Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 22, 2012

Uncertainty Principle for Serendipity?

Filed under: Analytics,Data Integration — Patrick Durusau @ 10:22 am

Curt Monash writes in Cool analytic stories

There are several reasons it’s hard to confirm great analytic user stories. First, there aren’t as many jaw-dropping use cases as one might think. For as I wrote about performance, new technology tends to make things better, but not radically so. After all, if its applications are …

… all that bloody important, then probably people have already been making do to get it done as best they can, even in an inferior way.

Further, some of the best stories are hard to confirm; even the famed beer/diapers story isn’t really true. Many application areas are hard to nail down due to confidentiality, especially but not only in such “adversarial” domains as anti-terrorism, anti-spam, or anti-fraud.

How will we “know” when better data display/mining techniques enable more serendipity?

Anecdotal stories about serendipity abound.

Measuring serendipity requires knowing: (rate of serendipitous discoveries x importance of serendipitous discoveries)/ opportunity for serendipitous discoveries.

Need to add in a multiplier effect for the impact that one serendipitous discovery may have to create opportunities or other serendipitous discoveries (a serendipitous criticality point) and probably some other things I have overlooked.

What would you add to the equation?

Realizing that we may be staring at the “right” answer and never realize it.

How’s that for an uncertainty principle?

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