information science

Bubbles Distilled By Time.

~ Taran ~ 3 Comments

We all perceive the world through our own little bubbles. As far as our senses go, we only have touch, taste, feeling, hearing, smell and sight to go by. The rest comes from what we glean through those things, be it other people, technology, language, culture, etc.

If the bubble is too small, we feel it a prison and do our best to expand it. Once it’s comfortable, we don’t push it outward as much.

These little bubbles contain ideas that have passed down through the generations, how others have helped us translate our world and all that is in it, etc. We’re part of a greater distillation process, where because of our own limitations we can’t possibly carry everything from previous generations.

If we consider all the stuff that creates our bubble as little bubbles themselves that we pass on to the next generation, it’s a distillation of our knowledge and ideas over time. Some fall away, like the idea of the Earth being the center of the Universe. Some stay with us despite not being used as much as we might like – such as the whole concept of, ‘be nice to each other’.

If we view traffic as something going through time, bubbles are racing toward the future all at the same time, sometimes aggregating, sometimes not. The traffic of ideas and knowledge is distilled as we move forward in time, one generation at a time. Generally speaking, until broadcast media this was a very local process. Thus, red dots trying to get us to do things, wielded by those who wish us to do things from purchasing products to voting for politicians with their financial interests at heart.

Broadcast media made it global by at first giving people information and then by broadcasting opinions to become sustainable through advertising. Social media has become the same thing. How will artificial intelligences differ? Will ChatGPT suddenly spew out, “Eat at Joes!”? I doubt that.

However, those with fiscal interests can decide what the deep learning of artificial intelligences are exposed to. Machine learning is largely about clever algorithms and pruning the data that the algorithms are trained on, and those doing that are certainly not the most unbiased of humanity. I wouldn’t say that they are the most biased either – we’re all biased by our bubbles.

It’s Pandora’s Box. How do we decide what should go in and what should stay out? Well, we can’t, really. Nobody is actually telling us what’s in them now. Our education systems, too, show us that this is not necessarily something we’re good at.

Data Transfer

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

In today’s news, a fruit company continues marketing stuff to people who don’t need what they’re selling for the price it is being sold for – but who buy it because of the brand.

Wait, that isn’t a fruit company. Doesn’t matter. It’s a slow news day.

So I’ll build up some of what I wrote in Traffic here, since it connects two things that are often disconnected and siloed in these chaotic times. Yet there’s some technical stuff that most people don’t know about that may make you think of things a little differently.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

You might be surprised just how much companies depend on trains, planes and automobiles to move data around. XKCD was asked about when the bandwidth of the Internet will surpass that of FedEx. The answer will likely boggle your minds: 2040.

Moving data storage devices is still the best way to move data quickly. It’s not cheap, but it doesn’t matter that much – we’re paying for it, after all, not them.

‘Sneakernet’ existed long before the Internet for much the same reason. The joke originates from around 1975-1976.

“…one day a plumbing contractor’s backhoe dug up and broke the underground cable that carried ALL of the JPL-to-Goldstone data and voice lines through Fort Irwin, and it would take at least a day, maybe longer, to repair. So someone was designated to drive two boxes of 12 reels each of magnetic tape down to JPL, and quickly. The first available vehicle was a white NASA station wagon. Hence the punch line: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway”.

Rounding off the numbers, twenty-four reels of tape at 170 megabytes each is 4080 megabytes. Three and a half hours is 210 minutes. 4080 megabytes divided by 210 works out to about 19.4 megabytes per minute, or 32.3 kilobytes per second (258.4kilobits per second) – over 100 times faster than a 2400 bps data circuit of the time. Note that the incident above involved only 24 reels – which didn’t come anywhere near filling the station wagon, in fact the two boxes of tapes didn’t even fill the front passenger seat. (as an aside, a station wagon is known as an estate car or estate in other parts of the world). Incidentally, that conversation was the first time your contributor ever heard the term backhoe fade used to describe accidental massive damage to an underground cable (compare it to the term rain fade used to describe a fade-out of a point-to-point microwave radio path due to the absorptive effect of water in the air)…”

Stanley Ipkiss, Reddit post.

It’s a very tangible way of viewing how data is transferred too, and perhaps reinforcing the anxiety of seeing a backhoe in your area. Much of what is done on the internet these days is streaming, and I think maybe the present generations coming up may not immediately understand life without streaming. When we kept things on our hard drives and floppy disks, back when they were hard and floppy respectively.

So with that settled in everyone’s mind, let’s talk a bit about what’s being marketed as artificial intelligence, which is not really that much artificial intelligence as it is a bunch of clever algorithms using probability to determine what in it’s thesaurus/image library you would like to see when queried. Where do they get that thesaurus/image library?

Us.

I’ll get into this in the next post.

The Babel Problem

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Babel TowerSome self-centric perspectives shared using social media creating a communication failure got me thinking more about information and how it affects us, as individuals, and how it affects humanity. It’s also something that I’ve been researching off and on, and one which has me working on a hobby software project related to it.

Information is everywhere. We’re all pattern recognition and information analysis experts in our own right. It’s a part of being human, as Stephen Pinker wrote about in the context of language, which is one of the  ways that we process and communicate information. There is the nature aspect, and there is the nurture aspect, which is often seen as a matter of which has more influence.

This is particularly interesting in this day and age for a variety of reasons, particularly when interacting using social media.

Language is the most obvious barrier, and translation algorithms are getting much better – but interpretation of translations leaves much to be desired at times. Another aspect is dialect, born of geography, which do not always translate well. There are some who will argue about cultural identity, but if cultural identity isolates, what use is that identity?

Another aspect is the ability of people to actually read and write to be understood.  While we may have a lot more literacy in the world than we did some decades ago, functional literacy is something different and is something that educational systems only measure within their own dialects. This leads to how people think, because people typically communicate as clearly as they think. And what affects how we think?

We get into world views – a factor of nurture, largely, and the ability to process the information of our world clearly. The most obvious aspect of these prejudices has to do with the color of skin of human beings – something that haunts us despite scientific evidence that there are no actual races. Other things are less obvious.

There are commonalities, as mentioned in a very thorough exploration by Pierre Levy in “The Semantic Sphere“, that weave commonality through concepts around the world despite language – but they can fail in that last mile of neurons, as people may have very different reactions to the same concepts.

When it comes to all of this, I live a very different life and look at things, at times, in very different ways than others. This has allowed me to sometimes solve problems that others could not solve.

Everyone looks at things differently, but commonly, people don’t look at things that differently when they read what everyone else reads, watch what everyone else watches, and thus think fairly closely to what other people think.

That, in turn, gives us the codification of problems in a way that is sometimes more popular than correct, and thus any solution may be solving the wrong problem. It’s a convoluted mess when you start thinking about it (and worse, trying to express it as I am here).

And that, really, is the core of this post. A thought of why the people who come up with appropriate solutions are typically the ones who can identify what the problems actually are… in a world of popularity.

 

Information Fiefdoms

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Social Media Information OverloadYesterday, I found myself standing in Nigel Khan’s bookstore in Southpark, looking at what I consider old books.

I have a habit when I look at books, something I picked up in Trinidad some years ago after the Internet became more than a novelty. I check the date a book was published. It keeps me from buying antiques, though I have also been known to buy books in thrift shops abroad (though I am very picky).

I found myself looking at Tim Wu’s ‘The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires‘. Given some of the stuff I’d been talking about in different circles, it interested me – and Tim Wu I knew from his work with Network Neutrality. I checked the publication date.

November, 2010.
It’s August, 2018.

8 years. 5.33 evolutions of Moore’s Law, which is unfair since it isn’t a technology book – but it’s an indicator. Things change quickly. Information empires rise and fall in less time these days – someone was celebrating integrating something with OneNote in one of the groups I participate in, thinking that he’d finally gotten things on track – when, in fact, it’s just a snapshot more subject to Moore’s Law than anyone cares admit – except for the people who want to sell you more hardware and more software. They’ve evolved to the subscription model to make their financial flow rates more consistent, while you, dear subscriber, don’t actually own anything you subscribe to.

You’re building a house with everything on loan from the hardware store. When your subscription is up, the house disappears.

Information empires indeed. Your information may be your own, but how you get to it is controlled by someone who might not be there tomorrow.

We tend to think of information in very limited ways when we are in fact surrounded by it. We are information. From our DNA to our fingerprints, from our ears to our hair follicles – we are information, information that moves around and interacts with other information. We still haven’t figured out our brains, a depressing fact since it seems a few of us have them, but there we have it.

Information empires. What separates data from information is only really one thing – being used. Data sits there; it’s a scalar. Information is a vector – and really, information has more than one vector. Your mother is only a mother to you – she might be an aunt to someone else, a boss to someone else, an employee to someone else, and a daughter to your grandmother. Information allows context, and there’s more than one context.

If you’re fortunate, you see at least one tree a day. That tree says a lot, and you may not know it. Some trees need a lot of water, some don’t. Some require rich soil, some don’t. Simply by existing, it tells us about the environment it is in. Information surrounds us.

Yet we tend to think of information in the context of libraries, or of database tables. And we tend to look at Information Empires – be they by copyright, by access (Net Neutrality, digital divide, et al), or simply because of incompatible technologies. They come and go, increasingly not entering the public domain, increasingly lost – perhaps sometimes for good.

And if you go outside right now and stand, breathing the air, feeling the wind, watching the foliage shift left and right, you are awash in information that you take for granted – an empire older than we are, information going between plants through fungus.

There are truly no information empires in humanity other than those that are protected by laws. These are fiefdoms, gatekeepers to information.

The information empire – there is only one – surrounds us.