Comments on: Saving Private Information

By: Atanu Dey on India’s Development » Information: Pure and Actionable

Atanu Dey on India’s Development » Information: Pure and Actionable — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 06:46:01 +0000

[...] me. I had enough spare time. Good bye and have a wonderful happy new year. Related post: Saving Private Information. Add a Comment [...]

By: Malapati Raja Sekhar

Malapati Raja Sekhar — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:03:13 +0000

Yes! One has to be careful so that his private information is private enough. As atanu claims, in future, everyone have to be knowledgeable enough to do some amount of “security consultant’s” job.

Raja

By: Parijat

Parijat — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 10:57:39 +0000

Mr. Ramchandra,
While getting more pages on a google search may not necessarily translate into more information being present “out there”, it certainly is true for “all practical purposes”. As of today, if something does not turn up in a Google search result, its pretty much non-existent.
However, talking about your idea of “improving our though-processes”, I do think that this has indeed been going on over the centuries. We have developed much finer abilities to comprehend information that is thrown at us. The more interesting thing is what technology can do to aid it. Maybe crawlers that can read through blog entires (and comments) and create summaries that are relevant to a particular person. While work such areas is already going on on a fairly large scale, what we need is a mechanism to store (and represent) “knowledge” as opposed to “information”. This would be the situation, for example, where an organisation acquires know-how about certain procedures. As older employees leave, this know-how has to be transferred to newer ones. Standardized mechanisms to do this would add tremendous amounts of productivity to both organisations as well as individuals. Ofcourse, this would require more than just “technology” as we know it – it would require a confluence of engineering, psychology, philosophy, linguistics and a whole bunch of other stuff.

By: S. Ramachandra

S. Ramachandra — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 04:09:28 +0000

Atanu,

I googled information now and got 5.96 bn hits in 0.04 seconds – 0.03 bn addl. hits in the space of some hours……is this some indication of the the growth of knowledge/ information I wonder.

The challenge remains making the information comprehensible, relevant and timely to a user. One issue that bothers me at a personal level is the amount of stuff I need to wade through in any book or article to add to my understanding of a subject. I am going a bit beyond the public vs private info divide; seeking to know if there is any initiative that can make learning more efficient. Even with access to “private information”, the processing and sieving of this information remains a challenge. It would be wonderful if there was some way in which humans could learn to improve their thought processes and technology could enable that. I hope this doesn’t sound too much like wool-gathering!- any thoughts?

By: jamal

jamal — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:02:45 +0000

yes, the internet can be a wonderful place!