The World Health Organization has announced that it has temporarily halted the hydroxychloroquine arm of its Solidarity trial. This followed the publication in The Lancet of an analysis of registry […]
Jeff Aronson’s Words
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Hypotheses—weak and strong
Evidently, we have a problem. The introduction of evidence based medicine in the early 1990s brought rigour to the use of evidence in guiding therapeutic practices. Its principles have become […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . testing hypotheses in testing times
All hypotheses are unequal; some are more unequal than others. I have previously discussed the Indo-European root DHE. The basic root, the so-called e-grade form, DHE, means to set or […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Chains of exponentials
The story so far: I have previously described four different pattern of changes with time that exponential functions generate, depending on what is being measured and whether the exponent is […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Change and decay
Last week I discussed the way in which the function ext can result in curves that go up or down with time, depending on whether x is greater or less […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Exponential finances—increasing/decreasing
Last week I suggested that there is widespread misunderstanding about the meaning of “exponential” in mathematics. Colloquially, it means a huge increase, which it need not be. And when events […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Logarithmic exponents
There is widespread misunderstanding about the meaning of the mathematical idea of “exponential”. Here are some synonyms listed on a website called WordHippo: aggressive, epidemic, ascending, augmented, expanding, growing, mounting, […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Modelling elections and covid-19
Last week I introduced the basic and effective reproduction numbers, respectively R0 and Re, that are estimated in studying the way a viral epidemic spreads through the population. The basic […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Modelling viral reproduction
Here’s an extract from a recent newspaper report: “The key aim of social distancing is to get this figure below one, at which point the outbreak would begin to peter […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Autarky or autarchy?
While we are all self-isolating, people are starting to think about autarky, self-sufficiency. For example, that doyen of ancient Greek and Roman history as a reflection on modern affairs, Peter […]