Models are not meant to predict the future perfectly – yet they’re still useful. Biomedical mathematician Lester Caudill, who is currently teaching a class focused on COVID-19 and modeling, explains the limitations of models and how to better understand them.
As far back as we have records, humans have tried to predict the future. Some societies turned to prayer, divination or oracles. Others to tarot cards or crystal balls. In the modern world, much of that function is fulfilled by mathematical models. Is this new technology of forecasting really an upgrade?
After two decades that have almost been defined by wave upon wave of crises, argues Matthew Flinders, it’s possible that the public has simply become immune to warnings from politicians and habitually distrustful of their claims.
‘I think,’ writes Damon J. Phillips, ‘ that this suggests that you happen to be coming along in a new era that will be stressful to live through, but also one that will fuel the best of our scholarship. In the coming years and decades there will be an urgency around different questions framed by our current crises.’
“Rather than sending out thousands of online or paper questionnaires, we teamed up with health data science company ZOE to develop a simple symptom-monitoring app called COVIDradar. The app was made from scratch in about four days and would normally take four months. Volunteer citizen scientists use it to report their health status daily and note the appearance of any new symptoms. Once we realized that there was nothing similar available in the UK to monitor symptoms on a population-wide level, we decided to make the app freely available to all.”
Having already released a curated collection of existing conbtent relating to the nexus of pandemics and transportation, the National Academies’ Transportation Research Board is looking for other sources of useful information outside of academic journals.
If the promises of behavioral science can be believed, the UK government’s use of it would potentially minimize economic disruption while still tackling the crisis. This is because, in theory, behavioral science can achieve desirable behaviors without significantly impacting other day-to-day activities. However, the question is whether in practice behavioral science is helping to mitigate disaster.
Counties with large universities depend heavily on student responses to the decennial census, because the census counts determine the levels of federal funding communities receive. And if those students are counted as being there …?
“We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] Tom Burns, whose combination of play — and plays – with teaching in higher education added a light, collaborative and engaging model […] The creation of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has led to a heated debate on the balance between peer review and evaluative metrics in research assessment regimes. Luciana Balboa, Elizabeth Gadd, Eva Mendez, Janne Pölönen, Karen Stroobants, Erzsebet Toth Cithra and the CoARA Steering Board address these arguments and state CoARA’s commitment to finding ways in which peer review and bibliometrics can be used together responsibly. David Canter reveals how he discovered Microsoft Copilot acted like a lazy student, inventing responses with apparent confidence that were blatantly wrong. […] “We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] The interactional skill of large language models enables them to carry out qualitative research interviews at speed and scale. Demonstrating the ability of these new techniques in a range of qualitative enquiries, Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel, present a new open source platform to support this new form of qualitative research.
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Impact
Canada’s Storytellers Challenge Seeks Compelling Narratives About Student Research
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Tom Burns, 1959-2024: A Pioneer in Learning Development
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Research Assessment, Scientometrics, and Qualitative v. Quantitative Measures
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Innovation
Beware! AI Can Lie.
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Canada’s Storytellers Challenge Seeks Compelling Narratives About Student Research
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Our Open-Source Tool Allows AI-Assisted Qualitative Research at Scale
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