Go read Kevin Kelly’s important essay “Speculations on the Future of Science”. In particular, read the sections on “Combinatorial Sweep Exploration”, “Evolutionary Search”, “Multiple Hypothesis Matrix”, “Pattern Augmentation”, “Adaptive Real Time Experiments”, &c.
Now think not merely about science, but engineering as well. Think about what makes one different from the other. Historically, that is.
(Via 3quarksdaily)
The last is a line from what bids fair to be one of the management books of the year. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (Harvard Business School Press), by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, is a compelling tour of management conventional wisdom and why it so often turns out to be unwise, untrue and a stranger to fact – bollocks, in fact. Every potential manager should be made to read it before they are allowed to be in charge of anything, even a whelk stall.
The way it’s done is changing:
WHAT makes a scientific revolution? Thomas Kuhn famously described it as a %u201Cparadigm shift%u201D%u2014the change that takes place when one idea is overtaken by another, usually through the replacement over time of the generation of scientists who adhered to an old idea with another that cleaves to a new one. These revolutions can be triggered by technological breakthroughs, such as the construction of the first telescope (which overthrew the Aristotelian idea that heavenly bodies are perfect and unchanging) and by conceptual breakthroughs such as the invention of calculus (which allowed the laws of motion to be formulated). This week, a group of computer scientists claimed that developments in their subject will trigger a scientific revolution of similar proportions in the next 15 years.
Will the century-old academic scientific culture adapt, or snap? What do those two outcomes mean, exactly?
As seen at Barbara’s Odd Ends:
Ballade of the Book-Hunter
In torrid heats of late July,
In March, beneath the bitter bise,
He book-hunts while the loungers fly—
He book-hunts, though December freeze;
In breeches baggy at the knees,
And heedless of the public jeers,
For these, for these, he hoards his fees—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!No dismal stall escapes his eye,
He turns o’er tomes of low degrees,
There soiled romanticists may lie,
Or Restoration comedies;
Each tract that flutters in the breeze
For him is charged with hopes and fears,
In mouldy novels fancy sees
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.With restless eyes that peer and spy,
Sad eyes that heed not skies nor trees,
In dismal nooks he loves to pry,
Whose motto ever more is Spes!
But ah! the fabled treaure flees;
Grown rarer with the fleeting years,
In rich men’s shelves they take their ease,—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!ENVOY
Prince, all the things that tease and please,—
Fame, hope, wealth, kisses, cheers, and tears,
What are they but such toys as these—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs?— Andrew Lang, in Ballades and Verses Vain.
Visit the R Graph Gallery for ideas on R graphic techniques.
(Via Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.)