I’ve just had a few days off with ‘flu – not man ‘flu, but a real one!
No great threat to life and limb, but exhausting to the point of my being able to stand non-stop daytime TV, without usual resort to Discovery, National Geographic. Or, better still, to my beloved radio and e-reader.
Just when you are beginning to think you’re never going to feel better, however, the brain cells start to work and you cease to be passive. You start searching for something a bit better. I found it.
I have been connected with front line research most of my working life. It’s a paid job but one managed in a different way from almost all other jobs mostly, I think, because failure is an option and must be accepted as such when exploring the unknown.
I don’t think I have seen this better demonstrated than in the BBC programme Destination Titanhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0109ccd/Destination_Titan/
This programme tells the story of the joint US/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and thought to resemble our own early Earth.
For a small team of British scientists this would be the culmination of a lifetime’s endeavour – the flight alone, some 2 billion miles, would take a full seven years and the preliminaries10 or more years before that.
The programme tells the story of the space probe they built, the sacrifices they made, their hopes for the landing and the emotions they felt at each stage of ups and downs.
It would have been perfect if Northern Ireland’s role had been mentioned – but then that’s for us to do.
It was the Martin Baker Company, of ejector seat fame, that provided the critical parachute arrestor system to allow a soft descent into the largely unknown atmosphere.
I don’t think managing the unknown is our best business quality, whereas it is one of the top characteristics of our US friends.
They would have made the programme even if the project had failed. If we hadn’t succeeded, I suspect we would have heard no more about it once the headlines had died away.
I must applaud our leaders, though, for one recent decision: the rapid embrace of the world of big data.
Almost instantly, it seems, we have joined the Californian avante-garde and begun to publish our data much more freely.
I would urge everyone (even if they are not desperately seeking distraction) to watch The Joy of Statistics –http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00wgq0l/The_Joy_of_Stats/
In this very elegant and lively (despite its subject) programme, Professor Hans Rosling tells the story of how Statistics has moved, through computers and the internet, from the controlling hand-tool of autocrats to the power of the people. But only once (good) data is made freely available.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as the old adage goes, and statistics can be very tricky.
So, with openness must surely come clarity as to the provenance of the data, proper mathematical analysis and the highest quality reasoning and presentation.
Ought we now to be considering our own Csar of Stats, like Hans Rosling, as we enter the unknown territory of open data?
