Category Archives: Science

Thursday 16th June 2016

Shadbolt and Wakeham

Both the Shadbolt and Wakeham reports on CS and STEM Graduate Employability have now been published and, as predicted, they largely don’t say what the government was hoping they would.

Both reports point to the need to improve the quality of the data available, greater cooperation between all parties and a closer look at programme accreditation. Nowhere is to be found the university-bashing the reports’ commissioners probably expected. The full text for each report is available from the following links:

Click to access ind-16-5-shadbolt-review-computer-science-graduate-employability.pdf

Click to access ind-16-6-wakeham-review-stem-graduate-employability.pdf

1 Comment | tags: CS Graduate Employability, Nigel Shadbolt, STEM employability, William Wakeham | posted in Academia, Computer Science, Computing, Education, Engineering, Industry, Politics, Science

Tuesday 2nd February 2016

Known Unknowns

By Vic Grout

This month’s post may make a valid point. Or it may not. Or it may be impossible to tell, the concept of which itself may or may not make sense by the end of the piece!

How do we handle things we don’t know? More precisely, how do we cope with things we know we don’t know? All right then: how do we handle things we know we can’t know?

As is the nature of this blog, the examples we’re going to discuss are (at first, at least) taken from the fields of computer science and mathematics; but there are plenty of analogies in the other sciences. This certainly isn’t a purely theoretical discussion.

On the whole, we like things (statements or propositions) in mathematics (say) to be right or wrong: true or false. Some simple examples are:

The statement “2 > 3” is false
The statement “There is a value of x such that x < 4” is true
The proposition “There are integer values of x, y and z satisfying the equation x³ + y³ = z³” is false

OK, that’s pretty straightforward but how about this one?

“Every even number (greater than 2) is the sum of two prime numbers”

2 Comments | tags: Incompleteness, Limits of knowledge, Undecidable propositions, Unsolvable problems | posted in Computer Science, Mathematics, Philosophy, Science

Wednesday 6th January 2016

Seeing the Bigger Picture: ‘STEEPLED’ and ‘The Great Curtain’

By Vic Grout

Futurology is a difficult and inexact science, with a poor history of getting it right. However, there are ways of giving yourself a chance or, at least, avoiding some of the more obvious mistakes and oversights. This post looks at a tool for considering the bigger picture in futurology and reflects on the results of using it with various user groups.

We’ve made the point before that technologists aren’t necessarily (or solely) the best people to ask what the future may hold because:

they only tend to think about technology, or
when they think about things other than technology, they’re not very good at it.

Of course, there’s probably a parallel observation to be made about any focused specialist in a particular field (economists, lawyers, politicians, etc.) but the observation doesn’t invalidate 1 and 2: it just shares the blame around a bit. So, what can be done to help, and where does it take us?

3 Comments | tags: Fermi Paradox, Futurology, Predicting the future, Social impact, The Great Curtain | posted in Computer Science, Engineering, Industry, Philosophy, Politics, Science

Thursday 5th November 2015

‘Will the Robots Take Our Jobs?’ Isn’t Really the Important Question

By Vic Grout

Professor Stephen Hawking provoked considerable debate recently by suggesting that we could have more to fear from the nature of capitalism in future than armies of intelligent robots. The response was immediate, robust, deeply personal and entirely predictable.

The basic premise of the discussion was Hawking noting that, if most of the work of a future society was performed by machines, then how we occupied ourselves instead was much more of a social, political, economic, ethical, demographic, etc. question than it was technological. The rebuttal was essentially: