Change is constant. Or so the saying goes. However, even change is ever-varying. So perhaps we should say: Change is constantly changing. As occupants of planet earth, we intuitively know this and yet strive to keep everything the same, at least those things that do well by us. Uncertainty derails the best of our plans, even uncertainties that we recognize up front.
The recent and ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has raised some questions as to the preparedness of Big Oil to respond to an emergency spill. An examination of their emergency spill plans has garnered criticism but is it justified? How much effort should companies spend on risk identification and mitigation?
Overview of techniques to accelerate Excel Models and custom applications.... I have included a few fun user defined functions as examples.
Dr David Berlinski (2000) makes the historical observation that two great ideas have most influenced the technological progress of the Western world:
The first is the calculus, the second the algorithm. The calculus and the rich body of mathematical analysis to which it gave rise made modern science possible; but it has been the algorithm that has made possible the modern world. (Berlinski, p. xv)
Dr Berlinski concludes that:
The great era of mathematical physics is now over. The three-hundred-year effort to represent the material world in mathematical terms has exhausted itself. The understanding that it was to provide is infinitely closer than it was when Isaac Newton wrote in the late seventeenth century, but it is still infinitely far away…. The algorithm has come to occupy a central place in our imagination. It is the second great scientific idea of the West. There is no third. (Berlinski, pp. xv-xvi)
Source: Berlinski, D (2000). The Advent of the Algorithm: The 300-Year Journey from an Idea to the Computer. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.
Related Posts: Enter the Algorithm