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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Andrea Murari, Guido Vagliasindi, Eleonora Arena, Paolo Arena, Luigi Fortuna, JET-EFDA Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 2 | October 2010 | Pages 685-694
Selected Paper from the Sixth Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2010 (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A10893
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In practically all fields of science, measurements are affected by noise, which can sometimes be modeled with an appropriate probability distribution function. The results of measurements are therefore known only with uncertainties that sometimes can be significant. In many cases the noise source is independent of the system to be studied and the quantities to be measured. In this paper, a numerical approach to handle statistical uncertainties, due to an independent noise source, in a fuzzy logic system is developed. Numerical analysis and various tests with a benchmark show how statistical error bars can be interpreted as an independent "axis of complexity" with respect to the fuzzy boundaries of the membership functions. The uncertainties in the inputs can be transferred to the output and handled separately from the system intrinsic fuzzyness. The main advantages of this independent treatment of the measurement errors are shown in the case of a binary classification task: the regime confinement identification in high-temperature tokamak plasmas. Significant improvements in the correct prediction rate have been achieved with respect to the classification performed without considering the error bars in the measurements.