Aug. 14 2011

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. (via The Elusive Big Idea)

the deeper cut of info overload.

May. 31 2011

It’s not the echo, it’s the chamber

You’ll argue about whether LeBron James or Derrick Rose should have won the MVP, whether or not Mitt Romney has a shot in the Iowa caucuses, or why Apple decided to pre-release information about the WWDC keynote.

We dive and feel deeply about a range of pre-defined topics, tied to our professions, hobbies, needs, and histories, and sharpen our swords with opponents who do the same.

And on the margins, maybe that’s okay. Mass culture throws a whole lot of stuff at its audience that I, like you, have no intrinsic interest in. The time, energy, and cognitive surplus we once devoted to those things we used to consume only because “they were on” are all much better put to use tackling subjects we actually care about.

But it does mean that we’re often unaware of what’s happening in the next room, where there is frequently plenty of useful stuff that we could port into our own special areas of interest. We need to make sure we’re taking advantage of the web’s built-in ability to move laterally.

you’re in control, folks.  don’t forget that.

May. 20 2011

pieto:

NSA Headquarters at Fort Meade.

While most of the N.S.A. was reeling on September 11th, inside SARC the horror unfolded “almost like an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment,” according to J. Kirk Wiebe, an intelligence analyst who worked there. “We knew we weren’t keeping up.” SARC was led by a crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney, whom Wiebe describes as “one of the best analysts in history.” Binney and a team of some twenty others believed that they had pinpointed the N.S.A.’s biggest problem—data overload—and then solved it. But the agency’s management hadn’t agreed.

Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of dark hair; he has the quiet, tense air of a preoccupied intellectual. Now retired and suffering gravely from diabetes, which has already claimed his left leg, he agreed recently to speak publicly for the first time about the Drake case. When we met, at a restaurant near N.S.A. headquarters, he leaned crutches against an extra chair. “This is too serious not to talk about,” he said.

…

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

via

the brother, it is big.

Jul. 21 2010

The dangerous art of the right question

bobulate:

Venkatesh Rao on the dangerous art of the right question. Four questions that are, in fact, terrible from the world of business:

1. Who is our customer?
2. What is our market?
3. What is our goal?
4. What problem does our product solve for the customer?

They’re terrible, he says, because they’re devoid of information. Instead:

Real questions, useful questions, questions with promising attacks, are always motivated by the specific situation at hand. They are often about situational anomalies and unusual patterns in data that you cannot explain based on your current mental model of the situation… Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting  the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. You cannot frame a painting without knowing its dimensions. You cannot frame a problem without knowing something about it. Frames must contain situational information.

Here’s why things work this way:

There are two types of questions. Formulaic questions and insight questions. …. Formulaic questions can be asked without knowing much. If they can be answered at all, they can be answered via a formulaic process. …. Insight questions can only be asked after you develop situation awareness. They are necessarily local and unique to the situation.

So how do you ask these questions? Here are three ways:

1. The Poirot Method
2. The Jack Welch Method
3. The 42 Method

And what are those you ask? For those answers, you should head over to read the piece in its entirety.

[via]

this reminded me of dave gray’s new gamestorming book.

Apr. 20 2010

you’re not the first thing i reach for.

now that i have a new commute in the morning, i have some time on a train to do as i please.

most of it is spent in the new york times iphone app.

what i’m not doing?  twitter, facebook et al.  even if i do, for a second, i’ll close it out shortly.  not that i don’t love my friends, digital and non, but i’ve decided i don’t need you being some of the first items pinging around upstairs.

maybe, it’s like eating breakfast for my brain.  should i have the balanced meal or the piece of candy?

this was inspired by this.

Apr. 16 2010

Will the Future Contain Information Black Holes?

So, why we are all thinking of a ubiquitous information future, there are likely to be (many?) situations in which there is no economic or social reason for the presence of that information.

who’s going to get there first and what will be your intention?  equal parts opportunity for control and advancement.  who would’ve thought that “information management” requires social responsibility?

Mar. 12 2010

The case for context

These terms I’ve been using – “intellectual framework,” “systemic information,” etc. – this is what I mean when I say “context.” I’ve pitched you on the consumer benefits of context, but information creators are also slowly beginning to come around to the long-term ROI of delivering context as well, for several reasons. For one thing, our information becomes much more valuable and much more desirable to you as your framework for understanding it becomes better. Jay Rosen has astutely noted the uptick in attention to financial crisis stories after This American Life’s Giant Pool of Money episode laid out the context of the crisis. For another thing, the success of Wikipedia and the enduring popularity of items like “The Ultimate Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Social Media” has taught us there’s a real market for context. There are also significant advertising benefits to having more sophisticated structures for information than “latest updates.” We could dwell on the “why” for a long time.

if you’re in austin - put down your phone, stop stalking that girl you saw at the bar and go to matt’s panel.

Nov. 08 2009

Against the backdrop of the evolution of media and its powerful gathering of news material and data, all of the world’s happenings are trimmed like a lawn by a mower, with fragments of information flying about from place to place through the media as grass flies through the air. These broken pieces of information adhere to our tofu-like brain like spices sprinkled so thickly that they obscure the entire surface. For a moment, this makes us think we’re quite knowledgeable, but information tacked on the surface of the brain doesn’t amount to much when you add it all together.

Kenya Hara, Art Director for MUJI, on information dissemination in Designing Design. [Thanks for book and wine tip Dave. Book review with above quote here.]

It is interesting to relate this sentiment to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of a low-information diet, reserving your brain for higher order functions than storing what amounts to rubbish by and large (according to him, you’ll learn whatever news is important by speaking with people at parties via verbal gossip).  However, from the perspective of the digital information professional, the apparent chaos surrounding information dissemination is not random, much like looking at beehive or a crowded intersection in New York or Shanghai, over time, there is an order, a flow, a rhythm and a harmony.  Information isn’t broken, it is imperfect by design.  There is a simplicity in the abstraction that captures the nuanced way information goes from atomic to ubiquitous, from valuable to valueless, from sticky to externalized, from profane to mundane.  Information has nature, a food chain, a cycle of death and rebirth, beautiful disasters, seismic shifts, and yet has a stillness when observed as a landscape obscuring us from the dynamic details.  The goal is to become one with this nature.

(via gbattle) (via evangotlib) (via mikehudack)

Sep. 04 2009

But the Internet did something else to the news. By putting everyone on a 120MPH highway, it left very little room for value judgment and discretion around what is or isn’t worth talking about.
Basement.org: On The Web, More Isn’t Only Less, It’s Actually Nothing (via 43folders)

Jun. 29 2009

Toward a theory of information relativity

People will also believe that they understand something when they don’t really understand it. Have you ever left a meeting where everyone seemed to be in agreement, yet their later actions made it clear that they didn’t agree after all? It’s common to see nodding heads in a room when people don’t agree – they think they agree but in reality they don’t. This is because when an explanation is sufficiently vague, people are free to believe what they want to believe. Politicians often use this rhetorical principle to great effect. Words like “freedom, justice and fairness” mean different things to different people. Vague explanations are common in business, and they can give the illusion of agreement. But they don’t get results.