When we can measure everything.
From the Flickr of bcostin
A couple weeks ago, I caught a snippet on the news about an interesting correlation. Apparently, the economy is directly responsible for an increase in the incidence of West Nile virus. Foreclosures have increased, and many of the foreclosed homes have pools. With no one tending these pools they’ve become breeding grounds for new mosquitoes.
Shortly after that I switched my running style to a shorter stride and higher cadence. I found I was able to run further without tiring and that my overall speed increased as a result. Some quick research revealed that this is a fairly well known effect. The benefits of a faster cadence are less time in the air and lower impact on your legs; better positioning to maintain momentum and increased potential for speed.
A few days ago, this post on using Google Maps to test a site’s potential for solar arrays caught my attention. It was an unexpected and clever use of maps combined with existing data around the Sun’s strength at various places. (I recently had a solar site assessment – it took several hours and involved a technician climbing up onto my roof with gear to measure the angle of the roof and then a fair amount of calculations afterwards. It cost me a couple of hundred dollars as well.)
And then most recently, this snippet from NPR linking hairy women to a declining economy also got me thinking.
So what do all of these have to do with each other? Russell wrote about this a while ago in Campaign – the idea of non-obvious relationship awareness. As our ability to measure just about every facet of our world increases, odd and unexpected relationships start to appear.
However, awareness is the first step towards behavior change. I’ve touched on this before, numbers provide a way to make decisions about what to do. Quantification of the risks associated with smoking changed behaviour and legislation around tobacco use. Quantification of the dangers of trans-fats are currently creating the same result. Measurement allows us to understand much more clearly the relationships between things that aren’t obviously related and that understanding makes us change our behaviour.
Because our entire evolution up to this point has been built upon obvious relationship awareness, there’s a potential for the impact of measurement to create fairly large and disruptive changes at every level of society. As our understanding grows around the relationships between seemingly unrelated things we will inevitably alter our behaviour accordingly.
The non-obvious relationship awareness of measurement could be cultural change.
