Is there life on Mars?
This week NASA announced that it may have discovered evidence of water flowing on the surface of Mars in the recent past. This raises the possibility of life existing on Mars in the past and even to the present day.
A lot of talent, time and money has gone into addressing the fundamental question – is there life on Mars. In addition to the two rovers on the surface, there are currently three spacecraft in operation around Mars; Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express – sadly the Mars Global Surveyor which is responsible for this weeks exciting news has probably suffered a severe failure and is in effect lost. Each spacecraft has been sent out to gather some basic statistics about the Red Planet such as; how the surface changes over time, the percentage of carbon-dioxide at the poles or how the temperature varies throughout the atmosphere. All of this in the hope that we move closer to a definitive answer to that fundamental question. But forget the answer: are we asking the right questions?
Matching: Determinism and Probability in a new context
I wanted to follow up on my comments about technical versus business metadata and had intended to make this article about metadata, but instead I’m going to kill two birds with one stone and talk about approaches to matching. Why? Well recently I found myself getting dragged into a very old argument about Probabilistic versus Deterministic matching. Normally I’m very happy to get into any techie argument and the more pointless the better, but this one has been done to death so I feigned ignorance and escaped with a new idea for a blog entry.
The argument was about whether a deterministic or probabilistic approach to matching is better. After six years in data quality technology, I’m happy enough to argue for either approach and given a strict choice between “A” and “B” can make a convincing case for option “C.”
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