The Human and the Being: Small Data Search, Big Data Search

In the Boston Bombing in 2013 a huge investigation 'on the run' was being conducted using state of the art surveillance techniques, Social Media and CCTV technology in a unique and uncharted way.  The art of sleuthing was on hyperdrive with people on the job making up the application of technology in new ways.

As soon as the bomb went off, investigators were accessing the local businesses CCTV footage to try and piece together what was happening in the crowd.  They also used Social Media to access individual people’s camera footage to add to the picture that added up to two young men, one with a black baseball cap, the other with a white baseball hat, who were seen dropping off a package and walking off together into the crowd.

When the FBI had the CCTV pictures and the Cell phone pictures of the white capped individual, they started using their face recognition technology. On reflection, they took longer to identify the two bombers because they were looking into their “Small Data Search” list of known persons of interest who were radicals and possible terrorists.

In fact, the black hatted bomber had a FBI file from years back and had a description on himself as having been “Radicalized”  some years back.  The reason they were slow in identifying him was because the data entered on him years back, had a typo in the way they spelt his name.

An expert noted that if they had've used a“Big Data Search” like a Google search, that they would have gotten the end result much quicker, because Google offers spelling alternatives intuitively in contrast to a“Small Data Search” needing exact spelling  to come up with a result.

“Small Data Search” is like the Human mind, searching through the known information, using systems of logic to come up with the answer. 

"Big Data Search" is like the Being - having a much larger data base: 'Everything', not just a limited set of information.

In this dramatic and deadly event, there were human investigators, gnarly sleuths who used their intuition to leap to conclusions that lead to breakthroughs in the understanding of what was going on.  These experienced and canny operators were using the resources of their Being to come to very different conclusions to the people who were working on the  human equivalent of the “Small Data Search”

In that way, the resources of the Being is similar to the Google styled searching of everything available and coming up with disparate, but connected information that clarified the situation in ways that the logical linear thinking wasn’t capable of.

Your Being gives you night vision, 3d modelling,  cross discipline analysis, complexity rather than simplicity and a whole range of capability that the Human mind can’t deliver.   

This is like the difference between a skilled technician and a Master.

 

This is only the beginning. Get to know clarity. Email me, Mike Kennedy...