Situating (in)significance

Destiny of Insignificance

Our Cosmic Insignificance

The universe that surrounds us is vast, and we are so very small. When we reflect on the vastness of the universe, our humdrum cosmic location, and the inevitable future demise of humanity, our lives can seem utterly insignificant. Many philosophers assume that such worries about our significance reflect a banal metaethical confusion. They dismiss the very idea of cosmic significance. This, I a...

Situating Instructions

A videographic study of origami is presented in which subjects were observed making four different origami objects under five modes of instruction: photos + captions, illustrations-only, illustrations with small captions, illustrations with large captions, and text-only as control. The objective of the study was to explore the gestures and other actions that subjects produce as they try to foll...

Situating Flatness

Our paper, ‘Human Geography without Scale’ (Marston et al. 2005), is developed in two parts: a critique that is immanent to scale, where we show that, even on the grounds of contemporary spatial theory, the concept is deficient; and a critique that is extrinsic to those grounds, where we make a contribution to an alternative ontology that does not rely on the transcendental abstraction of scale...

The Insignificance of Statistical Significance Testing

Despite their wide use in scientific journals such as The Journal of Wildlife Management, statistical hypothesis tests add very little value to the products of research. Indeed, they frequently confuse the interprettation of data. This paper describes how statistical hypothesis tests are often viewed, and then contrasts that interpretation with the correct one. I discuss the arbitrariness of P-...