Category Archives: How Much Information?

Short-attention spans; does anyone still THINK?

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I spoke yesterday at The Economist conference, Information: Making Sense of the Deluge. Very interesting speakers, I was excited to go. The stated and sincere intent was to get a  discussion going, including the audience. But the format was like watching TV news (and I don’t mean PBS): toss someone on stage, let them roll a 6 minute video, answer a few questions, and on to the next. This format was good for Twitter-bytes, but not for thinking or reflecting or building ideas.

One of the topics was Nick Carr on how “pseudo-multitasking” is hurting our brains. The conference itself seemed to follow the same format. This morning, for example, the schedule for the first 50 minutes has 7 different people on stage, in four sessions:

Act II:   Bottom up: Information for people
8.35 am
Flash of genius: How to translate the internet
Luis von Ahn, A. Nico Habermann, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
8.45 am
Flash of genius: Turning information into knowledge
Amit Singhal, Engineer, Google
8.55 am
Data exhaust
The intersection of search and big data
Luc Barthelet, Executive Director, Wolfram Alpha
Arkady Borkovsky, Chief Technology Officer, Yandex Labs
Moderator: Kenneth Cukier, Business Correspondent, The Economist
9.15 am
Flash of genius: The information entrepreneur
Scott Yara,Vice-president, Products and Co-founder, Greenplum
The audience is finding plenty to Twitter about. But 10 minutes is only time for a sales pitch; it is not enough time to discuss the weaknesses as well as the strengths of an idea.
On the plus side, this means there’s still a need for academics who can sit in an empty room and work on one thing for an hour. Of course to accomplish that I have to discipline myself not to check email…..
A  friend who was there told me he “never follows Twitter.” It turns out that  he means  he keeps a Twitter feed in the corner of his screen 100% of the time; he just does not explicitly devote time to reading it! Talk about distractions…

The world’s servers processed 9570000000000000000000 bytes in 2008

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We recently completed another major “How Much Information?” report. This one measures how much information servers processed, worldwide.  Answer: we estimated 9.57 ZB in 2008. The coverage was broad, although not as much general press as our previous report on information consumption. I was impressed to see us reach 130,000 Google hits in a few days (try searching on the string 9570000000000000000000 ), until I realized that most of them are spam sites – they just duplicate hot items in hopes that Google will point to them, instead of the original.

As always, we had to make a lot of judgment calls in deciding what to measure and how. See the report, and the forthcoming technical appendix.

The report is available here.

Researchers Study the World’s Information Explosion – The Numbers Guy – WSJ

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Arguments over what information to measure, and how are fundamentally irresolvable. There are too many good answers, and for most purposes measurement problems make it impossible to measure exactly what we want, in any case. The WSJ’s “numbers guy” collects some views on this, related to the new USC/Science article on the world’s computation.

My print column this week examines a recent paper in Science and other research efforts that attempt to quantify the world’s information. The studies generally compile dozens of pieces of data, such as hard-drive production and sales, and put all information into a single unit, such as bytes or words. “We can say things like ‘a 6 square-cm newspaper image is worth a 1000 words,’ ” the Science study’s authors, Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, wrote.

via Researchers Study the World’s Information Explosion – The Numbers Guy – WSJ.

Language Log » Tracking a factoid to its lair

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Our How Much Information? 2008 Consumer report continues to generate discussion. The comments that follow this blog entry in Language Log are quite interesting. I added my own comment – we’ll see how long it takes to go through their moderation process.

Matt Richtel, one of the leading current peddlers of the “technology is eating our brains” meme, is fond of this assertion:The average person today consumes almost three times as much information as what the typical person consumed in 1960, according to research at the University of California, San Diego.That version is the lead paragraph of the online site for his appearance on Fresh Air, “Digital Overload: Your Brain On Gadgets”, 8/24/2010. I was curious about what this sentence could mean, and more specifically, I wondered which UCSD researchers did the measurements, and what they they measured.

via Language Log » Tracking a factoid to its lair.

Shut off Internet access – voluntarily

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For those  who have trouble staying on task for hours at a time. Which probably means most computer users. Several applications now exist to block off Internet access, selectively block programs, etc. I do this by not turning on my wireless – but then I can’t stream music. So I’ll try something more elaborate.

Economist article: Software that disables bits of your computer to make you more productive sounds daft, but may help keep distractions at bay

Freeware: SelfControl 1.2.2 Block distracting websites for predetermined periods of time   SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web.

via Download SelfControl for Mac – Block distracting websites for predetermined periods of time. MacUpdate Mac Software Downloads.

Your Brain on Computers – NYTimes.com

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Article yesterday on the brain-altering effects of constant computer use. It’s a complex topic and I think a lot more research is needed, but there is certainly something going on. The reporter, Matt Richtel, won a Pulitzer last year for his series on distracted driving while using cellphones. (I’m quoted in the article, but not by name.)

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive.

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Disposing of old hard drives – do it right!

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Here’s an expanded comment I posted to Computerworld recently. Re-using an old hard drive yourself, by putting it in an external drive enclosure and using it for backup is fine. (I have one in a safe deposit box, in case my house burns down). But don’t donate it, sell it, or even recycle it unless you destroy the data on it properly first.  RB

Recycle an Old Laptop Hard Drive

A reader, I’ll call him \”S,\” wanted to know if there’s a hard drive enclosure that can \”accept the thicker hard drive out of an old [laptop].\”

RB comment: Just be sure to destroy the drive if you are finished with it. Unfortunately, donating it /selling it are not wise. You can also do a “secure erase,” which encrypts the old data and allows the drive to be safely reused. Reformatting the drive, and running the various utilities that supposedly overwrite old data, are NOT substitutes, because they don’t get at the underlying data thoroughly. And tests of drives purchased on eBay still show about half of them have proprietary data, including financial records etc.

Here is one such academic study: Remembrance of Data Passed: A Study of Disk Sanitization Practices. There are many others.   Here’s a good popular article.

Here is an explanation of safe erasure. http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/DataSanitizationTutorial.pdf

For physical destruction, the easiest method is a hammer applied to the spindle. Once the bearing has “wobble” in it, the drive can’t read the tracks any more, and it would take an NSA-level lab to recover data, even partially. You can also smash the circuit card. It can be replaced, but the thief has to work much harder to find a compatible card.