Quote of the day: Tradition

credit: ?

Quote of the day - machine learning

Climate change and the glass half full

Quote of the day:

"Some people complain that this is the hottest summer in the last 125 years, but I like to think of it as the coolest summer of the next 125 years! Glass half full!" (Carter Bays)

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day - social science

“We live in an era of social science, and have become accustomed to understanding the social world in terms of 'forces,' 'pressures', 'processes', and 'developments'. It is easy to forget that those 'forces' are statistical summaries of the deeds of millions of men and women who act on their beliefs in pursuit of their desires. The habit of submerging the individual into abstractions can lead not only to bad science (it’s not as if the 'social forces' obeyed Newton’s laws) but to dehumanization" (Steven Pinker)

Quote of the Day: induced demand

“We assume that car use is an incompressible liquid that must be routed somewhere. But it’s more more like a gas that fills whatever space it's given.” Ian Lockwood, HT Taras Grescoe

The creative process lollipop chart

Stefanie Posavec came up with this brilliant 'chart' to illustrate the creative process of coming up with a great idea.

It reminds me of a story of this Brazilian band (Paralamas do Sucesso), when the lead singer/composer was asked about their success. Long time ago a journalist asked him: "When a band releases a new album, they usually get one maybe two songs in the top hits. How come you get so many top hits for every new album you release after so many years on the road?". His secrete, his said, was that every day he would write the lyrics of a new song. It took a lot of discipline, for sure, but at the end of the year he would have more than 300 songs. Most of them would suck, of course, but certainly a few would be good material that could be worked further.

Ok, I don't remember the exact words of the dialogue, but you get the idea. And frankly, I think that's a good advice for young researchers looking for good research questions. Read a lot of papers so you have an informed understanding of what are the knowledge gaps in your field. Then put yourself to ask as many questions as you can think of and write them down without censoring yourself. At some point you will have many questions (20? 50?). Revisit your list of questions after a few weeks and some more reading. You'll realize most of them won't work. Some are too ambitious, some have been answered already, some are just not that relevant etc. Once you have three or four questions that sound reasonably good, it's time to do more reading and to discuss these questions with more experienced mentors/supervisors/friends. Remember to be humble.

"You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one." (Albert Einstein )

The bottom line is this:

credit: Stefanie Posavec

Quote of the Day

And damn, I'm good at this!   the making mistakes part, at least 

I saw this quote on via Programming Wisdom, great account to follow on Twitter.

Quote of they day: programming

"In programming the hard part isn’t solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve."

  Paul Graham, HT Programming Wisdom

ps. a timely quote that reflects my struggle working on the 4th paper of my doctoral research.

Quote of the day: programming

"Computers are stupid and they will act like they don't know what you're talking about" #SfAMECS #Bioinformatics pic.twitter.com/OR1hjv1Z2s

— Jennie French (@jenniefrench95) 19 April 2017

Quote of the day: the idea of community

A passage of the book "The Just City", where Susan Fainstein quotes D. Harvey to draw attention to how the idea of "Community" is a double-edged value. At the same time a community provides its members with social support, it is also exclusionary.

" 'Community' has ever been one of the key sites of social control and surveillance, bordering on overt social repression. Well-founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all sorts of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls) .... As a consequence, community has often been a barrier to rather than facilitator of progressive social change, and much of the populist migration out of villages (both rural and urban) arose precisely because they were oppressive to the human spirit and otiose as a form of sociopolitical organization". (David Harvey, 1997)

Quote of the day: Plans

For when you start your PhD: 

"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything" Eisenhower

When you get close to the end of your PhD:

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Mike Tyson

I could say Mike Tyson is my academic hero right now :)

Quote of the Day

"My interest is not data, it's the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers." 

(Hans Rosling in an interview in 2013)

Thanks Sunniva Sandbukt for bringing this quote to my attention.

Quote of the day: measurement

'Not everything that can be measured is important, and not everything that is important can be measured'

I heard this sentence the other day, but apparently the original one is a bit different.

Quote of the Day: Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.

— Taleb Bot (@TalebBot) August 18, 2015

Quote of the Day: progress

Sean Illing: What would you consider the most dangerous idea in human history?

Tyler Cowen: The idea of progress. ... Well, we're all for progress. It's easy to say the most dangerous idea is evil or racism or genocide or murder, but those ideas tend to persist only when they're packaged with some notion of progress. Progress, for all of its good, brings us new technologies and threats against which we can't deter, environmental problems, biodiversity loss, and so on. That we cannot avoid believing in progress may also prove to be our undoing.

This is from an interview T. Cowen gave to Vox.

Spreadsheets

true story

"Some of my best friends use spreadsheets" @JennyBryan #csvconf pic.twitter.com/elQkcUtOeW

— Rich FitzJohn (@rgfitzjohn) 4 May 2016

Quote of the day: immigrants

Louis CK: 

Quote of the Day: statistics

via densitydesign, DH Group at FBK, Moritz Stefaner

Quote of the Day: Anxiety

Anxiety will paralyze you, but dispair will break the spell. #phd

— Juliano Spyer (@jasper) December 21, 2015