Slashdot Mirror
Extreme Complexity of Scientific Data Driving New Math Techniques
An anonymous reader writes "According to Wired, 'Today's big data is noisy, unstructured, and dynamic rather than static. It may also be corrupted or incomplete. ... researchers need new mathematical tools in order to glean useful information from the data sets. "Either you need a more sophisticated way to translate it into vectors, or you need to come up with a more generalized way of analyzing it," [Mathematician Jesse Johnson] said. One such new math tool is described later: "... a mathematician at Stanford University, and his then-postdoc ... were fiddling with a badly mangled image on his computer ... They were trying to find a method for improving fuzzy images, such as the ones generated by MRIs when there is insufficient time to complete a scan. On a hunch, Candes applied an algorithm designed to clean up fuzzy images, expecting to see a slight improvement. What appeared on his computer screen instead was a perfectly rendered image. Candes compares the unlikeliness of the result to being given just the first three digits of a 10-digit bank account number, and correctly guessing the remaining seven digits. But it wasn't a fluke. The same thing happened when he applied the same technique to other incomplete images. The key to the technique's success is a concept known as sparsity, which usually denotes an image's complexity, or lack thereof. It's a mathematical version of Occam's razor: While there may be millions of possible reconstructions for a fuzzy, ill-defined image, the simplest (sparsest) version is probably the best fit. Out of this serendipitous discovery, compressed sensing was born.'"
Does Slashdot ONLY promote junk science and maths. Frauds and cons? Yes, we all know about the concept of fractals, and how fractals can be used to create FAKE data that seems semantically pleasing to the Human eye. However, there is a world of difference between producing FAKE data that matches the pattern expectations of our brains, and thus looks correct, and REAL data that science (including medicine) requires.
I am reminded of a true story. In the early days of 'image enhancement', one city in the UK was regularly getting convictions for robbery from surveillance footage that was VERY unclear. They used a so-called specialist image processing company who took the footage, 'enhanced' it (just like you see in CSI) and proved in court the boys-in-blue had caught the guilty party. One problem. It later came to light that the police were giving the enhancement company a photograph of the suspect, and the enhancement company were merging a scan of this photograph with the so-called enhanced video frame. They CLAIMED that this was a legitimate mathematical technique.
Needless to say, with yet another proven case of forensic fraud in the UK 'justice' system, all previous convictions based on such 'evidence' were overturned. The UK police and prosecution bodies have a LONG history of faking forensic evidence- and using prosecution 'experts' spouting absolute nonsense fill with sciencey sounding terms to bamboozle a naive jury (or judge).
Filling in gaps in data DOES have a legitimate place in 'art', like when an old photograph or frame of a movie has a region (damaged or empty down to something like post-conversion 3D) that needs to be filled with a 'texture' that will look to the viewer like it belongs in shot. It has NO, repeat ***NO*** place in science.
Sadly 99.9% of scientists are VERY poor scientists with an extremely limited grasp of fundamental concepts of logic and mathematics. They can quote, repeat, and remember, but they cannot understand. Being the vast majority of ALL scientists, casual sheeple hear more NOISE (fake facts) from the crappy scientists than ever they hear true facts from the good ones. The pseudo science of EUGENICS, for instance, was proven to be total garbage by first class scientists in the UK and Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century, for instance, but was universally adopted by American scientists (who then directly influenced Hitler's scientists), and accepted as proven 'fact' by the population of the USA up through into the 1960s. Even today people like Bill Gates fund the same US Eugenic organisations that operated in the early 20th century, partnered with the Nazis, and pushed for forced sterilisation and medical experimentation on 'inferior' Humans.
Bill Gates continues the work of Eugenics via far more modern methods of societal manipulation of those Gates refers to as 'inferior'. Gates is behind the 'Common Core' curriculum dumbing down the US schools where most ordinary people send their kids, and Gates partnered with RUPERT MURDOCH of Fox News to create the inBloom full surveillance database of every child in the USA
Bill Gates created MSNBC, and you sheeple are constantly told that MSNBC is the very opposite to Fox News. Yet when Bill Gates partners with Murdoch to record intimate details about your child (including sexual development) and your family, and provides that information to any pervert who wants to target children with minimum risk of detection or punishment, you sheeple are supposed to NOT notice this unexplainable arrangement?
Gates even named the company overseeing the database inBloom- which is a pedophile codeword describing a child considered ripe for abuse.
Given the overall percentage of libertarians (1%?) and the overall percentage of liberals (48%?), clearly it isn't anywhere near "all libertarians". This proves that:
The liberals are completely wrong.
That's the only conclusion that can be drawn by anyone who can follow simple logic. People who can follow simple logic knew that already, though.
I'm KIDDING you hyper-sensisitive liberal weenie who is furiously clicking the "reply" button. Sometimes liberals are right, even Obama. Obama was right when he said the lack of a federal budget was a sign of no leadership from the president. Obama was right when he said if the economy isn't back on track in early 2012 he shouldn't be re-elected. Obama was right when he said it would be irresponsible of him to run for president because a presidential candidate should "know what you're doing". Liberals are very often right.