Picturing Your Life Data

August 17, 2014 by 2 Comments
wedding day smile

wedding day smile

I’m not a mother, but I’ve heard that a mother’s love sometimes can be described as “an awful love.”

I’ve witnessed a bit of that awful side over the past couple of days, as female friends of mine have taken to social channels, like Facebook, to share photos and express melancholy feelings, while leaving their first-year kids on college campuses for the first time.

It seems to be a time for “both sides of things.” Joni Mitchell famously pointed to these times in life with her “Both Sides Now” lyric, “something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day.”

For all the different kinds of data analysis and exploration that’s happening right now on the business analytics front, wouldn’t it be interesting to apply a “Things Gained vs. Things Lost” filter to our own life experience data and examine the results?

What if you could quickly and easily assess all that you’ve gained and lost along life’s way? Would you conduct that type of personal analysis?

Or, maybe you wouldn’t prefer to examine your life in terms of gains and losses? Maybe you’d apply a different filter to your life experience data?

If I could analyze my life experience data, I’d create a frequency distribution report to reveal all the occurrences of my greatest personal joys – those moments when my smile was widest.

Until then, like my friends who are mothers of first-year college students, I’ll have to rely on pictures to record and reveal my most significant milestones. Pictures like the one, taken on my wedding day a few years ago, when my smile stretched to its limit.

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Going Beyond Surface Data

July 19, 2014 by 2 Comments
tennis racket

a shadow beneath the surface of a racket

Working in the business analytics arena, I’m always interested to learn about the myriad ways that organizational and business data can be mined and explored to reveal insights for enhanced decision-making, productivity and overall business improvement.

What excites me the most is when I hear about businesses that are using data mining and data analytics techniques to improve our quality and way of life.

One way of life is the way that we play (in my case, tennis, that is).

As a USTA League tennis player, you can imagine how excited I was to read about consumer sports analytics system provider PlaySight Interactive Ltd. and its new PlaySight™ Smart Court, which captures a player’s on-the-court performance data and enables the player to access a plethora of real-time and post-match, personal performance statistics. Talk about awesome!

While considering the concept of PlaySight Smart Courts and how the technology enables players to go beyond the court surface to discover new insights into their personal tennis games, I recently began to think a bit more philosophically and wondered…exactly how much lies beyond the surface of our lives?

What about you? How would you answer that question?

I tend to think that the universes inside each of us seem hidden and that we often make assumptions about others, based on surface realities that we see without “Smart Court”-access to their truths and feelings.

Would you agree? When you interact with others, how often do you consider what’s not being said? And, how often do you consider what you may be missing, as you consider their points of view?

While driving my car and listening to the SiriusXM radio Bluegrass Junction channel 61 earlier this week, I heard Joe Mullins & The Radio Ramblers sing their fantastic tune, Some Kind of War, a song that includes a lyric of advice that I think is appropriate to share as the conclusion of this post:

“Lord, help me stop and understand, before I rush to judge my fellow man.”

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