ANALYSIS ENGINES - A RANT

After attending a two-day Analysis IPR, or “in-process review” for those not familiar with the acronym, I’m annoyed and frustrated. The greatest analysis engine that has ever existed is the 3-lb lump of grey matter behind the eyes and between the ears, yet most attendees use it to drive their vocal chords instead.

I know I’m being over the top here; even a bit unfair, since the questions being asked aren’t easy to analyze, and the available data is chaotic, incomplete, and possibly even irrelevant. But polling (trend analysis in this case) doesn’t answer the questions being asked. It can’t; at its best, trend analysis can indicate correlation, but not causation.

What is needed is for the participants to quit using those analysis engines as vocal chord drivers and instead give some hard-headed thought to what effects can or should occur given the input changes being made. (That’s called hypothesis formulation, by the way.)

Then give an equal amount of thought to what measurements need to be made to either prove or disprove the hypothesis. That includes making sure that the measurements can in fact be made. I remember some years back a colleague of mine developed a brilliant analytic solution to a geolocation problem we had been working for years. His mathematical solution was complete, correct, and absolutely spot-on. But in order to do the mathematics, he had to structure the problem is such a way that the input estimation variables needed were not physically realizable. Meaning that the solution could never be tested, since the data needed to test his solution could never be measured. Back to the drawing board ....

Finally give another equal amount of thought about how to acquire the data. That means ignoring the mass of existing data until it can be shown to contain the relevant data. Then - and only then - begin to look at that mass of chaotic, incomplete, and possibly irrelevant data that’s been collected for every purpose except yours.

Here’s an analogy. The current analytic process is akin to taking three 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles, mixing them together, turning over every piece until only the backs show, putting them together, and only then turning the three completed puzzles over to see the pictures.

Did I mention that I’m annoyed and frustrated?

MISSILE DEFENSE SUCCESS?

Not good news for North Korea and Iran ....

Air Force Lieutenant General Henry “Trey” Obering III, Missile Defense Agency (MDA) director, announced today it has successfully completed an important exercise and flight test involving the launch of an improved ground-based interceptor missile designed to protect the United States against a limited long-range ballistic missile attack.

The interceptor missile was launched at 10:39 am PDT (1: 39 pm EDT) from the Ronald W. Reagan Missile Defense Site, located at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. For this exercise, a threat-representative target missile was launched from the Kodiak Launch Complex, Kodiak, Alaska.

Although not a primary objective for the data collection flight test, an intercept of the target warhead was achieved.

Since the intercept was not a primary objective of the test flight, we’ll have to wait and see if the test was really successful. Nevertheless, the fact that an intercept occurred indicates that the basic engineering problems are pretty well under control.

OPEN MOUTH, INSERT FOOT

In his Washington Times commentary “The Rumsfeld horripilation” R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. was doing just fine defending Mr. Rumsfeld until the ninth paragraph:

Is the thing possible? Do the likes of Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi think we are no better than the Iranian Islamofascists who whoop it up for suicide bombers and are governed by a zany who looks like an eternal graduate student from one of our cow colleges?

As a graduate (BS, 1968; MS, 1973; PhD, 1978) of a “cow college,” I don’t know whether to demand an apology of Mr. Tyrrell or Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid, but I want to assure all three that an Iranian Islamofascist would have an easier time graduating with honors from Harvard or Yale than he would gaining admission to my alma mater).