Blog Posts

UPDATE: The tremendous response to this blog post led to an international and interdisciplinary survey on how these terms are/should be defined. The results of that survey were combined with an in-depth review of the literature to produce an article that has now been published in Earth-Science Reviews. The article updates and refines the patterns…

Scientists often measure and predict things. Therefore, we need ways to describe how much we know, how close a number is to reality, and how likely we are to get the same number again. The terms accuracy and precision are generally used to describe these things, but there can be some ambiguity. This post explains…

When you read the phrases “large scale” or “small scale,” do you know what they mean? Sometimes “large scale” describes a large area, and sometimes it describes a small area, depending on if the author was thinking about process scale or cartographic scale. This is a problem for communication. In this post, I will describe…

In the process of creating a map, geographers often have to engage in the activity of spatial prediction. Although there are many tools we use to accomplish this task, they generally boil down to the use of one or two fundamental concepts. Waldo Tobler is credited for identifying the ‘first law of geography’, stating “Everything…

In an earlier post I contrasted induction and deduction while suggesting that induction is the currently favored term used in science. However, I also suggested that the two philosophies can be used in concert with one another. Indeed, as much as one can argue about the virtues of one philosophy or the other, science actually advances…