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A College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots

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Re: A College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots

#31

Post by wavegeek »

lloeki wrote: post #19
da_chicken wrote: post #13

> Medrano comes from a Mexican-American family and speaks Spanish, so understanding the Spanish census document was no problem. Handling numbers and data came naturally to him as well, as an economics major. The challenge, as both Medrano and Urton note, seemed to demand a perfect alignment of his skills and interests. I wonder how many unsolved problems there are out there with this problem. Problems that are solvab…

You don't need to go out of your way looking for highly challenging world class unsolved problems: I'm versed not just in CS/IT but also in various fields of physics, thermodynamics, solid and fluid mechanics, automation, electricity, and electronics, and it's readily apparent to me that some solutions or effects are just obvious to me while being completely elusive to my colleagues with a good level but pure CS/IT e…

I would be interested to hear some examples of this. Not doubting you but this would be very enriching.

One obvious example from my own life: Due to I needed to understand medical research in . There is a huge opportunity in medical research for people who actually have a deep understanding of statistics. Or even an elementary understanding. Protip: just because P>0.5 it does not prove "no effect".

Re: A College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots

#32

Post by PhasmaFelis »

tzahola wrote: post #5
TN1ck wrote: post #2

What they actually found out: “Manny has proven that the way in which pendant cords are tied to the top cord indicates which social group an individual belonged to. This is the first time anyone has shown that and it's a big deal,”

So the knots are basically census records? How disappointing :/

These knots are census records.

> Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems.

They've known for a while that many kinds of data were recorded with khipus, but (it sounds like) they couldn't read anything but the raw numbers, which were meaningless without context. Medrano has basically discovered a Rosetta Stone, the same data in both a known and unknown language, and it could very well lead to cracking the full language of the khipus.

And don't underestimate census records alone. There's a lot of tremendously valuable information to researchers there.

Re: A College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots

#34

Post by jefurii »

stevenwoo wrote: post #18
da_chicken wrote: post #13

> Medrano comes from a Mexican-American family and speaks Spanish, so understanding the Spanish census document was no problem. Handling numbers and data came naturally to him as well, as an economics major. The challenge, as both Medrano and Urton note, seemed to demand a perfect alignment of his skills and interests. I wonder how many unsolved problems there are out there with this problem. Problems that are solvab…

The recent lichen genetic revelation that rewrote textbook definitions is similar, kinda magical coincidences in all the things that had to fall into place (or survivorship bias?/good writer telling story). If you are not familiar with it - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-a-gu...

> Thanks to his family background, he could speak German, and he had heard that many universities there charged no tuition fees. His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook. “They said that under exceptional circumstances, they could enroll a few people every year without transcripts,” says Spribille. “That was the bottleneck of my life.”

This marks a significant point in America's status as an educational and scientific power in the world.

Re: A College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots

#36

Post by yourapostasy »

da_chicken wrote: post #13

> Medrano comes from a Mexican-American family and speaks Spanish, so understanding the Spanish census document was no problem. Handling numbers and data came naturally to him as well, as an economics major. The challenge, as both Medrano and Urton note, seemed to demand a perfect alignment of his skills and interests. I wonder how many unsolved problems there are out there with this problem. Problems that are solvab…

If you like the “proper perspective puts it all in place” meme, then you should check out James Burke’s “Connections” TV series (there was a sequel series as well), which is all about those perspectives in the history of science and engineering.
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