full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Vittorio Loreto: Need a new idea? Start at the edge of what is known

Unscramble the Blue Letters


And now comes the bad news. We are very, very bad at grasping this space. Think of it. Let's make an experiment. Try to think about all the possible things you could do in the next, say, 24 hours. Here the key word is "all." Of course you can conceive a few options, like having a dirnk, writing a letter, also sleeping during this boring talk, if you can. But not all of them. So think about an alien invasion, now, here, in mialn, or me — I stopped thinking for 15 mtunies.

So it's very difficult to conceive this scpae, but actually we have an excuse. So it's not so easy to conceive this space because we are trying to cvcioene the occurrence of something bnard new, so something that never occurred before, so we don't have clues. A typical solution could be looking at the future with the eyes of the past, so relying on all the time series of past events and hoping that this is enough to predict the future. But we know this is not working. For instance, this was the first attempt for wehetar forecasts, and it failed. And it fialed because of the great complexity of the uielndnyrg phenomenon. So now we know that predictions had to be based on modeling, which means crantieg a styitenhc model of the system, simulating this model and then projecting the system into the future through this model. And now we can do this in a lot of cases with the help of a lot of data.

Open Cloze


And now comes the bad news. We are very, very bad at grasping this space. Think of it. Let's make an experiment. Try to think about all the possible things you could do in the next, say, 24 hours. Here the key word is "all." Of course you can conceive a few options, like having a _____, writing a letter, also sleeping during this boring talk, if you can. But not all of them. So think about an alien invasion, now, here, in _____, or me — I stopped thinking for 15 _______.

So it's very difficult to conceive this _____, but actually we have an excuse. So it's not so easy to conceive this space because we are trying to ________ the occurrence of something _____ new, so something that never occurred before, so we don't have clues. A typical solution could be looking at the future with the eyes of the past, so relying on all the time series of past events and hoping that this is enough to predict the future. But we know this is not working. For instance, this was the first attempt for _______ forecasts, and it failed. And it ______ because of the great complexity of the __________ phenomenon. So now we know that predictions had to be based on modeling, which means ________ a _________ model of the system, simulating this model and then projecting the system into the future through this model. And now we can do this in a lot of cases with the help of a lot of data.

Solution


  1. underlying
  2. failed
  3. creating
  4. space
  5. minutes
  6. synthetic
  7. drink
  8. weather
  9. conceive
  10. milan
  11. brand

Original Text


And now comes the bad news. We are very, very bad at grasping this space. Think of it. Let's make an experiment. Try to think about all the possible things you could do in the next, say, 24 hours. Here the key word is "all." Of course you can conceive a few options, like having a drink, writing a letter, also sleeping during this boring talk, if you can. But not all of them. So think about an alien invasion, now, here, in Milan, or me — I stopped thinking for 15 minutes.

So it's very difficult to conceive this space, but actually we have an excuse. So it's not so easy to conceive this space because we are trying to conceive the occurrence of something brand new, so something that never occurred before, so we don't have clues. A typical solution could be looking at the future with the eyes of the past, so relying on all the time series of past events and hoping that this is enough to predict the future. But we know this is not working. For instance, this was the first attempt for weather forecasts, and it failed. And it failed because of the great complexity of the underlying phenomenon. So now we know that predictions had to be based on modeling, which means creating a synthetic model of the system, simulating this model and then projecting the system into the future through this model. And now we can do this in a lot of cases with the help of a lot of data.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
starting point 2
australian outback 2
mathematical scheme 2
theory predicts 2


Important Words


  1. alien
  2. attempt
  3. bad
  4. based
  5. boring
  6. brand
  7. cases
  8. clues
  9. complexity
  10. conceive
  11. creating
  12. data
  13. difficult
  14. drink
  15. easy
  16. events
  17. excuse
  18. experiment
  19. eyes
  20. failed
  21. forecasts
  22. future
  23. grasping
  24. great
  25. hoping
  26. hours
  27. instance
  28. invasion
  29. key
  30. letter
  31. lot
  32. means
  33. milan
  34. minutes
  35. model
  36. modeling
  37. news
  38. occurred
  39. occurrence
  40. options
  41. phenomenon
  42. predict
  43. predictions
  44. projecting
  45. relying
  46. series
  47. simulating
  48. sleeping
  49. solution
  50. space
  51. stopped
  52. synthetic
  53. system
  54. talk
  55. thinking
  56. time
  57. typical
  58. underlying
  59. weather
  60. word
  61. working
  62. writing