27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Redundancy of English language is a Goldilocks zone for C...
In Shannon’s terms, the feature of messages that makes codecracking possible is redundancy. A historian of cryptography, David Kahn, explained it like this: “Roughly, redundancy means that more symbols are transmitted in a message than are actually needed to bear the information.” Information resolves our uncertainty; redundancy is every part of a message that tells us nothing new. Whenever we can guess what comes next, we’re in the presence of redundancy. Letters can be redundant: be... 1 
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notes27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Successful Prediction
Successful prediction is the revenge of the nerds. Superforecasters are intelligent but not necessarily brilliant, falling just in the top fifth of the population. They are highly numerate, not in the sense of being math whizzes but in the sense of comfortably thinking in guesstimates. They have personality traits that psychologists call “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity and a taste for variety), “need for cognition” (pleasure taken in intellectual activity), and “int...Folksonomies: statistics prediction
Folksonomies: statistics prediction
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notes31 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Anthropologization
. 'Anthropologization' is the great internal threat to knowledge in our day. We are inclined to believe that man has emancipated himself from himself since his discovery that he is not at the centre of creation, nor in the middle of space, nor even, perhaps, the summit and culmination of life; but though man is no longer sovereign in the kingdom of the world, though he no longer reigns at the centre of being, the 'human sciences' are dangerous intermediaries in the space of knowledge. The tru... 1 notes
notes25 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Jay Rosen: Information Overload
Filters in a digital world work not by removing what is filtered out; they simply don't select for it. The unselected material is still there, ready to be let through by someone else's filter. Intelligent filters, which is what we need, come in three kinds:
A smart person who takes in a lot and tells you what you need to know. The ancient term for this is "editor." The front page of the New York Times still works this way.
An algorithm that sifts through the choices other smart people have... 1 notes
notes13 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
With Obtuse Spelling Rules, Pronunciation Becomes Reliant...
Since our current orthografy bears no real relation
to the present pronunciation, but is at best an imperfect attempt to represent that of the Elizabethan
period, English pronunciation has become almost entirely a matter of oral tradition as unsafe a gide in
regard to correctness in speech as it is in regard to
correctness in history. We learn to talk, and continue
to talk, entirely "by ear," and with the same tendency
to uncertainty and variation as do those who play music
by ear. The...13 APR 2013 by ideonexus
The Problem with Occam's Razor
In climate forecasting, the situation is more equivocal: the theory about the greenhouse effect is strong, which supports more complicated models. However, temperature data is very noisy, which argues against them. Which consideration wins out? We can address this question empirically, by evaluating the success and failure of different predictive approaches in climate science. What matters most, as always, is how well the predictions do in the real world.
I would urge caution against reducin...Not all models can be simple.
05 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Negative Capability
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caugh...According to wikipedia: "...the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts." Here is the first use of the term by John Keats, where it sounds more like the ability to remain calm and rational in the face of uncertainty and not jump to conclusions without evidence.
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Deducing the Original Arrangement of Chemicals
The chemists who uphold dualism are far from being agreed among themselves; nevertheless, all of them in maintaining their opinion, rely upon the phenomena of chemical reactions. For a long time the uncertainty of this method has been pointed out: it has been shown repeatedly, that the atoms put into movement during a reaction take at that time a new arrangement, and that it is impossible to deduce the old arrangement from the new one. It is as if, in the middle of a game of chess, after the ... 1 notes
notesFrom a compound is like trying to figure out the history of a chess game from the positions of the pieces on the board at present.
30 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
The Importance of Large Samples
Any experiment may be regarded as forming an individual of a 'population' of experiments which might be performed under the same conditions. A series of experiments is a sample drawn from this population.
Now any series of experiments is only of value in so far as it enables us to form a judgment as to the statistical constants of the population to which the experiments belong. In a great number of cases the question finally turns on the value of a mean, either directly, or as the mean diffe...Folksonomies: statistics sampling
Folksonomies: statistics sampling
1 notes
notesSmall samples introduce two potential errors.
16 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
If We Knew the Outcome of a War, There Would be No Need t...
The determining cause of most wars in the past has been, and probably will be of all wars in the future, the uncertainty of the result; war is acknowledged to be a challenge to the Unknown, it is often spoken of as an appeal to the God of Battles. The province of science is to foretell; this is true of every department of science. And the time must come—how soon we do not know—when the real science of war, something quite different from the application of science to the means of war, will...1 
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notesQuote from Sir Michael Foster Times Literary Supplement, 28 Nov 1902, 353-4.
