Managing Information: A Special Report (10 Articles ) from The Economist
The report consists of 10 articles and an audio report. We%u2019ve excerpted on a couple of paragraphs from a few of the articles. The rest of the articles are linked near the bottom under %u201CAdditional Articles.%u201D Some excellent material here and for those of you who enjoy and/or use statistics about info, this report has a lot of them in one place. Let%u2019s get started.
Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes%u2014the equivalent of 167 times the books in America%u2019s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs%u2014which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.
All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
[Snip]
There are many reasons for the information explosion. The most obvious one is technology. As the capabilities of digital devices soar and prices plummet, sensors and gadgets are digitising lots of information that was previously unavailable. And many more people have access to far more powerful tools. For example, there are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide (though many people have more than one, so the world%u2019s 6.8 billion people are not quite as well supplied as these figures suggest), and 1 billion-2 billion people use the internet.
The best way to deal with these drawbacks of the data deluge is, paradoxically, to make more data available in the right way, by requiring greater transparency in several areas. First, users should be given greater access to and control over the information held about them, including whom it is shared with. Google allows users to see what information it holds about them, and lets them delete their search histories or modify the targeting of advertising, for example. Second, organisations should be required to disclose details of security breaches, as is already the case in some parts of the world, to encourage bosses to take information security more seriously. Third, organisations should be subject to an annual security audit, with the resulting grade made public (though details of any problems exposed would not be). This would encourage companies to keep their security measures up to date.
All Too Much-Monstrous Amounts of Data
Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes%u2014the equivalent of 167 times the books in America%u2019s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs%u2014which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.
All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
Quantifying the amount of information that exists in the world is hard. What is clear is that there is an awful lot of it, and it is growing at a terrific rate (a compound annual 60%) that is speeding up all the time. The flood of data from sensors, computers, research labs, cameras, phones and the like surpassed the capacity of storage technologies in 2007.
[Snip]
Only 5% of the information that is created is %u201Cstructured%u201D, meaning it comes in a standard format of words or numbers that can be read by computers. The rest are things like photos and phone calls which are less easily retrievable and usable. But this is changing as content on the web is increasingly %u201Ctagged%u201D, and facial-recognition and voice-recognition software can identify people and words in digital files.
%u201CIt is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information,%u201D quipped Oscar Wilde in 1894. He did not know the half of it.
This article also includes and interesting and useful chart titled, %u201CData Inflation.%u201D
For example, 5 megabytes=The Complete Works of Shakespeare%u20262 gigabytes=1 to 2 hour movie (compressed)%u20265 petabytes=The amount of mail delivered this year by the U.S. Postal ServiceAudio: A Conversation with Kenneth Cukier (A Correspondent for The Economist)
Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits %u2013 but also big headaches.
Additional Articles
A Different Game: Information is Transforming Traditional Businesses
Clicking For Gold: How Internet Companies Profit From Data on the Web
The Open Society: Governments are Letting in the Light
Show Me: New Ways of Visualising Data
Needle in a Haystack: The Uses of Information About Information
These days metadata are undergoing a virtual renaissance.
New Rules for Big Data: Regulators are Having to Rethink Their Brief
Offer to Readers (Download PDF Version of the Complete Special Report)
Buy a copy of the complete report.Source: The Economist
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 and is filed under Digital Repositories, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Industry, Technology and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
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My two most essential print manages: The New Yorker and The Economist
