The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Sometimes what I learn is ways to integrate NextStage's research into what the WAA and its committees are doing. In this case, standards and the effect noisy data has on creating them. I brought up the topic of standards in The Long Tail, Part 1 and feel there's enough research to get back to it now.

Noisy data as I'm using the term here is a concept used in many branches of science (neuroscience, climatology, astronomy, ... you name it, its got some noisy data inside it) and is perfectly valid data but not necessarily for what you're using it for.

An example from climatology is using tree rings to determine regional temperatures. Tree rings actually measure growth and growth is related to temperature so you can use tree rings to provide a rough and not exact map of temperature variations in a given area. The challenge to using noisy data accurately (oxymoron warning, that) is correctly separating the wheat from the chaff, or in this case the noise from the data. Another example of noisy data is using light pulses inside deeply buried water tanks to detect neutrinoes flying through the earth. There's just a slightly greater chance that a neutrino will hit a water molecule and cause a flash of light than a normal decay doing the same thing. Now that's truly noisy data.

(more to follow...)

Links for this post:

• WAA
• Posts mentioning WAA:
  • The Long Tail, Part 1
  • The Long Tail, Part 2
  • The Reluctant Blogger
  • Nothing New Under the Sun (Ajax)...
  • Nothing New Under the Sun (Privacy)...
• Posts on new web technologies:
  • RIA
  • Rich Media
  • Social Tools
• Articles on noisy data affecting analysis:
  • The Isomap Algorithm and Topological Stability
  • Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data
  • Losing Variability in the Noise