It can be made a model of DNA, or a model of a whole city like this one is, and sometimes they can make the model exist in the silicon of a computer, so you've got a computer model, and other times, they actually use real silicon and sand, which they're doing it, in this case, like a giant hands-on model.

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And if a faulty computer model leads a bank to make deals at too low a price, the problem is likely to afflict an entire series of trades, rather than just a single transaction.

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Frank Gehry, a godfather of contemporary American design if there is one, is shown crumpling paper or aluminium foil into a form, and then scanning the shape by computer in order to reduce it to two dimensions or make it into a model, so that a design can be refined or manufactured.

ECONOMIST: American blobjectivity | The