Data warehousing for human Life - Contd 5

When I spoke about this topic to my teacher and well-wisher Mr.Bruce Andrews  he asked me the following questions to answer my self.

• “The challenging part of designing a Data Warehouse is understanding what types of questions you may want to ask, which influences the structure of your data.”
• “Are we going to try to measure ourselves through time?”

My response is :

 

“The challenging part of designing a Data Warehouse is understanding what types of questions you may want to ask, which influences the structure of your data.”

The application we are trying to build should answer the basic questions. which are directly impacting and on analysing can improve our day to day life. Which we have in our mind as an adult, as an employee, as a young parent, as an ambitious person, as parent’s of an adult, as grand parents. Our application should be capable of answering 10-15 questions under each category.

As a young parent we would lie to have the following question answered:

1. How active is my kid?
2. How long he / she spend in physical activity?
3. How long he / she spend in learning activity?
4. How long he / she spend in extra curricular activity (painting, drawing etc...)?
5. How long he / she spend in Internet?
6. How long he / she spend in TV & electronic media?
7. What are his / her eating habits?
8. How may time he / she had minor medial problem for a period of time?
9. What are his / her seasonal medical problems?
10. What are his / her emotional reactions (mostly dissatisfied / happy / creepy)?
11. What are his / her medical allergic situations?
12. What are his / her physical allergic situations?
13. Etc…

Note: These lists are for Illustrative purpose only. We can short list the objective questions after doing a research involving the SME’s.

Going by 80- 20 rule (Pareto rule), by understanding the 20 % of the things that impact our life we should be able to tune our life for better living. Our datawarehouse should be capable of covering that  20 %.

“Are we going to try to measure ourselves through time?”

My answer is a ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.

Yes:  As I mentioned in my previous posts certain things can be analysed / compared with out an impact on time. Like the Intellectual capabilities, healthy habits etc…

                        Ex: How many languages my grandfather had known at the age of 30?

                              How many hours had my parents spent on entertainment activities?

No: The things which are impacted by time and may not provide value for today’s life style like driving a chariot, building a mud house etc…

                        Ex: (Being an Asian) does my grandfather know to speak Italian at the age of 30?

TID BIT:

Nicholas Felton:  One of the designers who built the Facebook’s Time line feature had virtually built a datawarehouse for individual’s life. The interesting part is that he landed in Facebook by building an analytical reporting tool for his personal life. Knowingly or unknowingly he ended up building  a personal datawarehouse, which he ended up doing so. Facebook is building a personal datawarehouse, which is answering some of our queries on entertainment habitat. 

COMMENTS:

I received an interesting email from last week posting

- Our brain is the best data warehouse and our senses are the input. We have to be very careful while interacting with brain.

There has been a misunderstanding; we are not contemplating neuroscience here. The application we are talking is an external product which helps us to analyse the data set externally, like we do for the business. To be philosophical, the data that we are trying capturing in this application is captured by our subconscious mind. It takes a long time for us to recognise what is there in the subconscious mind and it is difficult to analyse it objectively. Our application helps us to analyse objectively and on demand.

Next week let us see how we can build such an application...

Data warehousing for human Life - Contd 4

I was asking my friends,” we were busy in building application for tuning other business to perfection, by using the various technologies (Datawarehousing, Business Intelligence, Data mining, Data Analytics, Business planning etc... ) but why we never thought of something that is required to tune our personal life.”

Some of them said,"Yes, I agree having such application will give a better result".

Some said,"it is good to have".

Some said,"do we require it? I’m good at taking my own decision".

Some said," what I will get tangibly …."

The outcome I had after a series of conversation with my friends is

We do this sort of application for tuning business, because the results we achieve are explicit and noticed by others. There was no anonymity and most important people are rewarded tangibly (money, promotion, new car, house etc…).

The changes received by having “DWH for human life” application are Implicit. It is only for individuals to see and feel. There is anonymity.

For example:

No one can force individuals to follow exercise schedule, nor can the individuals see a tangible reward like getting money or a promotion (excluding body building competition) .It is for the individuals to feel the strength he receives and the healthy life he lives. If he feels the intangible rewards (Confidence with in him, healthy life etc…), then he will follow the schedule.

The same is true for the application that we are discussing. This application will provide implicit benefit for people but it has to be felt by the individuals to use it. There are individuals who track their daily habit, sense out the pattern and tune their life accordingly.

• Some achieve this by writing diary.
• Some does this for their financial progress by analyzing their bank balance, savings, loans, assets, liabilities etc….
• Some does this only for their educational progress, by analyzing the grades, white papers, no of degrees.
• Some does this only for their health progress, by analyzing their weight, height and the medical expenditure.

But we are not having an overall application that covers most of the aspects of life that can show the correlation between them. The application we are talking here will be able to provide this for us.

Most of us take things for granted. We take decision on our self more subjectively. This application will help us to take decision objectively.

We may not be getting any monetary benefits by using this application directly.But using this application and tuning our activities accordingly will provide more monetary benefit than ever. This will provide more indirect tangible benefits.

When we build a house the person who is benefited directly is the contractor. But the people who are benefited indirectly is count less.From masonry, brick maker, steel rod maker, cement factory worker, utilities transporter, carpenter, etc…
Similarly we may not get direct monetary benefit ay this application but once we start using this we can tune our life to get wealth that is beyond our imagination.

Any other views on this are welcome.

Data warehousing for human Life - Contd 3

Hope every one had a good “NEW YEAR CELEBRATION”

While interacting about DWH for human beings, one of my colleague asked me a question, 'what is the use of having such an application?'

I asked him, have you ever wondered what our parents concerns were while we are growing and on same term, what are our concerns about our kids?

He came back with a list,

1. What is my kid’s educational interest?
2. What is my kid’s sports interest?
3. What is my kid’s health condition?
4. Is there any change in the attitude that I have to concern for?
5. How much I have to earn to make him to go for his interest? ………

I said, ‘all these questions can be answered by having a DWH for human being or ourselves’

The application may not be providing answers, but it will provide necessary insight for us to find the answers.

Let us see how it can help  

What is my Kids educational Interest? Today what we do to answer this question is

1. Just ask our kids to go to school and let the school identify or report to us, what is their interest?
2. Some parents even force the kids to accept, what is available & affordable to them.
3. Some parents spend their time in observing the kids activities and conclude themselves that he is interested in some field. Some time this approach gives better result some times don’t
4. Some parents ask or discuss with their close friends / relation to finalise the kid’s interest.
5. In western countries, most parents leave the kids to explore the world and find their own interest.

I’m not saying the above methods are wrong. My point is what is the probability of identifying the kid’s interest correctly by following the above said methods? Hardly a 50% success rate.

What we are talking here is we are trying for an application which will help us to achieve to an 80% success rate.

Scientific researchers had proved that,’ the kid’s interest can be identified by closely monitoring their activities from age of 6 to 14’.

Consider each parents spends 5 min daily to enter the child’s activities and reaction on various activities into this application (like the time spent on drawing, time spent on reading story books, time spent on dancing or physical activities, his energy level in doing various activities, his reaction to various activated suggested by us etc… (This list for illustration purpose only)). Down the line in 2 years we will have a pattern for our kid’s in our hand. This will guide us to find our kids interest. We can plan accordingly and help them in their growth.

What we do today is taking a slow and single dimensional approach and by the time we find their interest the precious time is lost or we have already invested in the field which our kid’s hate.

The only thing we  require is to have discipline in updating the application regularly for the data to be built. Once we do that, we can analyse how the kids are performing. Even we can compare between other's who are having similar characteristics, across the world. Even we can collaborate this analysis with various parties (Schools, Doctors, Friends, Elder parents etc…) to find where our kid’s are moving towards. This application can be used from toddlers to old people. Some times it helps us to unlock the inherent strength of our kids for that case even ourselves.

As it has been proven for ages there will be signs before anything happens in the world. Like the animals migrate, before the change of season or before a major catastrophic (earth quake, volcano etc…). There are signs in our life too. Only we have to do is, look for signs. This application helps us to notice those signs before it is too late.

At the end of our conversation he said “Let us figure out how we can achieve this ….”

While continuing my thoughts I came across one organization that does a data warehousing (DWH) for human being. That is 100plus.com

What they do is they use the data warehousing technology and their analytics process to analyse our individual health input and come out with a better prediction of our health in the near future.

We are seeing that this technology (DWH for humans) is taking pace in the world. Hope my friends 3^rd concern (What is my kid’s health condition) about kids is taken care by 100plus.com currently.