Mathemagenic

Two bits saying a lot about archiving, search and retrieval.

1. Thanks to David Gammel for pointing out to the summary by Piers Young which I missed while travelling:

Bad news I think...

1. If two groups of people construct thesauri in a particular subject area, the overlap of index terms will only be 60%.

2. Two indexers using the same thesaurus on the same document use common index terms in only 30% of cases.

3. The output from two experienced database searchers has only 40% overlap.

4. Experts' judgements of relevance concur in only 60% of cases.

This is from: JAA Sillince, 1992, Literature searching with unclear objectives: a new approach using argumentation. On-line Review, 16 (6), 391-409.

2. John Moore:

Neat little factoid from the ever-excellent newsletter of ecustomerserviceworld.

"Customers were ten times more likely to buy jams when only six varieties were on display as when there were twenty-four."

- Psychologist Barry Schwartz, illustrating his new research that shows too much choice is making people miserable, and that some feel so paralysed they go home empty-handed. Nothing to do with ghosts and machines, but important.