Revisiting the Scientific Method

Revisiting the scientific method.

So wrote Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), who was born around 965 in Basra (now Iraq, but then part of Persia), lived most of his life in Egypt, and is credited with being an early developer of the scientific method. His road to truth took a wrong turn that almost cost him his life. After claiming that he could use mathematical principles to regulate the flooding of the Nile—and later realizing that t...

Revisiting the Ceschino Interpolation Method

Revisiting Summarization Evaluation for Scientific Articles

Evaluation of text summarization approaches have been mostly based on metrics that measure similarities of system generated summaries with a set of human written gold-standard summaries. The most widely used metric in summarization evaluation has been the ROUGE family. ROUGE solely relies on lexical overlaps between the terms and phrases in the sentences; therefore, in cases of terminology vari...

Defects, Scientific Computation and the Scientific Method

Computation has rapidly grown in the last 50 years so that in many scientific areas it is the dominant partner in the practice of science. Unfortunately, unlike the experimental sciences, it does not adhere well to the principles of the scientific method as espoused by for example, the philosopher Karl Popper. Such principles are built around the notions of deniability and reproducibility. Alth...

The scientific method.

The nature of the scientific method is controversial with claims that a single scientific method does not even exist. However the scientific method does exist. It is the building of logical and self consistent models to describe nature. The models are constrained by past observations and judged by their ability to correctly predict new observations and interesting phenomena. Observations do not...