The Slough of Despond
The winter sunshine is bright enough to force a permanent squint, even with my sunglasses on. A perfect day to go flying I thought but at the same time, I wondered how the grass runway at Maypole had stood up to a week's rain.
The answer is that it hasn't, as I discovered as I sank up to the tops of my boots in muddy water. One other optimistic pilot had taken off this morning but the marsh-like conditions leave very little room for error and the last thing I want is to find myself diving into a swamp when I should be climbing into the air.
I'm going to have to wait until it dries out, which could be weeks at this time of year. Meanwhile, several small helicopters from Manston are flitting around in the sunshine overhead;like large dragonflies, rubbing-in the fact that I'm grounded until the end of the rainy season here in Kent.
I hate helicopters.
It’s a new expression I haven’t heard before. ‘Civilisational data mining.’
Let me start by putting it in some context. Every character, you or I have typed into the Google search engine or Facebook over the last decade, means something, to someone or perhaps ‘something,’ if it’s an algorithm.
In May 2014, journalists revealed that the United States National Security Agency, the NSA, was recording and archiving every single cell-phone conversation that took place in the Bahamas. In the process they managed to transform a significant proportion of a society’s day to day interactions into unstructured data; valuable information which can of course be analysed, correlated and transformed for whatever purpose the intelligence agency deems fit.
And today, I read that a GOP-hired data company in the United States has ‘leaked’ personal information, preferences and voting intentions on… wait for it… 198 million US citizens.
Within another decade or so, the cost of sequencing the human genome …
Let me start by putting it in some context. Every character, you or I have typed into the Google search engine or Facebook over the last decade, means something, to someone or perhaps ‘something,’ if it’s an algorithm.
In May 2014, journalists revealed that the United States National Security Agency, the NSA, was recording and archiving every single cell-phone conversation that took place in the Bahamas. In the process they managed to transform a significant proportion of a society’s day to day interactions into unstructured data; valuable information which can of course be analysed, correlated and transformed for whatever purpose the intelligence agency deems fit.
And today, I read that a GOP-hired data company in the United States has ‘leaked’ personal information, preferences and voting intentions on… wait for it… 198 million US citizens.
Within another decade or so, the cost of sequencing the human genome …
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