Information is not knowledge

UCSD Wants To Measure How Much Information There Is - In The Whole World. The summary article quotes “We know that overall information technology increases productivity and human welfare, but not all information is equally valuable.”

So - if they’re aware of that, why are they trying to measure the immeasurable? How are they going to even define what to include or exclude? What can we actually do with the measurement once we have it - anything other than saying “Oh look it’s gone up x%”.

What we really need is to answer how to find good, useful, accurate information quickly. So far for me, Google is _still_ the easiest, quickest way most of the time, especially once you learn how to use it effectively. Use quotes “around phrases”, sticking a ‘-’ in front of words you want to exclude from the results, and using ~ in front of words which there’s multiple words with similar meaning that you’re interested in greatly improve your chances of finding what you’re after.

The results of searching for ‘post’ are very different to the results when searching for ‘post -”australia post” -”post office”‘ : Now the majority of the mail related results we’ve had removed and instead we’re getting other meanings of post in the results - relating to post production, power on self test, the Trading Post and so on. Another scenario: ‘~maize’ will return results referencing corn, and searching for ‘~corn’ returns results referencing maize and grain and so on.

Using just a mix of these three technique’s can help you get your results filtered so the information you’re actually interested in is there for you at the top of your results more often than not, and you’ll be a lot more efficient than people who just use plain keywords and end up drowning in irrelevant information.

I think spending time/resources on improving the ‘findability‘ of useful information would be much more beneficial. Remember - the goal is to increase the amount of your knowledge, not the amount of your information.

I think we’ll be waiting for the Semantic Web for a long time. (What will it be, Web 9.0?)

…they release a 35 page document to help you decide which of the 11 variations of Visual Studio 2008 is right for you:

You can get your very own copy from the Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison Guide download page in .docx, .pdf or even .xps format which is something I’d never heard of until now: XML Paper Specification. Guess it’s meant to compete with PDF which is pretty entrenched and will be hard to budge despite MS saying ‘look - this new xps format is open and free!’.

I just had to link to this: The Secret Of Building Effective Software Systems because it has the supposed Einstein quote which forms the name of this blog. It appears at the start of the ‘Knowledge Creation and Retention’ section, right near the top. It’s only fair for you to click across and read the actual post to find out what ‘The Secret’ actually is - go read it now, it’s more useful than reading this post.

Still here? For reasons I may write about later, I’m currently like the guy in the top picture, and working hard to try and get to the happy, organised ‘effective brain at work’ in the bottom picture. This is partly due to the face I’m not directly in my usual software development role at the moment and am in a slightly unfamiliar and not very organised environment. It’s the good old catch-22: I’m too busy to find the time to properly organise the things I’m busy doing because they’re so unorganised. Fortunately I’m just about at the point I’ve finally got some breathing space to make the time, which is a welcome relief.

An additional resource to add to the links at the bottom of the above-mentioned blog post is a book called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, currently in ‘beta’ which is by The Pragmatic Programmers, the people who (unsurprisingly) wrote ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, which greatly influenced me back in the day, and also got me into Ruby well before it was on rails. Just wish they’d do a new edition of the original ‘Pragmatic Programmer’ book - the original doesn’t even appear in their book list anymore…!?

It’d also be nice to have the time to read the above-mentioned Wetware book properly and possibly even give feedback (one of the great things about the access to ‘beta’ books is that you can give feedback before it’s published which benefits all future readers). I still feel sorely lacking in giving back to the wider software development community so far compared to how much it’s helped me. Consistently blogging is part of me working towards that goal - one day I hope I can contribute posts similar to the quality of Andriy’s post.

Technorati Profile

It looks like I’ve finally got around to creating my weblog.

How did the blog got its name? I was reading my usual assortment of blog’s in FeedDemon (recently made free, although I’d bought it a couple of years ago) and came across the quote in a post on overcoming information addiction on 30 Sleeps.

I thought that was a cool quote, and particularly relevant to me as I tend to be a bit OCD when it comes to reading stuff on the internet. I want to read every RSS post I subscribe to, every comment on Slashdot moderated at +3 or better and on top of that a lot the links from the source articles (which then have their own links…let’s recurse again).

On a whim I found that informationisnotknowledge.com was not registered. I registered it which finally gave me enough momentum to start blogging. I’m now also trying to be a lot more selective in my reading and trying to value quality a lot higher than quantity leaving more time for action (i.e. getting things done).

It seems the “Information is not knowledge” quote is attributed to Einstein everywhere, but no one actually mentions when/where or in what context it was said. Maybe he never said it, but because so many people believe it is true it almost doesn’t matter now. There were only 2 references to the German translation, so presumably it was said in English?

Here’s a couple more places it’s come up, I’m sure there are many others out there as well:

Frank Zappa sang:

- ‘Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST…’ - “Packard Goose” (on the album Joe’s Garage)

Cliff Stoll & Gary Schubert:

- Data is not information, Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not understanding, Understanding is not wisdom.

In fact Clifford Stoll wrote The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, a book about a $0.75 accounting error in 1988 which led the author to track down a German student who was effectively trying to spy on the US. Great book, although one I no longer own unfortunately as my copy was stolen from work during my stint as a blackjack dealer at Star City Casino, fortunately it was my second time reading it, so at least I knew how it ended.

Many thanks to my wife Melissa for the profile image in the top right (she’s a graphic designer).

So that’s my first blog post - hopefully I’ll help increase the knowledge level as well as information overload.