Glossary

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Term	Definition
Pre-flection	Pre-flection is a reflective strategy or session held before an experience, training, or learning task begins. Science General
Pre-registration	Publicly recording a study's hypotheses, methods and analysis plan before collecting data, to prevent p-hacking and selective reporting. Science General
Prebunking	A proactive strategy to build resilience against misinformation by teaching people to recognize manipulation tactics before they encounter them. Based on psychological inoculation theory, it works like a vaccine: exposing people to a "weakened" dose of disinformation techniques to help them develop mental "antibodies". Antiscience
Precession	The wobble over thousands of years of the tilt of the Earths axis with respect to the plane of the solar system. Climate Change Denial
Precision	The degree to which repeated measurements or observations under the same conditions show the same results. Science General
Predatory Journal	A publication that charges authors fees but provides little or no genuine peer review or editorial oversight, allowing low-quality or false work to appear legitimate. Public Trust
Preprint	A research paper shared publicly before peer review. Useful for speed, but findings may change or be rejected after review. Science General
Preservatives	Compounds like 2-phenoxyethanol or trace thimerosal that prevent harmful bacteria or fungus from growing in multi-dose vials. Vaccines
Pretraining	Pretraining is the large-scale learning phase that gives an AI model broad knowledge before fine-tuning. LLMs are pretrained to predict the next token using a massive dataset that includes the whole public internet and any private, licensed, and synthetic data the developers can find or create. Artificial Intelligence
Probabilistic	Probabilistic means relating to or based on the likelihood that a specific event or outcome will happen, rather than providing a fixed or absolute certainty. Artificial Intelligence