Post date: Mar 17, 2021 11:30:10 PM
Dear Conal,
I trust you and your family and friends are well and safely ensconced in comfortable places.
Just seeing your email after the covid whirlwind. I was excited about your interview, and then I was locked out of my office for 7 weeks and counting. Or have I already lost count?
Sorry to learn of your disappointment. Funders often don’t see the greatest before them. Was the interview process encouraging at least?
As I may have explained at the beginning of our correspondence, funding for PhDs is in short supply at the moment. The only general thing I can say is that you should consult the University of Liverpool website on the matter.
However, there is money for one home PhD in an area that might be of interest. See the green text below. I would encourage you to apply for that. It is not impossible to imagine a hybrid that twists this idea and your idea together.
As you know, I got excited by our original correspondence, and I have put together some loose leaf topics that seem to be related into a Google Site. See https://sites.google.com/site/davmarkup/inspection-records which is a placeholder for your project should it be allowed to flower. Use the navigation links on the left of the screen to see the larger context I see for it. It may be a bit crazy, and it is definitely “pre-decisional” as they say. I need to involve some colleagues in computer science to see whether it already exists. I am pretty sure that it is possible, but it would be a serious research effort to show that it is useful, friendly and “light-weight” enough to be widely adopted. I would certainly be interested in your thoughts.
Best regards,
Scott
There is funding available immediately for a PhD studentship for a UK home student (you must have maintained residence in the United Kingdom for at least three years to qualify as a home student). The project is on communicating uncertainty to humans and will supervised jointly by the University of Liverpool's Institute for Risk and Uncertainty and the School of Psychology.
Communicating uncertainty to humans is notoriously difficult, yet decision makers must understand relevant uncertainties to make optimal choices. It is fundamental for meaningful informed consent in medicine and essential for prudent business planning and financial forecasting. It is essential for scientific and engineering practice.
Although various verbal, numerical, and graphical techniques for expressing quantitative uncertainties have been proposed, none has proved to be reliably effective for general use. They regularly fail dramatically in high-stakes discourse such as patient counselling and communication of risk assessments such as health warnings and guidance during pandemic.
Recent psychometric research has shed light on how humans recognise and process uncertainties of different kinds. This PhD project will make use of this research to design and test methods for expressing and communicating uncertainty to medical patients, decision makers in business, and technical practitioners in science and engineering. Some of the questions will include the following:
How can risk communicators improve their effectiveness in conveying the whole story with uncertainty?
What provisions can be used to ensure the recipient or audience actually apprehends a message’s uncertainty and its import?
How can improvements in decision making from alternative communication strategies be assessed?
This project may require standard ethics training as it will likely involve research with human participants. It will also make use of ludic elicitation, so skills in computer programming and statistics will be especially useful.
A PhD Studentship includes tuition fees plus a stipend of about £16,000 annually over 3 years, available for UK home students. In addition, a research budget for your use will be provided. This PhD project is affiliated with the multi-disciplinary EPSRC and ESRC Centre for Doctoral Training on Quantification and Management of Risk & Uncertainty in Complex Systems & Environments, within the Institute for Risk and Uncertainty at the University of Liverpool. The project will commence in August 2020.
The deadline for applications is Friday, 26th June 2020, but please inform Prof Ferson (via email to amh@liverpool.ac.uk) earlier if possible. To apply for the PhD Studentship, please use the University of Liverpool online system https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/how-to-apply/. Also be sure to send your application files directly to amh@liverpool.ac.uk