tokatlas
Teacher account

Evacuating a million people on a forecast

From India·An enduring case

Before Cyclone Fani struck Odisha in 2019, forecasts triggered the evacuation of over a million people, and the death toll stayed in double digits where a similar storm two decades earlier had killed thousands. Probabilistic knowledge was converted into buses and shelters days before certainty existed.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

CertaintyStatus of Knowledge
The degree to which doubt about a claim has been closed off. Certainty is a state of the knower, not of the claim, which is why a claim can be true without anyone being certain of it and why confidence and reliability can come apart badly.
ResponsibilityKnowledge and Society
What a knower owes as a result of knowing, or of being in a position to know. It covers obligations in producing knowledge, in passing it on accurately, and in acting or refusing to act on it, including the responsibility taken on by choosing not to look.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Ethics
The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.

Areas of knowledge

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.