All You Can Eat Data
Will we be Gourmets or Gluttons?
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Essential Element of the Forecast System
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All You Can Eat Data
Concept from the Smartphone Industry
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All You Can Eat Data
Concept from the Smartphone Industry
But terms and conditions usually apply…
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All You Can Eat Data
Concept from the Smartphone Industry
But terms and conditions usually apply…
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All You Can Eat Data
…but why would you want more of
something than you actually need???
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All you an eat..
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All you an eat..
• Maybe 60 to 70 individual items to choose
from.
• How many did you pick?
• Probably no more than 6 to 8
• The chef did not know in advance just what
you wanted..
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All you an analyse..
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All you an analyse..
• Perhaps 300 weather observations
• Each containing 15-20 individual elements of
information
• Perhaps 5,000 individual information
elements
• Maybe 10-20 tell us something new!
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All you an analyse..
• Weather Charts tell us something about the
power of presentation in organising data to
promote good decision-making.
• Use of weather data in analysis also tells us
something about the strengths and
weaknesses of human and machine analysis
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The Explosion of Data
• Weather Data
– Minute-by-minute observations
– Multi-channel satellite imagery (and many
combinations thereof..)
– Radar, Lidar, and other remote sensing
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The Explosion of Data
• Impact Data
– Damage Reports
– Traffic Flows
– Power Disruption
– Flood extent and depth
– Airport Delays
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The Explosion of Data
• Impact Data
– Text Reports
– Images
– Videos
• Increasingly, a lot of this “soft” data is on
social media.
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The Human Dimension
• What do we know about how humans process
information and make decisions?
• Not an awful lot!
• Work of Kahneman and Tversky
– Israeli Psychologists
– Studied decision-making in the 1970’s
– Particular study of military decision-making
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Work of Kahneman and Tversky
• The human mind has two modes of working –
fast and slow.
• Fast – from our evolution
– Monitoring the senses
– Keeping us safe
– Fast, but shallow thinking
– Very poor at assessing complex probabilities
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Work of Kahneman and Tversky
• Slow – a very human capability
– Deep thought and study
– Uses a lot of energy!
– We tend to avoid it where possible
– “Thinking so hard my head hurts”
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Behavioural Science
• Thinking Fast – how most decisions are taken
– Humans tend not to examine all available information
in a structured and dispassionate way
– Use “Heuristics” or “Rules of Thumb” to arrive at
decisions (Cheat Sheets)
– Make unconscious decisions as to the worth of
different elements of information
– Presentation greatly affects these decisions
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Behavioural Science
• Forecast Decisions – typically made quickly
Fast Decisions
• The only way a forecaster can assimilate all
that data and come to a forecast / warning
decision
• We may presume that users act similarly
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Behavioural Science
• Training and experience enable an “Expert” to
condense years of study and experience into a
quick judgement
• Non-experts find this much more difficult
• From “Slow thinking process” to “Fast
Judgement” is a learned skill
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Behavioural Science
• The problem lies in the “biases”
• Every person has biases, or blind-spots, and
these affect especially our “fast” decisions.
• The human attention-span is very short – it
has been estimated at 8 secs!
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Longer Attention-Span?
• Estimated at 9 secs!!
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Behavioural Science
• We really don’t know a lot about:
1. The mental procedure with which forecasters process
information when they come to make forecast and
warning decisions;
2. How people use these warnings, and how they modify
their behaviour accordingly.
• Now we are proposing to throw a lot more
data at both forecasters and users
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Behavioural Science
• It’s not all bad news!
• One of the stronger known biases that people
have is the “confirmation bias”
– People will not make a decision to evacuate with
information from just one source. They look for
confirmation from other sources
– Information on Social Media offers another source
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Behavioural Science
• Back to SmartPhones…
• Decisions to evacuate or take other significant
actions in face of danger are “Fast” decisions –
like “Fight or Flight” decisions
• SmartPhones engage that “Fast” part of our
brain behaviour – sampling and gathering
large amounts of superficial data
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Behavioural Science
• SmartPhones and Social Media offer a perfect
medium to disseminate supporting
information to “official” warnings which will
back up and provide additional depth to those
warnings.
• We have to learn to use these new paradigms
of communication wisely
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Behavioural Science
• Kahneman again:
“….I gave up on decision analysis. No-one ever
made a decision because of a number. They
need a story”
“….the understanding of numbers is so weak
that they don’t communicate anything”
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Thank you
谢谢
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