I was still able to play golf for a while, at a ‘safe’ social distance – not a problem when you play golf like me and spend most of your time in the bushes, but that came to an end when the full lockdown began. What now?
Three days passed in a blur and I had completed all of the ‘interesting’ bits and was left with about 250 pieces that had no distinguishing marks whatsoever – all beige rock!
After frustratingly trying to find some way of identifying differences that did not exist, I concluded that the only way to proceed was to try every piece into every space until I found the perfect fit. 250 pieces that had to be tried at least two ways each gives at least 500 tries. For every one of the 250 spaces. That’s potentially 125,000 tries!
Undeterred, I pressed on but after another evening session I had only found a handful of fitting pieces and I was fast approaching serious repetitive strain injury – so my mind wandered from the task in hand to try and calculate how long this was eventually going to take me to complete.
The more interesting bit is that while doing this my mind made the leap back to what I had read earlier that day about how the Chinese had been able to reduce the spread of Coronavirus through the use of GPS tracking data, face recognition technology and big data analysis.
Now you may have some reservations about all this stuff. A lot of people do – in my experience opinion seems to be split pretty evenly and very widely between those that are terrified by the personal security implications and those that do not give a flyer, because it works, and it can do good as well as bad. Depends what you do with it!
I tend to fall in the latter group – but you won’t find me saying that in front of my wife who falls most distinctly into the former! They say opposites attract!
Leaving aside the potential moral issues (if you can) just think about the magnitude of what the Chinese appear to have achieved.
They have been able to identify practically all of the contacts of every patient diagnosed with the virus and in short time, to have contacted each of each of them so that they could be tested and treated if necessary – thereby drastically reducing the spread of the virus in the early ‘detection’ stage. We will probably never know exactly how many lives this will have saved – but it will be a lot. A very big lot!
Sure, I am certain that this mammoth task also involved a great deal of old-fashioned detective work and feet on the ground (something the Chinese are not short of) but without the big data technology it would have been impossible. Unthinkable.
I am fast coming to the conclusion that there is no problem that cannot eventually be solved by some form of big data analysis – providing we can first obtain the data, and then find the processing power to manipulate that data. And I am getting at major, major issues here!
How to track cancer growth and eventually help find a cure? How to identify the exact nature of the human aging process with a view to delaying its onset? How to identify fake news and restore our faith in the media and social media, not to mention politicians.
Of course, I will not be around to see all of this. But my kids and grandkids might well!
If you are unconvinced, take a look at the Big Data Value Association website – www.bdva.org and look at the many and various mind-blowing projects described there!
You might also want to take a look at the Enterprise Big Data qualifications, including the newly available Enterprise Big Data Analyst course.
In the meantime, keep safe and keep sane. Now where did I put that other Jigsaw?