Academic literature on the topic 'Serendipity'

Serendipity in the sciences is an unexpected experience prompted by valuable interaction with ideas, information, objects, or phenomena. While serendipity is often associated with the “aha” and “eureka” moments that characterize well-known scientific discoveries such as the structure of DNA, serendipity may be more accurately described as a factor across the various stages of the scientific process. For example, serendipity in the sciences includes those unexpected encounters with prior research findings that are fostered by informal knowledge sharing within and among scientific communities. Serendipity’s contribution to science is increasingly noted by scientists in formal scientific reports, by funding agencies which recognize the need to make room and provide support for serendipity in science, and is often credited with the development of fruitful scientific careers. This paper describes the process of serendipity—the pattern of the phenomenon—that will be familiar to many who have experienced it and noteworthy for those whose have not. Through examples of serendipity in the sciences, different perspectives on its role are explored and lessons drawn.

Svend Larsens udgangspunkt er en bog om serendipitet skrevet af to amerikanske sociologer Robert Merton og Elinor Barber: The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity og han foretager herfra overvejelser om begrebets anvendelighed i kulturforvaltning og specielt biblioteksvæsenet.

The primary purpose of the researcher this study was to determine what, if any, unexpected benefits, spin-offs, and other "serendipitous" events occurred as a result of the year 2000 remediation process undertaken by businesses, industry, and other organizations. This was measured through the use of an online survey instrument comprised of a series of questions designed to measure and discover those benefits. The survey was sent to approximately 50 different businesses/organizations during the pilot stage of this study and 250 during the main stage of this study. These businesses/organizations were randomly selected from the sampling frame using random sampling techniques. The random samples that were used included the areas of financial services, health care, non-computer manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation, and utilities. The survey responses were analyzed in an effort to determine what benefits were common to these businesses as well as to discover possible unique benefits some business may have experienced. Of particular interest were any benefits that companies indicate were totally unexpected or serendipitous. Final analysis of the data was accomplished through the use of canonical correlation. This statistical procedure was chosen because of its usefulness in determining correlations between a set of independent variables and a set of dependent variables. The findings of the pilot study were, for the most part, inconclusive due to the small number of responses. The analysis of the data from the main study resulted in one significant canonical function. The canonical correlation between the computer generated variates created by this function was reported at approximately .86. This indicates a high degree of correlation between criterion variate I that represented the independent variables, and is the predictor variate I that represented the dependent variables. The variables PCSYS, NTSYS, MFSYS had the highest correlation with the Predictor I variate. The variables ITISS, A W AREMIA, and A WAREBF had the highest correlation with the Criterion I variate. Therefore, the independent variables PCSYS, NTSYS, and MFSYS were most predictive of the dependent variables ITISS, AWAREMIA, and AWAREBF. To determine if there were unexpected benefits in those companies surveyed, a multiple regression was performed using the measured variable "SEREDIP" as the dependent variable and the measured variables Y2KEFFORT, ORGSP, and ORGHM as the independent variables. The null hypothesis was not rejected indicating that among the companies surveyed, the occurrences of serendipitous events were not statistically significant. However, the literature indicated that serendipitous events have occurred, although these occurrences were not universal.

This exegesis examines the differences between chance and serendipity in contemporary art, with particular reference to the sublime. I use two major qualitative research strategies to clarify these differences: (1) Fine and Deegan’s (1996) methodology which emphasises the importance of serendipity in research and; (2) case studies with the artists Jackson Pollock and Rebecca Horn, analysed in light of several authors such as Kant and Burke. Data on these themes of chance, serendipity and the sublime has not only been collected from books, archives, published reports, reviews and interviews, but also from studio investigations deriving from on-site engagements with a location known as Gorman’s Gap near Toowoomba in Southern Queensland, Australia. This studio work entitled Located Dialogues is contextualised through analyses of Pollock and Horn. I make the claim that Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings are better understood through theories of serendipity rather than chance. In addition, Pollock’s drip paintings are analysed alongside the seemingly disparate mechanical drawings of Rebecca Horn in order to demonstrate their alignment with the idea of the dynamic sublime. Throughout this research it has been my close association to these artists and certain aspects of their work that has directed my line of enquiry and informed my art practice. This study creates a methodology suitable for further research into the serendipitous in art practice.
Thesis (Professional Doctorate)
Doctor of Visual Arts (DVA)
Queensland College of Arts
Full Text

PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO
COORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOR
PROGRAMA DE EXCELENCIA ACADEMICA
Fortuidade pode ser definida como a descoberta de algo que não está sendo buscado. Em outras palavras, fortuidade trata da descoberta de informação que provê valiosas intuições ao desvendar conhecimento inesperado. O tópico vem recebendo bastante atenção na literatura, uma vez que precisão pode ser justificadamente relaxada com o objetivo de aumentar a satisfação do usuário. Uma área que pode se beneficiar com fortuidade é a área de dados interligados, um gigantesco espaço de dados no qual dados são disponibilizados publicamente. Buscar e extrair informação relevante se torna uma tarefa desafiadora à medida que cada vez mais dados se tornam disponíveis nesse ambiente. Esta tese contribui para enfrentar este desafio de duas maneiras. Primeiro, apresenta um processo de orquestração de consulta que introduz três estratégias para injetar padrões de fortuidade no processo de consulta. Os padrões de fortuidade são inspirados em características básicas de eventos fortuitos, como analogia e perturbação, e podem ser usados para estender os resultados com informações adicionais, sugerindo consultas alternativas ou reordenando os resultados. Em segundo lugar, introduz uma base de dados que pode ser utilizada para comparar diferentes abordagens de obtenção de conteúdo fortuito. A estratégia adotada para construção dessa base de dados consiste em dividir o universo de dados em partições com base em um atributo global e conectar entidades de diferentes partições de acordo com o número de caminhos compartilhados.
Serendipity is defined as the discovery of a thing when one is not searching for it. In other words, serendipity means the discovery of information that provides valuable insights by unveiling unanticipated knowledge. The topic is receiving increased attention in the literature, since the precision requirement may be justifiably relaxed in order to improve user satisfaction. A field that can benefit from serendipity is the Web of Data, an immense global data space where data is publicly available. As more and more data become available in this data space, searching and extracting relevant information becomes a challenging task. This thesis contributes to addressing this challenge in two ways. First, it presents a query orchestration process that introduces three strategies to inject serendipity patterns in the query process. The serendipity patterns are inspired by basic characteristics of serendipitous events, such as, analogy and disturbance, and can be used for augmenting the results with additional information, suggesting alternative queries or rebalancing the results. Second, it introduces a benchmark dataset that can be used to compare different approaches for locating serendipitous content. The strategy adopted for constructing the dataset consists of dividing the dataset into partitions based on a global feature and linking entities from different partitions according to the number of paths they share.

This dissertation is a cross-case study and analysis of four teachers in a school involved in two reform initiatives which promote constructivist approaches to teaching and learning. The study describes the teachers' understandings of the learning theory and their interpretations of it in their classroom practice. The study found that three of the four teachers were practicing in ways consistent with constructivism while one was not because her need for control took precedence. The study found that although teachers are very aware of their students as individuals with different ways of learning and constructing an understanding, they are not much interested in learning theory. Teachers are, therefore, more likely to practice in ways consistent with constructivist learning theory if they see that such practice can help them meet the diverse learning needs of the individuals in their classes and if they are shown the "how-to's" in their professional development. The study also found that classroom management needs and the need for control of student behavior inhibit practice consistent with constructivism and concluded that teachers are more likely to practice in ways consistent with constructivism if complimentary classroom management techniques can be found and if teachers are comfortable giving students choice and control. The study uncovered the four C's of impediments to constructivist practice: classroom management, control, "coverage," and custodial care.

This thesis examines the relationship between photography and sociology as offering complementary ways of understanding ourselves and the world we live in. Drawing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams, I examine the idea of a ‘field’ of photography within the field of cultural production more generally. The practises of documentary photography, photojournalism and fine art photography are explored with specific reference to images of war. In this arena, the politics, aesthetics and ethics of representing the body in pain are addressed.

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Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)
In the past decades, there has been a revolution in the way science has been conducted. The current context has demanded more collaborative work such as, studies in research networks of large scale. One of the many essential marks of change in this new way of making science has been the intense usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), or “eScience”. Nowadays, it plays a fundamental role in the methodology adopted by many research groups around the world. Analyses of the qualitative data evidenced in researches about Special Education were done then. The biggest challenge that was noticed would be to advance in the analysis of qualitative data using information technologies without losing the subjectivity involved in the research and to broaden the capability of going over the data without losing the right to come and go, the right to critique and establish proper reflexions, respecting subjective positioning and, above all, maintaining the research's critic criteria. In this sense, this work establishes as its main objective to evaluate the proposed technological architecture of qualitative analyses of data. This analysis was based upon data mining theories, researches in ontology and techniques of semantic notation in the field of special education aiming to analyze the thresholds and possibilities this methodological approach permits. We used as methodology the construction of a prototype, named Serendipity, based on the perspective of software engineering, in order to extract the main techniques that could set as a safe method for design, implementation and deployment of the solution. Cyclically, the methodology allowed us to modify requirements and establish improvements, allowing the feedback process from new analyses. The text mining process relied on gaining knowledge from textual databases that have little or no data structure. The computational ontology was the element able to reconstruct the syntactic representation, giving it direction. The words (data) are related and are set within a context of formal knowledge, providing them with a semantic and cognitive ability, building concepts, open to interpretation, comprehension and common understanding; as a result, we built up a specific ontology for Special Education. The semantic annotation helped attach content to the text to describe their semantics, allowing that software agents could retrieve information in a more precise manner through the association of the document to the ontology in a conception of semantic fields. We built a customized dictionary for special education to relate terms to synonyms and expressions associated with the ontology. To view beyond the semantic classes, we used automatic concept maps to establish relationships between concepts included in a hierarchical structure of propositions. Finally, to assess the proposal, we made use of part of the data collected from the National Observatory of Special Education in transcribed texts about the formation of five cities, one from each region of Brazil. The results show limits already recognized in the proposal and; in this respect, did not aim to establish a subjective and deep analysis that would permit extreme precision results. It points out that the researcher is and will always be the driving factor that operates the process’ flow and relying, or not, on computing tools is not entirely immune to err. The proposal of serendipity has given a step forward in the automatic process of data analysis and can be used in big data without losing the subjectivity of the researcher. However, we must add new human and technological resources to contribute to its improvement and encourage other areas to develop domain ontologies with their experts and the development of specific dictionaries. Therefore, despite its limitations, the approach has shown significant advances in semantic exploration of qualitative data in the Special Education field and it is capable of being adapted to other areas and fields of knowledge.
Nas últimas décadas, tem ocorrido uma revolução no modo como a ciência tem sido conduzida, o atual contexto tem demandado cada vez mais o trabalho colaborativo, tais como os estudos em redes de pesquisa de ampla escala. Um dos pontos essenciais de mudança nessa nova forma de se fazer ciência tem sido o uso intenso de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), chamada como “eScience”, que desempenha hoje um papel fundamental na metodologia adotada por muitos grupos de pesquisa ao redor do mundo. Partiu-se então para uma reflexão acerca do aprofundamento de dados qualitativos evidenciadas principalmente nas pesquisas em Educação Especial. O grande desafio seria avançar na qualidade da análise de dados qualitativos com uso das tecnologias da informação sem perder a subjetividade envolvida na pesquisa e ampliar a capacidade de esmiuçar os dados sem perder a liberdade de ir e vir, de criticar e estabelecer reflexões próprias, respeitando posicionamentos e, sobretudo, mantendo o rigor científico na pesquisa. Neste sentido, o presente estudo estabeleceu como objetivo principal avaliar a arquitetura tecnológica proposta de análise qualitativa de dados, tendo como base as teorias de mineração de textos, ontologia computacional e técnicas de anotação semântica, em pesquisa da educação especial, a fim de analisar os limites e possibilidades desta abordagem metodológica. Utilizamos como metodologia baseada na construção de um protótipo, denominado Serendipity, fundamentado na perspectiva da engenharia de software, de maneira que extraímos as principais técnicas que puderam definir um método seguro para a concepção, implementação e implantação da solução. De forma cíclica a metodologia permitia modificar requisitos e estabelecer melhorias, permitindo a retroalimentação do processo a partir de novas análises. Para isto, a mineração de textos apoiou-se na obtenção de conhecimento a partir de bases de dados textuais que possuem pouca ou nenhuma estrutura de dados. A ontologia computacional foi o elemento capaz de reconstruir a representação sintática, dando a ela sentido. As palavras (dados) se relacionam e são postas dentro de um contexto, de um conhecimento formal, dotando-as de uma capacidade semântica e cognitiva, construindo conceitos, passível de interpretação, compreensão e entendimento comum; para isto construiu-se uma ontologia específica para Educação Especial. A anotação semântica ajudou a anexar conteúdos ao texto para descrever a sua semântica, permitindo que agentes de software pudessem recuperar informações de forma mais precisa, através da associação do documento à ontologia, numa concepção de campos semânticos. Construiu-se também um dicionário da Educação Especial customizado para relacionar termos a sinônimos e expressões associadas à ontologia. Para visualização, além das classes semânticas, utilizou-se de mapas conceituais automáticos para estabelecer relações entre conceitos incluídos numa estrutura hierárquica de proposições. Por fim, para a avaliação da proposta utilizou-se de parte dos dados coletados no Observatório Nacional da Educação Especial de textos transcritos acerca da Formação em cinco cidades, sendo uma de cada região do Brasil. Os resultados evidenciam limites já reconhecidos na proposta e, neste aspecto, não teve a pretensão de determinar uma análise subjetiva e detalhista, que a rigor, permita resultados de extrema precisão. Destaca que o pesquisador é e sempre será o condutor livre do funcionamento do processo e contando, ou não, com ferramentas computacionais ele pode cometer erros. A proposta do serendipity deu um passo no processo automático de análise de dados, podendo ser aproveitada em big data, pesquisas de nível nacional, sem perder a subjetividade do pesquisador. Para isto é preciso agregar novos recursos humanos e tecnológicos que contribuam em seu aprimoramento. Estimular outras áreas a desenvolverem ontologias de domínio com seus especialistas e a evolução dos dicionários específicos. Portanto, apesar de seus limites, a abordagem possui avanços significativos na prospecção semântica de dados qualitativos em Educação Especial e passível de adaptação a outras áreas de conhecimento.

Serendipity – Att söka en sak, och finna någon annan. Det är mötet mellan ett medvetet och ett undermedvetet skapande som tagit form ur drömmar och konkreta tankar. Det handlar om det som får ske i huvudet när en inte anstränger sig eller har försvarsmekanismen på som i den vakna vardagen – och inte heller försöker leva upp till föreställningar och förväntningar. Det handlar om att hitta det som inte syns, bara det som känns. Det innersta som bara är. Det är saker som är glömt, eller gömt. Som hamnat i skymundan, saker som förlagts. Förlorats. Som upplevts, förbrukats. Åter funnet, åter brunnen.
Serendipity – To go in search of one thing, to find another. It’s about what is allowed to take place in the mind when one doesn’t make an effort or have their defence mechanism switched on, as in the awake everyday life – and not when trying hard to live up to others’ conceptions and expectations. I show a meeting between conscious and subconscious creating, which takes shape from dreams and physical thoughts. My work is about searching for what usually doesn’t show, and instead finding how it feels. The innermost that exists. I twist and screw up reality and recreate an alternative world. I make an abstract version where surface and structures are central. I work with intuition and energy, where the starting point for my process is a reality in the shape of something already existing, an experience that took place, or a real object. I reuse its form or function. An experience can be a dream that took place in the mind, a happening where reality and fiction have met. I collect stories from memories as a way to get a second chance to catch something that already went by. It’s about time, waiting, loss, longing and expectations – dreams that reflect into new shapes of reality, like going on a search for days that escaped.

Memoria para optar al título de Arquitecta
Vivimos en una época en la que la sociedad reconoce a las personas por el éxito que alcanzan, en el ámbito de los estudios, laboral, económico, de las cosas materiales que se poseen, provocando que las personas vivan en un continuo estrés, intentando lograr todo lo que la sociedad nos reconoce como exitoso. Debido a esta presión social, y al ritmo de vida tan ajetreado, muchas personas buscan un desarrollo personal que les permita frenar el estrés que llevan. Algunos métodos que se buscan para lograr esa calma son a través del yoga y la meditación, disciplinas originarias de la India, que cada vez tienen más presencia en occidente. Son numerosos los centros en los que se imparten las distintas disciplinas de yoga, algunas de las cuales se centran más en ejercicios o posturas “Asanas”, y otras prácticas en las que se ejercita la meditación. La mayoría de las salas o centros de yoga que hay en la ciudad de Santiago se ubican en locales que en origen estaban destinados a comercio o vivienda. En algunos casos las instalaciones son de dimensiones pequeñas y no cuentan con el equipamiento y acondicionamiento óptimo para estas prácticas. El proyecto busca crear un centro de yoga y de realización personal, en el que se impartan clases, talleres y cursos, de yoga y meditación. El edificio trata de ser un oasis de paz y calma en la ciudad, que origine un espacio óptimo para la práctica de estas actividades.

The main recommendations of the panel report can be summarised under five key headings:  Building blocks: The ultimate aim should be to build rich, detailed and testable narratives situated within a European context, and addressing phenomena from the longue durée to the short-term over international to local scales. Chronological control is essential to this and effective dating strategies are required to enable generation-level analysis. The ‘serendipity factor’ of archaeological work must be enhanced by recognising and getting the most out of information-rich sites as they appear. o There is a pressing need to revisit the archives of excavated sites to extract more information from existing resources, notably through dating programmes targeted at regional sequences – the Western Isles Atlantic roundhouse sequence is an obvious target. o Many areas still lack anything beyond the baldest of settlement sequences, with little understanding of the relations between key site types. There is a need to get at least basic sequences from many more areas, either from sustained regional programmes or targeted sampling exercises. o Much of the methodologically innovative work and new insights have come from long-running research excavations. Such large-scale research projects are an important element in developing new approaches to the Iron Age.  Daily life and practice: There remains great potential to improve the understanding of people’s lives in the Iron Age through fresh approaches to, and integration of, existing and newly-excavated data. o House use. Rigorous analysis and innovative approaches, including experimental archaeology, should be employed to get the most out of the understanding of daily life through the strengths of the Scottish record, such as deposits within buildings, organic preservation and waterlogging. o Material culture. Artefact studies have the potential to be far more integral to understandings of Iron Age societies, both from the rich assemblages of the Atlantic area and less-rich lowland finds. Key areas of concern are basic studies of material groups (including the function of everyday items such as stone and bone tools, and the nature of craft processes – iron, copper alloy, bone/antler and shale offer particularly good evidence). Other key topics are: the role of ‘art’ and other forms of decoration and comparative approaches to assemblages to obtain synthetic views of the uses of material culture. o Field to feast. Subsistence practices are a core area of research essential to understanding past society, but different strands of evidence need to be more fully integrated, with a ‘field to feast’ approach, from production to consumption. The working of agricultural systems is poorly understood, from agricultural processes to cooking practices and cuisine: integrated work between different specialisms would assist greatly. There is a need for conceptual as well as practical perspectives – e.g. how were wild resources conceived? o Ritual practice. There has been valuable work in identifying depositional practices, such as deposition of animals or querns, which are thought to relate to house-based ritual practices, but there is great potential for further pattern-spotting, synthesis and interpretation. Iron Age Scotland: ScARF Panel Report v  Landscapes and regions:  Concepts of ‘region’ or ‘province’, and how they changed over time, need to be critically explored, because they are contentious, poorly defined and highly variable. What did Iron Age people see as their geographical horizons, and how did this change?  Attempts to understand the Iron Age landscape require improved, integrated survey methodologies, as existing approaches are inevitably partial.  Aspects of the landscape’s physical form and cover should be investigated more fully, in terms of vegetation (known only in outline over most of the country) and sea level change in key areas such as the firths of Moray and Forth.  Landscapes beyond settlement merit further work, e.g. the use of the landscape for deposition of objects or people, and what this tells us of contemporary perceptions and beliefs.  Concepts of inherited landscapes (how Iron Age communities saw and used this longlived land) and socal resilience to issues such as climate change should be explored more fully.  Reconstructing Iron Age societies. The changing structure of society over space and time in this period remains poorly understood. Researchers should interrogate the data for better and more explicitly-expressed understandings of social structures and relations between people.  The wider context: Researchers need to engage with the big questions of change on a European level (and beyond). Relationships with neighbouring areas (e.g. England, Ireland) and analogies from other areas (e.g. Scandinavia and the Low Countries) can help inform Scottish studies. Key big topics are: o The nature and effect of the introduction of iron. o The social processes lying behind evidence for movement and contact. o Parallels and differences in social processes and developments. o The changing nature of houses and households over this period, including the role of ‘substantial houses’, from crannogs to brochs, the development and role of complex architecture, and the shift away from roundhouses. o The chronology, nature and meaning of hillforts and other enclosed settlements. o Relationships with the Roman world