Quotes About Information

let slip the yapping chihuahuas of infowar

Don't you have any concept of individuality? she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states. Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer, says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?

The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn't just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.

Nor can I tell him—lest the SA's command override cause my arterial blood vessels to burst and my eyeballs to catch fire—about Long-Term Continuity Operations and the Resistance.

I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on. The

Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer.

Again, a mechanism that is supposed to transmit information has been dulled.

So we simplify. We perform calculations that reduce a complex array of data into a handful of numbers that describe those data

Prices are supposed to transmit information in a market economy; inflation obscures that mechanism.

Inflation of all kinds devalues everything it infects. It obscures information and so distorts behaviour.

Intelligence Gathering and Crime Analysis

The irony is that more data can often present less clarity.

The world is producing more and more data, ever faster and faster. Yet, as the New York Times has noted, "Data is merely the raw material of knowledge."3* Statistics is the most powerful tool we have for using information to some meaningful end

Our sample of 25 will still give us meaningful information, as would a sample of 5 or 10—but how meaningful? The t-distribution answers that question.

New York Times has noted, "Data is merely the raw material of knowledge.

The internet. Everything one needs at one's fingertips. There have been no doubt studies demonstrating how this has affected people's memories in the negative. I will have to look those up online.

Not that he'd have doubted Helen's word in any case; she was a librarian, and librarians were never wrong.

Your lack of geographical knowledge is truly astounding.

In the world of information science, the tricky question of where to put things is known as the "ontology problem.

professional journalists who are seeing their jobs evaporate are typically those whose employers failed to find a new role in a world of abundant information. By and large, that means newspapers, which are an industry that will probably have to reinvent itself as dramatically as music labels. The top tier (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) will probably shrink a bit, and the tier below that may be decimated.

1. If it's digital, sooner or later it's going to be free.

Commodity information (everybody gets the same version) wants to be free. Customized information (you get something unique and meaningful to you) wants to be expensive.

O sea que, ya ve: la maquinaria industrial de los imperios de medios de comunicación más grandes del siglo XX transformada en una cosa que usted puede manejar desde su propio ordenador. Ayer las instalaciones informáticas más grandes del mundo trabajaban para el gobierno, las grandes empresas y los laboratorios de investigación. Hoy trabajan para usted. Esto ha sido lo que ha traído consigo el desktop.

KNOWLEDGE NOT SHARED REMAINS UNKNOWN. —LUIGI L. LEMONCELLO