twenty years To be honest, if you don't know this before watching the series, you haven't being paying attention. 2. It deeply explores relationships This is illustrated with 'To quote Emma (the novel’s main female character): “Dexter, I love you so much…and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.”' Yep, deep...

I've recently been reading The Blind Spot , which describes how science tends to confuse its idealised and simplified models with reality, and how scientists have traditionally relied too much on reductionism while putting anything that involves human experience into the 'unreliable and subjective' box, even though everything we do in the sciences (as opposed to mathematics) requires the input of human experience. One of the subjects covered at length in the book is time. This is fascinating in the context, because time is the experiential phenomenon that is regarded most differently in physics than it is in reality. Some physicists go as far to say that time doesn't exist at all. Related to this, it is pointed out that many physical processes are reversible in time, where science does not care which way it goes. But in the The Blind Spot the authors emphasise that what we experience is not clock time - the only time that physics regards as real - but duration. Physic...