It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose

by Future Historian April 30, 2021

In one early-ish episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard confronts the android Commander Data in his quarters. Although Data has no emotion, he is mired in self-doubt and confusion after losing at a game he thought he would easily win.  Data futilely searches for something, something that explains the loss; a malfunctioning processor or faulty sensor, but keeps coming up empty.  And Picard, in the way that Picard can, explains the following:

My mind kept returning to this scene after the TecBridge finals last night.  We didn’t win, and it was a major bummer. I can be happy for the winner (I do have some empathy) but was terribly disappointed.

I honestly believe that every opportunity presents a chance for improvement. That’s the whole nature of the evaluation work done over at Dawn Chorus. And, yet, I can’t help but think that we really did do everything we could to put ourselves in the best, honest light. The journey was nice, and it’s okay to hope we’d end up at the beach.

So, the whole team here at PubTrawlr forges ahead. We really believe in the value of PubTrawlr and what it can do for scientific synthesis…and ultimately what it can do for outcomes. The only thing that fundamentally is different between yesterday and today is that we have to be a bit more creative.  And that’s not a bad thing.