08 NOV 2019 by ideonexus

 What are Observations?

What are observations? Some philosophers have taken them to be sensory events: the occurrence of smells, feels, noises, color patches. This way lies frustration. What we ordinarily notice and testify to are rather the objects and events out in the world. It is to these that our very language is geared, because language is a social institution, learned from other people who share the scene to which the words refer. Observation sentences, like theoretical sentences, are for the most part senten...
Folksonomies: belief
Folksonomies: belief
  1  notes
 
24 DEC 2016 by ideonexus

 Natural Selection Resembles Bayesian Inference

The analogy is mathematically precise, and fascinating. In rough terms, it says that the process of natural selection resembles the process of Bayesian inference. A population of organisms can be thought of as having various 'hypotheses' about how to survive—each hypothesis corresponding to a different allele. (Roughly, an allele is one of several alternative versions of a gene.) In each successive generation, the process of natural selection modifies the proportion of organisms having each...
Folksonomies: evolution biology bayesian
Folksonomies: evolution biology bayesian
  1  notes
 
25 FEB 2016 by ideonexus

 227 cognitive verbs organized into 24 categories of seman...

Add to: combine, deepen, improve, incorporate, integrate, introduceArrange: arrange, list, organize, sortBig picture: comprehend, contextualize, orient, understandCollaborate: collaborate, contribute, engage, interact, participate, shareCompare: associate, categorize, classify, compare, connect, contrast, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, link, match, relateCreate: accomplish, achieve, build, compose, construct, create, develop, draft, form, generate, initiate, produce, publish, recor...
  1  notes
 
17 NOV 2014 by ideonexus

 An Eloquent Description of Science and Wonder

As I gathered information for this book, I was continually reminded of the reality that science, rooted as it is in the certainties of the physical world, is a process that necessarily unfolds over time. In school, science classes tend to work according to this linear model; there's a “beginning, middle, and end” to science investigations, no matter how hard teachers may fight the “cookbook” reductionism that threatens true scientific inquiry. Yet, in probing further, I came to unders...
Folksonomies: science education wonder
Folksonomies: science education wonder
  1  notes
 
21 JUN 2014 by ideonexus

 The Rate of Change of a Rate of Change

In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word 'simplest'. It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as dx/dt = K(d^2x/dy^2) much less simple than 'it oozes', of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement ...
  1  notes
 
30 APR 2014 by ideonexus

 Bottom-Up VS Top-Down Method for Finding Laws

Broadly speaking, to discover new regularities and laws we either follow top–down or the bottom–up approach (Fig. 1). In the top–down approach, the search begins with an external observation e.g., Newton’s laws of motion. The observer intuitively imagines a set of elements, a set of interactions and a mathematically expressible form to connect the two. Components are weaved into a mental map and experiments are planned to verify or nullify the model. If the experimental observations r...
Folksonomies: theory terminology law
Folksonomies: theory terminology law
  1  notes

Fascinating explanation for why laws are harder and harder to find as we move into macroscopic sciences.