Category Archives: How Much Information?

Are You Really Drowning in Data?

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This blog challenges the “drowning in big data” cliche. He explains that most organizations don’t have useful access to most of their raw data – it sits somewhere in the IT department, but it’s not accessible, it has quality problems, and so forth.

But I think that is precisely where the “drowning” comes in. The psychological weight of all that unused data presses down and causes a sensation of “drowning.” The part of the data that is actually indexed, described, readily accessible and so forth is the data that we surf instead of drown under.

This applies on a personal level as well…. I drown under the weight of my “to read” pile; I surf the few things I actually sit and study.

Are You Really Drowning in Data? Challenging the Big Data Assumption – FICO Labs Blog.

Down with CISPA – By Trevor Timm | Foreign Policy

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The Obama administrations “Internet freedom” agenda — already tarnished — is on the line, and at least this time, officials seem to realize that their actions will have a direct effect on their foreign policy. …. There are signs, however, that the Obama administration is learning that it cant have a “do as I say, not as I do policy” when it comes to Internet freedom. During the SOPA debate, the State Department refused to comment on the bill despite virtually the entire tech industry complaining that it would amount to mass censorship. A spokesperson even released a statement at the time saying, “The Department of State does not provide comment on pending legislation,” despite a provision that would have made much of the circumvention software it is funding — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — illegal.In stark contrast this time around, Secretary of State Hillary Clintons senior advisor for innovation, Alec Ross, was the first U.S. official to definitively say, “The Obama administration opposes CISPA,” as he matter-of-factly told the Guardian Monday. Prior to that, the administration had only released a broad statement saying that “privacy and civil liberties” should be preserved in any cybersecurity bill.

via Down with CISPA – By Trevor Timm | Foreign Policy.

Information overload – some personal actions

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I attended a conference, Overloaded 2012, last week in San Francisco. Here’s a summary from one of the directors of the Information Overload Research Group (IORG). IORG is small, but addressing deep issues of how constant information deluges flows affect our working and thinking.
My “immediate action” conclusion was to start using #hashtags in my email. Examples: #invite, #meet #teach (for messages to colleagues about teaching). Also to provide longer subject lines in my emails – “6 words” is one suggestion.
And, I’ll take a look at a book by Jonathan Spira, an IORG director, who I’ve talked with but never met. Overload! book by Jonathan Spira

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.