“Intelligence can let you solve harder problems, but some problems are just resistant, and you get to a point that being smarter isn’t going to help you at all, and I think a lot of our problems are like that. Like in politics – it’s not like we’re saying that if only we had a politician who was slightly smarter all our problems would go away.” Peter Norvig, director of research in Google, Guardian
This just needs to be re-posted [from Kottke]: [F]or the Society of Indexers, book indices are a topic that holds endless fascination. And I do mean endless. The Prime Minister of England wrote to the Society of Indexers at the society’s founding back in freaking 1958. “I can scarcely conceal from you the fact that I am at present somewhat occupied with other matters, so that I cannot say all that comes into my mind and memory on the subject of indexing.” … One of the longest running features of the society’s publication, The Indexer, is its reviews of indices which are snippets culled from book reviews that pertain to the book’s index… They also regularly publish articles that meditate on what it means to be an index, defend indexing, and a look at the history of indexing societies. These guys should definitely be invited to the World Congress on Referencing Styles.
Obama Analytics Not only Nate Silver crunches numbers Marijuana Use and Driving Incidents More of these weird correlations Registry for Research Designs Why it’s not such a great idea The oldest town in Europe Unearthed Bubbles. Jason Tozer [via Colossal]
‘Science is like sex – it might have practical consequences but that’s not why you do it!’ This seems to be a modified version of a quote by the physicist Richard Feynman that I heard last week at a meeting organized by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (the major research funding agency in the Netherlands). It kind of sums up the attitudes of natural scientists to the increasing pressures all researchers face to justify their grant applications in terms of the possible practical use (utilization, or valorization) of their research results. Which is totally fine by me. I perfectly understand that it is impossible to anticipate all the possible future practical consequences of fundmental research. On the other hand, I see no harm in forcing researchers to, at the very least, think about the possible real-world applications of their work. The current equilibrium in which reflection on possible practical applications is required, but ‘utilization’ is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting a grant, seems like a good compromise. Of course, I come from a field (public administration) where demonstrating the scientific contribution is usually more difficult than showing the practical applicability of the results: so my view might be biased. I am not even sure what fundamental research in the social sciences looks like. Even rather esoteric work on non-cooperative game theory has been directly spurred by practical concerns related to the Cold War (and sponsored by the RAND corporation) and has rather directly led to the design of real-world social instituions (like the…