There is a growing fashion for collecting data of any description. This is 1. .... the dinosaurs of the electronic age are the computers which need 2....
be fed with prodigious amounts of data.. Anyone 3. .... access to a computer feels a compulsion to feed it 4. .... as much data as possible. Fortunately there is no 5. .... of anyone running 'out of data. It is always possible to generate 6. .... much data as one wants.
Imagine that you are measuring a potato. 7. .... could measure its longest
length or its widest width. But you could 8. .... choose to measure its circumference at an infinite number of points and 9. .... have an infinite source of data. You could do the same for any 10. ..... of potatoes. .
The diagram shows the outline of a shape cut out 11. .... cardboard. It is
possible to measure lengths at any point and in 12. .... direction so generating limitless data. There would have to be a reason 13. .... doing this but, too often, the possibility of measuring something is so appealing 14. ..... the reason is only found afterwards, as a sort of excuse.
The data 15. .... can be obtained from people is limitless in the 16. .... way:
height, weight, colouring, racial background, protein chemistry, smoking 17. .... , food habits, food preferences, buying habits, income levels, attitudes
to work, political attitudes, sleeping 18. .... , psychological hang-ups, sexual performance and so on. In most cases science 19. ... now become a matter of measuring everything in sight, feeding it all into a 20. .... , asking the computer to sort out which things relate to which, and then 21. ..... back and waiting for a significant idea to emerge.
Francis Bacon who is credited 22. .... being the father of modern science was a Lord Chancellor of England 23. .... Elizabethan times. His basic notion was that instead of thinking how things ought 24. .... be (as was fashionable at the time) scientists should carefully observe nature 25. .... list down the features they saw. There would then be a general comparison 26. .... the items which had certain features and those which did not. For 27. .... long time his ideas were regarded as impractical until, suddenly, the computer made them 28. .... . Unfortunately, data only becomes information when it is looked at through the spectacles 29. .... an idea; the idea has to come first.
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