The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) by Max Dane Read Free Book Online Page A

data in
the research side, or the hospital side?”   Jim asked.
    “The research side.”
    “Come here to my terminal, and show
me.”
     
    Ryan followed Jim into his cubicle, and
watched as he logged on to his terminal. Jim had six monitors of varying sizes
in front of him. They were clustered together with data alive and moving on
each one.
     
    Jim moved the data he had on his main
screen to another, and opened up the file directories Ryan had been talking
about. Ryan pointed to a file he recognized. The screen suddenly showed a
database filled with records that pertained to a recent treatment. Each record
populated with fields upon fields, and most of them were hidden by the ‘X’s.
     
    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.