At ten minutes after seven this morning, I asked my daughter if she needed a ride into school. She said that she didn't need one, but she would appreciate it, so we did. My wife asked me to find out what she'd been doing that kept her around so long, as she knows that the bus comes at about five minutes after the hour. She told me that on Friday the bus comes later -- in fact, that the only time it's 'on time' is the first day of the week; every day after that, it's successively later. But why, I asked. Because the bus driver is lazy, she replied. Doesn't make sense, I said. Being lazy should lead to the same amount of delay each day, or even a varying amount, not a successively increasing amount. She shrugged and continued to put on makeup (which is something I've yet to adjust to).
The reason I was intrigued was that I was was reading an article this morning from the Economist, whose topic d'semaine is the massive data glut. (They notice this about once every five or ten years, I think.) The specific article that I was reading was on data visualization, but it was preceded by ones on data extraction and cleansing and on data mining. I told her about the fellow who used what the Economist called 'an early social network' to scan multiple ship's logs for their transits across the Pacific, searching them for the routes that consistently gave the fastest transit. I wondered if her observation -- and the likely similar ones that other kids make -- could be used to chart the progress of the buses, and could something useful be made of that? She asked me why the ship's captains were willing to give up their logs, and I told her that they were promised a copy of the resulting maps, but it was also likely that they simply didn't see value in what, to them, was just a history of what happened to their ship. A history of when the bus shows up where -- of what use could that be? Well, I mused, you could use it as a rough way of tracking traffic patterns... what else?
Damned if I know. And I wish I did. Not that I care so much about this incidence, but wouldn't it be marvelous to be able to see that kind of connections?
2 comments:
You could use it as a precise way of figuring traffic patterns. You could also use it to determine if the bus goes by the most efficient route, or the most expedient.
You would also see something you might not expect: the traffic that is held up by the bus, and by how much it is held up.
And then, if you measured the amount of time each bus spent at each stop, you could determine the organizational abilities of the children who got off at whichever stop.
You could also see where the most accidents occurred. Because that would be where the bus was delayed on more than one occasion.
On the other hand, you could also figure out if the bus driver is lazy. :-)
Some of that occurred to me, but most did not. The organizational abilities? Hmmm... which vaguely reminds me of that old mind-bender about the fastest way to get liquid from a bottle (without breaking the bottle).
But I can imagine a little GMap with moving dots and whorls; the dots for the bus, the whorls for the results of eddies in the traffic flow. As this slide shows, when one schoolbus is within point two one traffic-lanes-lengths of another, the effect on queue length for waiting vehicles is cumulative..." Wonder if we could get a TED conference topic out of this?
I can just SEE going to to the local people and suggesting they have every bus satellite-trackable. Holy Enemy of the State!
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