Stream Senior Contributor William M. Briggs is a writer, philosopher and itinerant scientist living on a small, but densely populated, island in the Atlantic Ocean. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in statistics, where he is an Adjunct Professor. He studies the philosophy of science, the use and misuses of uncertainty, the corruption of science, and the uselessness of most predictions. He began life as a cryptologist for the Air Force, slipped into weather and climate forecasting, and matured into an epistemologist.