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"The best fuzzy rules, the best knowledge, deal with the turning points of the system. If a race-car driver teaches you how to drive, you don't need him to show you how to drive on the straightaway. It's how he handles the curves that matters."
- Bart Kosko
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| Spark Plug (Systematician) | ||
| A person who draws information from diverse areas of knowledge. |
| "Adjani is our Spark Plug - and the best in the business."
Spence looked at the slim Adjani with new respect. A Spark Plug , as they were called, was a member of an elite group of men and women so gifted as to be completely expert in numerous fields of study - as many as five or six. Whereas most scientists and theoreticians were specialists, training their professional vision to ever narrower bands of the scientific spectrum, those like Adjani - and there were very few of them - worked in reverse, enlarging the scope of their knowledge wider and wider... Most often they were employed as systematicians - men who could view the overall course of a project and draw valuable information from other areas of study and bring it to bear upon a particular problem. They acted as catalysts of creativity - spark plugs - providing those quick, dynamic bursts of creative insight for projects that had grown too complex to rely on the accidental cross-pollinization of ideas from other disciplines. |
| Technovelgy from Dream Thief,
by Stephen Lawhead. Published by Not known in 1983 Additional resources -
|
See also these specialists:
A specialist who correlated information within the House Records of the Bene Gesserit.
(From Heretics of Dune [1984] by Frank Herbert)
Dedicated humans who collected bits of data in hopes of catching key correlations between fields of study.
(From Sucker Bait [1954] by Isaac Asimov)
A person who did nothing but make cross-references between one field and another.
(From Stand on Zanzibar [1968] by John Brunner)
A person with a coordinative knowledge across a variety of sciences.
(From Voyage of the Space Beagle [1950] by A.E. van Vogt)
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
