1. Looking for Data in all the Right Places

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” ...I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

—Charles Babbage [1]

Somewhere around 1964, George Fuechsel is thought to have coined the phrase “garbage in, garbage out.” This popular computer science slang expression comes from early programmer education. Fuechsel taught his classes that they must check and recheck their data and coding to ensure that the results they achieved were valid. In this new era of computing, programmers were trained to test each step in their programs and cautioned not to expect that ...

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