Posts tagged as:

science

How to Learn about Everything in Belorussian

August 25, 2010

“How to Learn about Everything”, now in Belorussian translation:
       
(With thanks to Patricia Clausnitzer!)

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Data-mining the bioscience literature

June 24, 2010

Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics now meet paperomics: Automated trawling, not of whole slices of nature, but of whole slices of the scientific literature — the idea is to look for indirect links among papers that may indicate undiscovered links in nature.
From the Computable Genomix website:
…Powered by patent pending next generation text mining technology, GeneIndexer [...]

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Inquiry in Engineering, Design in Science:
Completing the Matrix

June 7, 2010

The focus of science is inquiry, and the focus of engineering is design. Just as sensory and motor neurons run antiparallel through the structure of the body, so inquiry and design run antiparallel through the structure of knowledge. Eye and hand, perception and action, measuring and making, science seeking knowledge, engineering seeking function.
I’ve been exploring [...]

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Knowledge and causality in inquiry and design

June 3, 2010

The structure of science and engineering, a big mistake, and a book

See also: “The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering”

An effect may have one possible cause, or many. The weight of a stone has a single cause, gravity, but the flight of a stone coming over a wall could have one of many [...]

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Is 华大基因 doing science?
     (aka BGI)

March 18, 2010

In a decade, the global Human Genome Project sequenced 3 billion DNA base pairs. Today, a single machine (the Illumina HiSeq™ 2000) can sequence 25 billion base pairs per day, and BGI (the Shenzhen company formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute) has purchased 128 of them. This puts BGI “on track to surpass [...]

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How to study for a career in nanotechnology

February 24, 2010

Students often ask me for advice on how to study for a career in nanotechnology, and as you might imagine, providing a good answer is challenging. “Nanotechnology” refers to a notoriously broad range of areas of science and technology, and progress during a student’s career will open new areas, and some are yet to be [...]

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Exploratory Engineering:
Applying the predictive power of science
to future technologies

June 26, 2009

While I’m on the subject of foundational concepts in the relationship between science and engineering, here’s the outline of a methodology for applying current science to assess lower bounds on the capabilities of a select subset of future technologies. (As many of you know, some of those lower bounds are startlingly high.)
A subset of the [...]

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The Antiparallel Structures
of Science and Engineering

June 22, 2009

Science and engineering are inseparable domains of thought and action, linked by a shared language of mass and energy, molecules and thermodynamics, physical systems and physical law. This shared language makes communication deceptively easy — easy, because scientists and engineers can see every detail in the same way; deceptive, because they see these details in [...]

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Science and Engineering:
A Layer-Cake of Inquiry and Design

June 16, 2009

Inquiry is the essence of science, design is the essence of engineering, and in their pure forms, these activities are utterly different. Scientific inquiry draws observations from the world to reshape the mind; engineering design projects ideas from the mind to reshape the world. One is an eye, the other a hand, afferent and efferent [...]

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A Welcome to New Readers

June 2, 2009

In the last few days, other sites have directed many thousands of readers to my recent posts on knowledge and learning: How to Understand Everything (and Why), How to Learn About Everything, and A Map of Science.
The learning process I describe led me to focus on what I am persuaded is the greatest technological [...]

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How to Learn About Everything

May 27, 2009

My recent post “How to Understand Everything (and Why)” discussed an untaught, integrative kind of knowledge, and why is so important in science and engineering — how it can leverage specialized knowledge and improve the trade-off between bold innovation and costly blunders. I discussed the nature of this knowledge and how it can be applied, [...]

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A Map of Science

May 20, 2009

A comment on my previous post reminded me of a wonderful visualization that amounts to a map of the whole of science, generated by citation-based clustering of almost a million papers. The image above is a view of an extraordinarily information-dense representation, not just of connections among fields, but of their content. At 13,566,672 pixels, [...]

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