Analytics
Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance.
Data
Data ( DAY-tə, DAT-ə, DAH-tə) is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables.
Data Science
Data science is an interdisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, similar to data mining.
Science
Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Social
Living organisms including humans are social when they live collectively in interacting populations, whether they are aware of it, and whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.
Social Analytics
Social analytics is a philosophical perspective developed since the early 1980s by the Danish idea historian and philosopher Lars-Henrik Schmidt. The theoretical object of the perspective is socius, a kind of "commonness" that is neither a universal account nor a communality shared by every member of a body. Thus, Social Analytics differs from traditional philosophy as well as sociology. It might be said that the perspective attempts to articulate the contentions between philosophy and sociology. The practise of Social Analytics is to report on tendencies of the times. It does not aim to make a diagnosis of the times that can be agreed upon by everyone or anybody but a report that no one wants to protest about.
Science
Too often, this concern for the big picture is simply obscurantist and is put forward by people who prefer vagueness and mystery to (partial) answers. Vagueness is at times necessary and mystery is never in short supply, but I don’t think they’re anything to worship. Genuine science and mathematical precision are more intriguing than are the “facts” published in supermarket tabloids or a romantic innumeracy which fosters credulity, stunts skepticism, and dulls one to real imponderables.
John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), pp. 126-127
Science
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Sir Ernest Rutherford from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996), 26.
Science
The men in the laboratory... cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all. ...The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper. ... What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions.
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
