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Have you ever wondered about the impact of your life and your decisions? How living the life you want, with the things you want, doing what you want, impacts the world? In this event from the University of Warwick you'll hear from three researchers who are looking into how we live our lives and the impact we have. You'll hear about the design and need for batteries to help store our growing need for energy, our need for 'stuff' and how we can reduce our 'stuff footprint' and lastly how we use maths to model all kinds of uncertainties - quite apt for the world right now.
How can we understand better batteries by looking closely at what they are made of?
Will Lima Da Silva
(Post graduate student in Chemistry)
Batteries are the next generation powerhouse to provide and store energy, from mobile phones to electric cars. From a micro to a nanoscale, materials inside a battery can have different shapes, which will affect how they function and how fast or slow they can be charged.
Are your uncertainties really random?
Jeremie Houssineau
(Assistant Professor in Statistics, University of Warwick)
Although it is widely accepted that there are two main sources of uncertainty, randomness and lack of knowledge, the usual approach to statistical inference conflates these two types of uncertainty and use the language and tools of probability theory to describe both. In this talk, I will illustrate via paradoxes and thought experiments how introducing specific notions to model a lack of knowledge can help with making intuition and theory better agree.
Living in a Material World – What is the ‘stuff footprint’ of my child?
Phil Jemmett
(Lecturer in Science and Outreach Officer for WMG)
I've just had my first child. Leaving the front door now feels like a trek to Everest. Walking to the post box requires a checklist and a large suitcase of stuff. The car used to have a boot but now it is a permanent cupboard for wheeled contraptions and complex machinery that only parents know how to use. How much stuff can such a tiny person need? This session will calculate the "stuff footprint" of a modern human and work out how many wheelie bins we fill in our lifetimes, how much of that gets recycled, and what we can do to be more sustainable.
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