Uncertain Science… Uncertain World

Policies for an Uncertain World

Doing Science in Uncertain Times

A scientist living in Russia is often asked two questions: “Why haven’t you left?” and “Is it still possible to work there?” The best response to the fi rst question is, “Why should I?”—which either terminates the conversation or leads to a stimulating discussion about the fate of the world. The second question, however, deserves a serious answer. In fact, this is the question that every one of...

Defining fitness in an uncertain world

The recently elucidated definition of fitness employed by Fisher in his fundamental theorem of natural selection is combined with reproductive values as appropriately defined in the context of both random environments and continuing fluctuations in the distribution over classes in a class-structured population. We obtain astonishingly simple results, generalisations of the Price Equation and th...

Neural scaling laws for an uncertain world.

Autonomous neural systems must efficiently process information in a wide range of novel environments which may have very different statistical properties. We consider the problem of how to optimally distribute receptors along a 1-dimensional continuum consistent with the following design principles. First, neural representations of the world should obey a neural uncertainty principle-making as ...

Economic Reliability Forecasting in an Uncertain World

Substantial work has applied stochastic techniques to network reliability models. These techniques can estimate risk, variance and uncertainty values. Unfortunately, these models do not address the issues of revenues, return on investment, or the time-value of money. To address these issues, we have developed an Economic Reliability Analysis [ERA] framework at the University of Virginia that fu...