Scientific Error

[Sanna Pospicil]

VirtuallyALL of our concepts about human abilities, tendencies, and qualities contain the ergodic error and the falsehoods that come along with it. Physical strength. Intelligence. Personality. Mental disorders. Learning disabilities. Talent. Creativity. Even the needlessly crude ways we think of genetics, or trauma, or injury, or motivation.

Human development is idiographic first and nomothetic second. Humans are complex evolving networks, and no one thing makes sense except in context over time compared to within person variation. Yes, your genome matters, but it plays out individually, in context, and interacting with epigenetics, developmental history, environment, behavior, and culture.

Researchers with the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University recently walked back scientific findings published last month that showed oceans have been heating up dramatically faster than previously thought as a result of climate change.

In a paper published Oct. 31 in the journal Nature, researchers found that ocean temperatures had warmed 60 percent more than outlined by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

However, the conclusion came under scrutiny after mathematician Nic Lewis, a critic of the scientific consensus around human-induced warming, posted a critique of the paper on the blog of Judith Curry, another well-known critic.

"The findings of the ... paper were peer reviewed and published in the world's premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media," Lewis wrote. "Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results."

According to the most recent IPCC report, climate emissions need to be cut by 20 percent by 2030 and then zeroed out by 2075 to keep warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

While papers are peer reviewed before they're published, new findings must always be reproduced before gaining widespread acceptance throughout the scientific community, said Gerald Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

By comparison, Keeling and Laure Resplandy, a researcher at Princeton University's Environmental Institute who co-authored the report, calculated heat based on the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide rising off the ocean, filling round glass flasks with air collected at research stations around the globe.

I was able to use Device Config and PC200W to connect to my CR800 datalogger from my desktop, send a program, and collect data from a sensor. I just installed Loggernet on my computer though, and I am unable to get it to connect to my datalogger. I went through setup, added comport, pakbus logger, CR800series, and followed some instructions I found for completing setup, but when I try to connect I just get an error message.

I've connected the logger via the RS-232 port on the logger and the same kind of connection on my computer (not the USB). This worked fine for the other two programs but not for Loggernet. I am totally new to this system and no one where I work is familiar with it either. I have read through the Pakbus manual and skimmed relevant sections of the CR800 manual, but if there is a better step by step instruction set somewhere, please let me know where I can find it.

I suspect the error may have something to do with the "table definitions suspect" alert that comes on. I'm not sure what that means though because when I set it up and set up the tables for what data I wanted it to collect, it did so just fine when I was using PC200W to view the data...

I suggest reconnecting with Device Config and look at which Baud Rate and Com Port you are using. Also while connected, you can see the Pakbus address of the datalogger. Then, make sure in Setup in Loggernet you selected the same baud rate, com port, and Pakbus address.

Ok, I did get Loggernet to connect to individual dataloggers now - the problem was that in Setup I had the comport set to communicate withe RF401A instead of COM1 - the instructions for setting up the radio said to set it up that way to be able to communicate with the datalogger via the radio (I think) but it didn't work.

Now I'm just trying to set up everything in a row - direct communication with the CR800, and remote communication with the CR206 via the radio. Do I have to write and send a program in order to be able to do this or should I be able to connect the components and get reads from the remote datalogger via Loggernet?

Communication of Loggernet through the CR800 to the CR206 can be done with a few settings. If the CR800 itself needs access to data from the CR206, you would need to make changes to the CR800 program.

This shouldn't require any specific programming to work. I would suggest that you look at the Network Planner to set up your links as it will be the easiest way to coordinate settings between the devices and LoggerNet.

One method of measuring error is by calculating absolute error, which is also called absolute uncertainty. This measure of accuracy is reported using the units of measurement. Absolute error is simply the difference between the measured value and either the true value or the average value of the data.

For example, if you measure gravity to be 9.6 m/s2 and the true value is 9.8 m/s2, then the absolute error of the measurement is 0.2 m/s2. You could report the error with a sign, so the absolute error in this example could be -0.2 m/s2.

Some people consider absolute error to be a measure of how accurate your measuring instrument is. If you are using a ruler that reports length to the nearest millimeter, you might say the absolute error of any measurement taken with that ruler is to the nearest 1 mm or (if you feel confident you can see between one mark and the next) to the nearest 0.5 mm.

Relative error is based on the absolute error value. It compares how large the error is to the magnitude of the measurement. So, an error of 0.1 kg might be insignificant when weighing a person, but pretty terrible when weighing a apple. Relative error is a fraction, decimal value, or percent.

The most common error calculation is percent error, which is used when comparing your results against a known, theoretical, or accepted value. As you probably guess from the name, percent error is expressed as a percentage. It is the absolute (no negative sign) difference between your value and the accepted value, divided by the accepted value, multiplied by 100% to give the percent:

Another common error calculation is called percent difference. It is used when you are comparing one experimental result to another. In this case, no result is necessarily better than another, so the percent difference is the absolute value (no negative sign) of the difference between the values, divided by the average of the two numbers, multiplied by 100% to give a percentage:

Random errors are due to fluctuations in the experimental or measurement conditions. Usually these errors are small. Taking more data tends to reduce the effect of random errors.

Examples of Random Errors

Price, M. (2017). Monarch Miscalculation: Has a Scientific Error About the Butterflies Persisted for More than 40 years? Science Mag. Retrieved from -miscalculation-has-scientific-error-about-butterflies-persisted-more-40-years.

Which one is correct? I've been looking online to find something that explains the proper notation when writing out margin of error with orders of magnitude but I haven't been able to find anything (I'm at a loss of what terms to search for). If what I wrote isn't the correct way to say 0.00378 0.00002, then what is? Writing it as 3.78 * 10^-3 0.02 or 3.78 * 10^-3 0.02 * 10^-3 seems kind of foolish.

Sometimes you need to go the extra mile to be entirely unambiguous. Your original formulation (3.78 0.02 * 10^-3) could be interpreted in two ways, the way you intended and the way your TA suggested. The majority of people, I expect, would use context to interpret it correct as you intended, but some (as your TA demonstrates) will not.

There is no clear cut widely agreed standard that will resolve this. But you can apply standard mathematical notation (which will look superfluous to some) to make what you write entirely unambiguous. As Ivan suggested in a comment the simple addition of brackets giving (3.78 0.02) * 10^-3 makes your statement unambiguous in its interpretation. This is more compact than 3.78 * 10^-3 0.02 * 10^-3 but just as unambiguous.

If you were using properly typeset formulae, you might well be able to avoid some of the apparent redundancy of the last formulation, but that would take more effort. Better to accept that redundancy is sometimes required to make things clear.

When you write a number derived from calculation or experiment, and following standard protocols for the propagation of uncertainties, you regard the last reported integer in the number as uncertain. Therefore, it simply does not make sense to report an uncertainty of 0.00002 for 3.78, since the uncertainty in 3.78 must be at least 0.01. I would say that although there may be cases in which explicit notation should be followed, it is generally safe to write

Clarity is very important, conciseness too, and there are, in general, recommended conventions. See this answer for instance, which suggests that using the "" symbol is not recommended unless you mean to use the uncertainty to estimate the distribution of errors.

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For many scientists, this is especially worrying in light of the reproducibility concerns. In 2005, epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in California suggested that most published findings are false2; since then, a string of high-profile replication problems has forced scientists to rethink how they evaluate results.

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