Stefano Mezzini | Poisson Consulting

Stefano Mezzini

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Stefano Mezzini, BSc, is a Computational Biologist.

When he joined Poisson Consulting in 2025, Stefano was completing a dissertation project that focused on quantifying how animals (primarily mammals) alter their home range size, movement speed, and exploratory behaviour in response to stochastic changes in resource availability and changing temperature.

What are s-values?

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

P-values are a common measure of statistical significance that are often misunderstood.

One issue is that the scale of p-values can be difficult to interpret. For example, small p-values such as 0.0001 and 0.00001 are easily confused, and many readers often convert p-values to fractions ($\frac1{100}, \frac1{1,000}, \frac1{10,000}$), rounding them in the process (e.g., $0.0103 \approx 0.01 = \frac1{100}$).

S-values address the issue of interpretability by converting p-values into a more tangible representation of probability: the number of heads in a row on a fair coin.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between s-values and p-values. A p-value of 0.5 corresponds to an s-value of 1, since a probability of 0.5 corresponds to a single successful coin flip. Similarly, the common significance cutoff of 0.05 is equivalent to flipping 4.32 heads in a row.

Figure 1: The relationship between s-values and p-values.

S-values are particularly convenient when comparing or evaluating p-values that are very small or correspond to difficult fractions. See Table 1 below for some examples.

Table 1: Example conversions from p-values to their equivalent simplest fractions and (rounded) s-values.
P-value	Fraction	S-value
0.5000000	1 / 2	1.00
0.2500000	1 / 4	2.00
0.1000000	1 / 10	3.32
0.0625000	1 / 16	4.00
0.0500000	1 / 20	4.32
0.0100000	1 / 100	6.64
0.0058366	3 / 514	7.42
0.0010000	1 / 1000	9.97
0.0001000	1 / 10000	13.30
0.0000010	1 / 1e+06	19.90

Environmental variability shapes biodiversity and protected area priorities in Canada

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The Human Shield Hypothesis: Does Predator Avoidance of Humans Create Refuges for Prey?

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How climate change and population growth will shape attendance and human-wildlife interactions at British Columbia parks

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Effects of vasectomy on breeding-related movement and activity in free-ranging white-tailed deer

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How resource abundance and resource stochasticity affect organisms' range sizes

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Impacts of a century of land‐use change on the eutrophication of large, shallow, prairie Lake Manitoba in relation to adjacent Lake Winnipeg (Manitoba, Canada)

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Abrupt changes in the physical and biological structure of endorheic upland lakes due to 8‐m lake‐level variation during the 20th century

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000