[Sigia-l] visual thinking, rambling about the past

[Ed Housman]

In the 60's and 70's one of the big
problems was the "information explosion."

The amount of information published was
doubling every 7 years, shelves were
bulging, people were archiving stuff on
microfilm and microfiche, and worrying
whether storage and retrieval technology
would not be able to handle it.

Well, reflecting on the past gives some
insight into the future. Space is no
longer a problem ... it turns out that
raw information takes very little space
and has almost no weight, yet still the
volume of stuff is doubling and doubling.

Things are not out of control because
we have cool tools like Google, and a
network with apparently unlimited
capacity that connects us directly to data
(though the quality is somewhat polluted
compared to the refereed scientific and
technical publications we were dealing with).

Many  basic problems still haunt
us: relevance, recall, user confusion about
what they really want, crumbling classification
strategies, incomprehensible presentation,
and sluggish system response time.

When I was in charge of information services
at GTE Labs, back in the 80's, the research
director said he wanted me to create a
data service that would answer "any question."

"Impossible, sir," I said.  "Give me a
question for example."

He said he had been at the board meeting
the other day and the question came up
of how many telephones there were in
Florida.  It would be nice, he said, to
have a system that would answer that on
the spot; it was critical for a decision.

I slapped my forehead and said, How could
I have the foresight to store that changing
number, how would I know anyone would ask
that?

I didn't get a big promotion that year.

I wonder if now we have such a system..

--Ed

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more
http://tax.yahoo.com