Jeanette M Wing, the head of CMU's CS department, has written a great opinion piece on thinking like a computer scientist, and approaches head on about how myself, and a lot of other CS people think about think world, and our approaches in interdiscplinary fields. Over the past 10 years, more and more fields have migrated over to computationally time-space descriptive space of their work. That is to say, fundamental axioms of how one thinks about describing statistics, biology, physics, social systems, etc. have been challenged and steadily reworked not just as data-centric models, but rather meta descriptions of the very logic of the systems that are being worked on.
My favorite quote: "Conceptualizing, not programming. Computer science is not computer programming." I love it. While computers are great for computing, the essence of studying computation is to gain an understanding of the relationships and the impact of your ontology, and ultimately producing reflections and deeper understanding of your processes at work.
Posted by Da Mystik Homeboy at March 7, 2006 11:39 PM