Summary of Article
Creating Insights From The Data Around Us – a Ted Talk given by Josh Jones, in which he emphasizes the reason why there is such an influx of data in these times(talk can be found here). Jones says that it is because of how much cheaper and smaller the computers and sensors that power the collection and processing of the data. In the talk, Jones also mentions how Sherlock Holmes is a lot like a data scientist. His reasoning for this is as follows: Sherlock Holmes was famous for creating insights around context if you think about the modern data scientist that is what they do, they take a bunch of data points and put them into the context of the business and come up with things that the business should do to meet its goals. For Sherlock Holmes it was the same thing except his context would allow him to be a detective and solve cases.
My Takes
Both of these points make sense in my mind as well. Starting with the reasons as to why there is so much more data now compared to even just 10 years ago if the costs of inputs go down then simple supply and demand dictates that more will be produced which – in this case – causes more data to be available. The more data the more insights from that data, and that data can be applied to just about every aspect of your daily life. For example, here are some of the instances that Jones thought of: creating taste profiles for customers of restaurants, identifying where the best location is to open a new restaurant or customers that we are at risk of losing, and then notifying our sales team to give them a call and see if we can avoid that, along with many many more.
The second major thing that Jones pointed out in his talk was that the job of the data scientist and the job of the character Sherlock Holmes isn’t really that different. At first, I was a bit skeptical but when I understood Jones’s reasoning I couldn’t agree more. The way that Jones compared Sherlock Holmes’ job to a data scientist’s was a really interesting and funny way to put it. I agree with this point because, the job of a detective is to accumulate as many facts as possible, contextualize them and see what they are telling you, and then from that context act on the facts by actually making the arrest or finding a suspect, etc. A data scientist’s job is more or less the same it is, at its core, to take the data, contextualize it and see what it is telling you, and then act upon those insights by recommending a path to the business based on the data. They are basically one and the same.
Conclusion
All in all, this was a great Ted Talk by Josh Jones and a very intriguing one. Its comparisons as well as reasoning really resonated with me. It definitely gave me a different perspective, which just happened to be a more fun one. This talk also gave me reasoning as to why we are seeing an increase in data production year over year like we are seeing. I encourage you to watch the Ted Talk and hopefully you will enjoy it as much as I did(it can be found here).