{"id":7604,"date":"2011-01-10T03:00:22","date_gmt":"2011-01-10T08:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=7604"},"modified":"2011-01-10T03:00:22","modified_gmt":"2011-01-10T08:00:22","slug":"context-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/7604","title":{"rendered":"Context Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In physics, units matter (just ask the Mars Climate <del datetime=\"2011-01-08T15:59:50+00:00\">Crasher<\/del> Orbiter).  They put a context on the number.  That isn&#8217;t always enough, because you don&#8217;t know if the number is big or small unless you compare it to a familiar quantity, which is why it&#8217;s a good exercise to be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.badscience.net\/2011\/01\/putting-a-number-in-its-context\/\">Putting a number in its context<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[I]s the failure rate exceptional? A figure means nothing if it has no context: 600 pregnancies sounds like a big number, but there is no way to know what it means unless we know how many women had Implanon, and for how long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In physics, units matter (just ask the Mars Climate Crasher Orbiter). They put a context on the number. That isn&#8217;t always enough, because you don&#8217;t know if the number is big or small unless you compare it to a familiar &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/7604\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}