Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Back

Welcome back to my blog, after a span of 13 days of not blogging! It has been really really hectic at school, with all the research and everything. After all the reason being, the PhD years are closing in. And the thought itself runs a streamy blood down me - the magnanimity of a lifetime's dream to make a difference. Specifically, I have been stressed about several research and research-related issues. And my night-owlish habits have also been giving me a tough time live up to normal human schedules!

Well, excuse is not a good option especially when it comes to the best of someone's pastimes, I am talking about writing, which I always enjoy to the fullest. It is a way to better understand myself. It provides an affordance to tide over difficult times. And nevertheless it is a platform to instantiate my online presence, as someone rightly said, "The Web is really the last resort where you can exercise Freedom of Speech"!

However, all this time not blogging has taught me a lesson. That, you don't need a medium to tread a difficult path. You need to have the confidence that you can make it till the end. After every sunset, there is a sunrise.

There have been several things running on my mind everyday, each day that I was not blogging. Most of them were related to my research, which goaded me to revisit my desire of starting a "brainstorming" social research blog. Let's see when that finally happens.

I encountered an interesting idea in the Wired magazine last week. And it was how there has been an inherent shift in the way we tackle scientific research now-a-days, especially armed with zillions of data. Have you heard of PetaByte? It is as of now the biggest sized information defined! And what the magazine said was how the profuse online data is changing our basic methods.

I felt research, for example, a hundred years back was linear and unidirectional. Scientists would form a hypothesis, develop a mathematical framework, test or simulate it on some data and thereby validate the hypothesis. However, with those overwhelming data, research paradigm appears to be circular. We observe a phenonmenon, form hypothesis, check if the data fits that hypothesis, formalize a model and then test and validate; which is followed recursively given the data, resulting in a circular paradigm.

With this interesting thought, I would leave. Hopefully, given the same amount of stress at work, I would be more regular with the blogs from now on!


1 comment:

alok said...

Hey, Welcome BACK :)

I see you have a good Idea about blogging; I may add something to it soon.

Keep blogging :)