Review: The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It probably takes a special sort of person to dive into an entire book about one statistical theory, but for those so-motivated, this one pays off.

The Shelf Life of a Scientist

How quickly after a scientist stops publishing does he or she fade to obscurity?   Well, that’s a broader question than I plan to answer here.   But I can do a little lifelogging data analysis to figure out if my expiration date has yet passed.

Semantic Searching Meets Dataporn

Following up on my earlier discussion of semantic searching and scholarly research, I’ve done a little more digging on recent work done in this area, emphasizing the visualization problem, which should really be added as another “major advance” needed to operationalize semantic searching.

From Plankton to Hailstones

Another drive-by brainoid: while learning about the Processing visualization language, I stumbled across this beautiful visualization of a system dynamics model of marine ecosystems, which captures the evolution of three discrete categories: nutrients, phytoplankton, zooplankton (the latter two across a range of size bins):

Social Networking, Semantic Searching and Science

Executive summary: The tools and tricks of scientific collaboration are still pretty old school.  With the ivory tower not being a major profit center, how can innovations in the private sector (which far outstrip academia’s capabilities) be brought over to accelerate scientific research and discovery?  (Caveat: I have no answers, just a problem statement!)