Gee Les' you have been having an introspective weekend. : ) you wrote: >Dear Friends, >There seems to be an assumption among many that emperical learning is not >scientific. I'm not so sure.
Dear Les', Assumption? Not at all. Observation, experience and experiment are in fact the basis of scientific theory. The beginning only. That is, they lead to the hypothesis upon which further research can proceed, but at each step of the progress, the contents of that hypothesis must be objectively proven or dismissed. If you suggest to a student, a certain line of action, and the student succeeds in achieving the result you sought, this empirical approach does not prove that your joint assumptions about what happened internally were correct, merely that the result was achieved. This is not scientific, it's the application of the hypothesis without the perceived need to prove it, which is why there are so many vocal training hypotheses. This unproven hypothesis is made the more confusing by attempts to communicate it to students who have their own unproven views. Many definitions of efficiency are based on value judgements of the users. For example, is all the expenditure of effort and lives in the development of this technology you see in front of you, really worth it? Another nagging one for me is the concern expressed about environmental waste and pollution, yet for every megawatt of energy that leaves an alternator, exactly the same is dissipated within that encapsulated device, with no effort whatever made to recycle it because it's just too easy to discard it into a cooling tower or river, and heap the responsibility on the innocent consumer. Winter warmth brings a stimulus to the brain which indicates that pain has been replaced with comfort. So is the stimulus that brain feels from the performance or reception of a beautifully performed piece of music, really that different? And is it efficient? : ) May I suggest that efficiency has a time component that is usually ignored. Most people don't want to know about the beauty of style and design incorporated in a computer chip, they just want to use it for what is seen as a higher purpose. To play computer games, of whatever type, like this.
Brain stimulation of one person by another must surely be the most worthy goal, it's the deviations that interpose themselves that are both necessary and dangerous, but that's only MY value judgement though I'm prepared to assume that it may also be that of many on this list.
Science for science' sake is rarely wasted even though it's end use may not be immediately obvious. I love the old WW II saying, "Time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted," I assume both sides thought that, but their ideas of mental stimulation were concentrated on less worthy reasons than ours, but again that's only my value judgement coloured by the fact that German and Italian music is now totally acceptable, which it wasn't then. On that same theme, in that immediate situation we know that it was a critical priority of both sides. In the medium term we know 50% were wrong and in the long term it was 100% a waste of effort.
At the moment I'm messing with a voice analysis programme and I'm amazed at some of the information I see. One graph indicates a 25th harmonic of considerable intensity. A fundamental of 119Hz at -42dB up to about 3kHz at about -44db and everything in between. I do a double take at that. Not that I don't believe it, just that I don't accept it at face value, yet.
Must go Reg.
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