by Dane, Max
Pleased that Jim had been able to get to the right place so easily, Ryan said, “So why are most of those fields censored?”
“You mean all the ‘X’ characters?”
“Yes, exactly.”
Jim swiveled around in his chair.
“Well, that’s the research data itself. Most of it is unique and confidential to the researchers generating or accessing it.”
Perplexed now, Ryan said, “How can I look for an error in a field, if I can’t see what’s written there?”
“Well that’s the tricky part, isn’t it?” said Jim with a smile.
Grabbing a soda and leaning back in his chair, Jim continued, “The data written in the field doesn’t matter, and it probably wouldn’t make a difference to you, if you could see it. What matters is the type of data in the field.”
Jim turned back to his terminal, but selected a different screen, one of the smaller ones above his keyboard. He began typing rapidly and in a few seconds generated a single line of text, with an input field.
‘INPUT DATA HERE: _______________________’
Jim turned to Ryan and said, “Ok, Ryan type something in here.”
Not sure what to type, Ryan leaned around and typed the word ‘blue’.
‘INPUT DATA HERE: __BLUE_______________ ‘
Jim then added some additional code that returned the information.
‘MY FAVORITE COLOR IS: _BLUE____’
Jim continued, “So the alpha characters are captured, and returned as my favorite color. But if I type a number in there instead, this is what happens.”
‘INPUT DATA HERE: __23_______________’
‘MY FAVORITE COLOR IS: (error mismatch num167ad6)’
Ryan had made enough mistakes working with data and coding in his career to know what this was. The programmed code was expecting alpha characters for an input, but got numeric. Not knowing what to do, the code punted with a big fat ‘error’ message.
“I get it Jim, I understand your point. But even so, it proves my point even more, we need to see the data in that field to know if it’s correctly entered,” said Ryan.
“Well, ignoring the researchers’ paranoia about their data, you will find that the data is highly complex. By that I mean that the field you might be interested in can have a non-repeating series of alpha/numeric characters with a handful of special characters as well,” said Jim.
Ryan sighed, “Well, that’s a new wrinkle.”
“Sure, but I’ve looked at some of this too, and I took a different route. I compared the information in a particular field across 10,000 records. I believe that if one of the fields has the wrong information in it, like in the example we just looked at, it would stick out from the rest.”
Ryan began to understand his point. If you picked a data field in a particular record, it would be the same field in all the records of all of the patients undergoing that same treatment.
So it followed that if the first field in a record, was meant for a color, and you compared it to all the records for a specific treatment, they should all be colors. The first fields for them all should match. If even one of them wasn’t a color it would be different from the rest, and stick out. Therefore it wasn’t necessary to know the colors, only that one of them was different. If he could identify a field entry that didn’t match, they could analyze the content later.
“Jim, that’s really clever. Did you find any exceptions?”
“Nope, not one.”
Jim leaned back in his chair again, and smiled.
“Ok, well that’s weird,” said Ryan.
“I agree. It’s a good strategy, but so far, it hasn’t yielded any results.”
“You’ve given me some things to think about. Thanks Jim, I really appreciate it.”
Headed back to his office, Ryan began to look at the problem the way Jim had. It was a strong point Jim had made about comparing like fields without worrying about what was in them. Ryan thought it made sense that Jim, the consummate programmer, would prefer to look at the form of the data rather than the content. Still though, he couldn’t help but feel that Jim’s method was missing something important. There was another element to this picture.
Even so, it was a good start.
They would need to try this approach, very carefully, many more times.
Looking at the clock, it was time to go; he wasn’t going to find it today.
Ryan headed to the garage and went home for the weekend.
It was one of his best in quite a while.
It was Saturday morning, and Jean brought Alex’s backpack to the kitchen table for the usual weekend exploration.
Mondays found Alex’s backpack nearly empty, but by Friday it would be full again. Homework got returned, lunch leftovers stacked up, toys got traded at recess, and notes from the school and PTA waited to be read.
Today was no different.
Jean had just thrown away all the leftover food bits when she came upon his take-home folder with the school and PTA notices in it.
There was another fundraiser coming and they were looking for volunteers. Also, there would be pictures taken next week. She had to remember to dress Alex next Thursday. There was a note regarding a new vaccination against some virus called ‘Rn186’. Apparently it could cause some sort of genetic disorder that wouldn’t impact them until they were teenagers, but the government had recommended protecting the children against it now.
She called to Ryan, who was in the laundry room.
“Hey Ryan, you need to make sure you get Alex to school on time next Wednesday.”
After a few minutes, Ryan made his way to the kitchen.
“What?”
“Ryan, you need to make sure you get Alex to school on time next Wednesday,” she repeated.
“I always get him to school on time. What’s so important about Wednesday?”
“Apparently they’re vaccinating the kids again for something else.”
She couldn’t quite remember the name.
“The note is over there if you want to look at it.”
He picked up the note while she was talking, and finished her thought, “Rn186.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Also, he has pictures on Thursday, so you have to help me remember to get him dressed Thursday morning. No videogame t-shirts,” said Jean.
Ryan remembered the last round of pictures at school. Alex had worn a Rusted Stakes shirt, and he had been the one who missed it.
Jean was mad for a week.
“Okay, I’m on it.”
Monday morning arrived, and Ryan was once again at his desk looking at very many lines of ‘X’s. He spent the whole day identifying specific fields on which to try Jim’s comparison idea. Only this time it would be with the fields he had hand picked.
He wanted to run comparisons within each of twelve patient treatments where an error had been found by the hospital staff. Each of these treatments was known to have an error, and each had thousands of records to compare against. He was casting a wide net. He spent all of Monday and most of Tuesday putting together a list of the field ID numbers to take to Jim.
Tuesday afternoon arrived, and Ryan returned to the programmers’ area again to see Jim and maybe David. Both were there when he arrived, and looked like they were having a heated discussion about something.
“Hey guys, do you have a minute?”
David said, “Ryan, true or false; the Star Wars Death Star was the most powerful starship of all time?”
“No,” said Jim, “you know it was the Enterprise from the old Star Trek series.”
Without hesitating Ryan said, “No, it was the Borg ship from Star Trek.”
The two disgruntled programmers sat back down.
Ryan went into Jim’s cubicle.
“Jim, I’ve sent you mail that has criteria for twelve search comparisons exactly like the one you described to me last week. I was hoping you would run the same test routine on them?”
“Sure, just let me see what
you sent me first.” Moving very quickly through his mail he said, “You know the Borg actually lost the war. Ah, here it is, let’s see what you’ve got.”
After a moment Jim turned back to Ryan, “Sure, I understand what you have here. I can do it. How many records should I compare against?”
“All of them, or I mean as many as there are for each treatment,” he said, paused and then added, “It’s the only way to be sure.”
“Ok, that was an Aliens reference wasn’t it?”
Ryan just laughed, “Listen Jim, this part is really important. I spent the last two days picking these exact fields, no substitutions, Ok?”
“Got it, Ryan, I’ll be extra careful.”
Ryan turned to leave, and then paused.
“Thanks Jim, how long do you think it will take?”
“I’ve got a few things burning in the queue, and then I’ll need to script up the query again. I believe I can have the results to you some time tomorrow afternoon?”
Very pleased, Ryan said thanks again and headed back to his office.
This was a good search, and he was looking forward to catching something.
After Ryan left, Jim looked at the information he’d sent for the data comparison. It was a good test. He hoped he would have something to show for it.
Jim said, “Hey Dave, do you have any better ideas for trying to help Ryan?”
”No, not really,” he said, “It’s a difficult assignment. I don’t really think he’s going to find any answers this way.”
“Yeah, I think I agree.”
“So you know of course that the Enterprise could have wiped out a ton of Star Destroyers.” He didn’t really care, but he loved getting David worked up.
David went into a huge speech about why it wasn’t true.
Without saying a word, Jim snuck out while he was still talking. He wanted to hit the gym downstairs for a little while. He had a date tonight and he always liked to feel ‘ripped’ before going out. Crouching low, he made his way off the floor.
The next morning, Ryan remembered to get Alex to school a little early. On the way to school, Alex complained about his stomach bothering him. It was the kind of thing that happened from time to time, and it usually amounted to nothing more than Alex trying to duck out of a dinner he didn’t like. Ryan, now a little desensitized to stomach complaints, pulled into the school, and looked him over.
“Ah, you’re fine. Have a great day, and I’ll see you when I get home.”
Alex unfastened the seatbelt, and got out of the car.
As he walked towards the front doors of the school, Ryan yelled, “I love you!”
Alex turned and waved slightly but kept going.
Ryan looked past Alex, and through the glass exterior of the school foyer he could see long lines of children. The lines wrapped around the foyer and disappeared beyond his view. There were several nurses set up on one side, vaccinating the kids with the usual arm injections. It all looked very organized, and they seemed to be moving quickly.
‘Ah, the wonders of modern medicine,’ he thought as he drove away.
Later that morning, there was a light knock on the door. Ryan looked up to see Ben James in the doorway.
“Morning Ryan, I thought I’d check on you, and see how things were going.”
“Hi Ben, please come in,” Ryan stood up while Ben came inside.
“So how are you? Are you getting familiar with how we do things?” Ben said.
“You bet. I’ve become familiar with the computer network, and I’ve taken my first stab at probing the information in my project. In fact, I’m starting with a method suggested by one of your programmers, and I’m hoping to get some good results this afternoon.”
Surprised and pleased, Ben said, “That’s great Ryan. The people I have supporting you are actually quite good. A couple of them are really too good to be here.”
“I do have a question about the information I’m working with; much of the data is encrypted, and I can’t tell what it is I’m looking at.”
“What do you mean, ‘encrypted’?”
“Come around here and I’ll show you.” As Ben walked around Ryan’s desk, he pulled up one of the records he had been looking at yesterday.
“You can see that most of the fields are masked with a lot of ‘X’ characters.”
Ben nodded and walked back around.
“Yes, that’s going to be a sticky issue to be sure. The amount of data, and I’m assuming you’re referencing the research side, is huge, even for just this Facility. Much of what is there is unknown even to my department.”
Ben sat down in one of Ryan’s chairs.
”You see it has always been the philosophy of IntelliHealth, that Information Services must protect and serve the research data with the highest possible care, but we are not always allowed to know the content of that data. Our department has been quite successful so far.”
“I understand,” said Ryan, “But it does make this particular project a little harder. I should say though that one of your programmers, Jim Safe, had a very clever idea on how to get around this wrinkle. He suggested comparing data from a single field against many records. So we aren’t interested in the exact entry, instead we want to know if any of the entries look different from the rest. In other words, if all the entries are apples, we compare 10,000 records looking for an orange. It’s the strategy I’m trying right now.”
“Sure, excellent idea. Jim is one of the ones I was talking about, he’s very, very sharp,” said Ben. He chuckled lightly, “He knows it too, but don’t let his ego put you off, Jim’s a good man.”
“He seems to be genuinely interested in the project,” said Ryan.
”Excellent that sounds like a promising start.”
Ben got up to leave, but paused when he got to the door.
“Ryan, would it help if I could make arrangements for you to visit with some of the scientists and general researchers? Maybe they could shed some light on the matter?”
Ryan thought it was a good idea. He wasn’t sure what they could tell him, but it was certainly worth a try.
“Yes, please do Ben. I’d like to meet them and get their take on the problem.”
“Ok then, it’s a deal. I’ll make the arrangements right away. Watch your mail for an invitation to go up and meet a few. It sounds like you’re doing really well Ryan. I’ll talk to you again soon.”
“Thanks, Ben.”
While he was thinking about it, he sat back down and checked his mail. There was a response from Jim. He opened it and saw the results of his 12 searches. There were 12 separate lines each with his search criteria stated, followed by ‘Comparison of 10,000 instances yielded no aberrations’.
Annoyed, he printed the results page, and took it with him to Jim’s cubicle.
Holding up the page Ryan said, “Hey Jim, I got your results. Really? Nothing at all showed up on any of them?”
Turning around from his monitor, Jim said, “Morning Ryan. Yep, I doubled checked them. The code is good. The results are solid. This was the exact same thing that happened to me when I tried this too.”
Ryan stared at the page.
After a short pause he thanked Jim for the help, and walked back to his office to think about it some more. He had been sure that at least one of his searches would’ve hit.
‘Well that sucks.’
He wasn’t sure if he said that, or just thought it.
As he sat down in front of his computer, he noticed that he’d received a phone call. Picking up the phone he heard a message from his wife saying that Alex had thrown up at school this morning. Apparently she had left work very early his morning to go get him and take him home. Jean went on to ask if Alex had complained about his stomach on the way to school.
“Well that sucks.”
This time he was sure he said it.
At the Dane house, Jean was up before Ryan the next morning. Alex had some sort of stomach bug, and would be missing school again
today. When Ryan went to the breakfast table to get some coffee, Alex looked pretty miserable.
He couldn’t help but feel terrible; if only he’d paid more attention to Alex yesterday.
“Good morning, here’s some coffee for you,” said Jean.
“Thanks, Jean. How’s Alex doing?”
“His stomach is much better, but now he has a fever. It is going through his system pretty fast. I bet he will be feeling better by this afternoon.”
Ryan looked at him again, “I sure hope so.”
“He missed the shots at school yesterday, and now we’re going to have to take Alex to the doctor next week to get his inoculation. By the way, I got mine at work yesterday, and my arm really hurts. Did you get one?”
He hadn’t even thought about getting one.
“No, was I supposed to?”
Jean said, “Well they’re saying on the news, that adults could be carriers, so they’re getting us too. I bet you see them coming around at work today, or tomorrow.”
