Thought stream's Tumblelog

All of the analytics in the world won’t matter if it remains inaccessible to the people driving an organization — the human decision-makers.

The Data Singularity, Part II: Human-Sizing Big Data : Dataspora Blog

A discovery is premature if its implications cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps to contemporary canonical or generally accepted knowledge.

History of the Actor model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you’ve thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don’t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

Referring to social media as a “media” perpetuates our bias towards it is as a marketing tool, as opposed to an enterprise-wide brand building capability, and that it does belong squarely in the marketing department’s domain.

Forget Social Media: Think Social Profitability | LEVEL5 Strategic Brand Advisors (Toronto) | brandchannel.com

Jean Renoir wrote in his autobiography that someone once asked his father, the painter Auguste, why he painted from nature. Renoir père answered that if he were to try painting a tree in the studio, he would be able to draw four or five different kinds of leaves, and the rest would all look like them. But nature creates millions [his count] of different kinds of trees. I like working in industry for the same reason Renoir liked to paint from nature.

Mihai Budiu’s Blog » An interview with Leslie Lamport

The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

`Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to. Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

Is it luck that he finally created special relativity? Early on, he had laid down some of the pieces by thinking of the fragments. Now that’s the necessary but not sufficient condition.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

The HTML parser will ignore tags which it does not understand, and will ignore attributes which it does not understand of CERN-SGML tags.

Early History of HTML - 1990 to 1992