Saturday, August 16, 2008

Rectory by the Sea

Ok, so no one's going to the Cook Islands. After Kathy's picture yesterday i just had to fire up the Rectory kitchen and have a seafood feast: Rectory Sevillan seafood (prawns, scallops and calamari); Sydney rocks; Rectory Fried Fish and mussels in their own liquor. I'm too full...



Helpful serving postulants are a boon...

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Friday, August 15, 2008

Verrry late Fish Friday


"Merrrs" as Rear Admiral Curt-Arse of Kansas calls him.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

It’s The End, he tells ya!!

Dammit, but I don’t have time to essay how and why I believe this guy is wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Just to begin with, I think the kind of science he’s advocating is at the Skinnerian, behavioural psychology level of understanding, whereby it’s shown that a dog salivates because it sees a nice tasty Shmacko.

Having said that, I should add that Chris Anderson’s piece is a fascinating and challenging read nonetheless.

So please enjoy “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete” by Chris Anderson (editor in chief of Wired magazine).

Just for a taste:

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

... the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

Heavens, isn’t formulating, testing and eventually discarding ‘models’ half the bloody fun?

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