BIG DATA, Small data, and a little practice on both (Part II)

How Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize by “changing gravity” 

In 1933, a certain former football and baseball player and wrestler on his high school teams failed the entrance exam into University of Minnesota. More athlete than egghead, he would eventually attribute sports as nurturing in him the drive that helped him succeed in the field of Agriculture:

“Wrestling taught me some valuable lessons… I always figured I could hold my own against the best in the world. It made me tough. Many times, I drew on that strength. …”

To afford his education, Borlaug found a position in the civilian conservation corps, where many of the unemployed who worked for him were starving:

“I saw how food changed them. All of this left scars on me…”

That was in 1935.

Wheat, a vital food source, was plagued by disease, particularly “stem rust,” which weakened the plants, reducing crop yield by anything from 20 to 80%. Now, you can invent and test fungicides – chemicals – and run the additional risk that several decades down the road you suddenly discover the kids in that region all have extra toes….. or you can breed disease-resistant, stronger-stalked wheat plants.

This was copied and pasted into a part II because I thought the previous post ran long (zzz), and then couple days ago HN’s year 1 band went on their long-planned field trip to the Zen Organic Farm, where speakers explained how in addition to not using pesticides, they were working on preserving vital plant species from extinction in order to preserve variety in gene pools… which honestly I hadn’t been expecting…

…right along with when they dangled a plastic fly strung from a fishing rod over some fruit as they explained to the little kids that they did not believe in combining insect-and-plant DNA to breed insect-resilient crops because it was against nature. No Franken-fruits for us!

KIDS THESE DAYS.

Kale is hailed as the “new beef,” and the kids were encouraged to replace potato chips with the kale chips..

The kids got to pull up their own carrots, pluck cherry tomatoes and huge leafy greens, rinsing them off and munching on them (no manure in fertilisers), making their own salads garnished with flowers. They learned about natural sweeteners. They learned about the importance of bees in pollination and the making of honey, met earthworms.

HN btw, is five. 

Back to Borlaug – he and a team that comprised soil scientists, maize and potato breeders kept at it for about 16 years and 6,000 crossovers, ultimately producing a plant resistant to the diseases that affect grain yield. It was named “Dwarf Wheat”. 

Sturdier stalks. That’s how they “changed gravity” 

When Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize, it was 1970. That’s 35 years after once failing his college entrance exam. 

Author Martin Lindstrom of Small Data and sometime “Brand Expert” believes that while Big Data helps you garner important information, ultimately enabling you to see the “correct Big Picture,”  Small Data is needed to help you create uniquely. It’s picking up on the small details that inspires you to new heights specific to your target audience.

In his search for clues and inspiration, Lindstrom pays a lot of attention to minute details, does things like  going on a wild goose chase observing mummiji and their daughters-inlaw in their households in India, devotes considerable attention to their very different colour preferences, who does the cooking, who does the cleaning and can therefore scent everyone’s laundry with the detergent she prefers……… all in the hopes of designing a new cereal packaging. His goal: to make mils and dils go home from grocery shopping with the same cereal – his.

Yet in cases like Borlaug’s it can mean discovering a vital need, or looking at an existing one in a new way, and with a confluence of inspiration and drive, maybe even saving lives, saving economies, someday. (If your land doesn’t yield anything, you simply don’t have an economy, and plants are the only living thing capable of making their own food.)

Now let’s go further off on that tangent – can you make barren land yield produce?

The Martian is about an astronaut who, after his mission goes awry, has to find ways to grow his own food until the rescue mission from Earth (which takes about a year and a half to get there, Mars is so far away) can come back to get him. So Matt Damon sets off to replicate the conditions on Earth that will allow him to grow potatoes on Mars. It makes you really appreciate all the conditions for growing food that we take for granted on a daily basis, and towards the end of the full-length movie also some of the vitamin deficiencies he experiences from not having a balanced diet:

….so he got the book. And Youtubes 😀

 

Anyway. After the science fiction book-turned-movie-starring-Matt-Damon, NASA decides to try growing potatoes on Mars, how freaking cool is that?)

Speaking of science fiction becoming reality, here’s one that I stopped watching…

…because it was too sad and possible an alternate reality. I mean, potatoes on Mars are cool, killer man-made highly contagious brain disease n-ot so much (more below). Written by a guy with a Masters in Accounting, no less. (Being accounting-trained myself – are accountants unhappy with the world, or what? 😀 )

Possible spoiler alert…

These teenagers find themselves post-apocalypse Maze Runners because they are the “fortunate” few who have evolved some kind of immunity to a disease that yes, pretty much eventually turns you into a screaming, cannibalistic zombie (thereby opening the door in later movies to all these awesome visuals of mutations as the virus evolves).

Here’s why I found this universe so terrifying and sad: Firstly, The Flare is a lab-developed originally-painless viral infection intended to solve the over-population problem. Basically, another way of “changing gravity” – but instead of feeding more people, this was a potential means of culling excess population.

Bad enough this (possibly fictitious-government-run) Biotech company named “WCKD” gets to create the disease and keep it on shelf somewhere, it is then accidentally released on the masses during some solar flare natural disasters. (At least this was how it originally looked, from the first few movies. I may be too chicken to watch Death Cure, the latest instalment out in cinemas now.)

My point is this: How many inventions and experiments, even some begun as well-meaning, that “we don’t plan on letting out of the lab” uh, end up causing apocalypses in movies?? NASA decided to grow potatoes out of Science used-to-be-Fiction. So really. No Franken-fruits for us. If you have the ability and inclination, may you also have the discipline and restraint 🙂 (No, not easy. Mankind doesn’t have a good track record for restraint in their creations, look at the financial crisis.)

 

So these “fortunate, immune” boys are placed within this ever-changing mechanical maze, their memories wiped, and given life-threatening “problem solving” (monsters, deliberate infections, lack of food and other supplies, and yes navigating the maze) so the way their brains work can be monitored and the scientists can figure a cure for the rest of the world.

It begs the same question as with Minority Report, last post: Would you argue that the good of the many (so many more people saved from violent crime or terrible disease) outweighs the good of a few (the psychic or immune children being locked up or experimented on for their abilities), essentially the same argument when you think of say, sending troops for peacekeeping. No matter how stacked in your side’s favour the force depletion is:

It depends which category your kid is in 🙂

Maze Runner, it’s awesome. It’s heartbreaking. I can’t watch! These boys fight their way out, struggling all the way, creating a social structure slightly reminiscent of 1954 Lord of the Flies (tween boys find themselves stranded and create their own social structure and hierarchy in efforts to survive, slowly becoming more aggressive and cruel – again, art in an old book, showing how even the most well-meaning face temptation and evil, brought upon by fear and insecurity) occasionally having to kill each other, clinging to the hope they can one day be free in the “normal world,” which they idealistically assume to be better than their current one…..

And then the “normal world” is horrible and some of them don’t survive the shock from finding that out. See, we draw on our experiences and memories, and while the bad ones are awful, they serve a vital purpose, they are refiner’s fire. With innocence also comes a potential lack of resilience, also a lack of being tested. The No Free Lunch Of The Real World…

The Ends.

 

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