Tue 1 Jul 2008
Better Living Through Correlative Analytics
Posted by Sean Hyde-Moyer under Chrome Cow Labs , Code| Add Comments
I read with great delight Kevin Kelly’s recent post over at the Technium, "The Google Way of Science".
Mr. Kelly is a big fan of intellectual broadsides - technological Zen koans, and this one is a doozie.
The elevator pitch is this: As we accumulate more and more data, petabytes of the stuff, scientists can knock of the difficult and time consuming process of coming up with, then testing, peer reviewing, then repeatedly testing a hypothesis, and simply look with special tools (petascopes?) through these vast pools of data for previously undiscovered correlations, which with enough data points become as good as natural law.
Imagine you had a database with a vast number of entries detailing how long it took objects to fall to the ground from varying heights.
Using the field of Correlative Analytics, you could simple query the database asking how long it takes for an object to fall 25 meters. With enough data points, you could get answers as accurate as if you actually had a theory of gravitation, though the database and related search software have no implicit theory of gravity built in to them.
As it turns out, this is much the way Google language translation services work. They have no theory of French, English, or Chinese, the simply have very large amounts of bilingual translations they can use to look for correlations. It is science by Bayesian filter.
Except that it isn’t.
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