Human biases are a tool to help us make decisions in the face of multiple inputs. There is so much information coming at us at all times, that our biases are the only way to process this information. Bias plays out every second of every day in every human activity. Read more…
Nothing illustrates the problem with information collection more than the annual ritual of the annual income tax return process. It is a multifaceted problem. You can start with the rules. The rules are made with multiple purposes in mind. First and foremost is gathering funds for the government to find Read more…
The big breakthrough of the touch screen iPod and the iPhone was that they allowed you to surface more information more quickly than the menu driven devices in the past. Information about choices and options became more visible more quickly removing some of the rigidity of menu driven interfaces. The Read more…
The technology is the same and the information could also be the same, but the possible interpretations are infinite. And the best part is that the points of divergence can be from anywhere. There are many versions of the truth, but for years people in information technology have been seeking Read more…
Watching the group psychology over the generation, transmission and reception of information play out over the last few years has shown me the utter delusion that we live under. There is a vestigial belief that there is something called the truth out there. Contrary to the X Files, the truth Read more…
In a world that seems to be presented without context, where does any real meaning come from? Context is the starting point of a story, but context is infinite. Any event at any point in time in any location can be the starting point of information. Attempts to reconcile this Read more…
We have created a massive data problem for ourselves and we think that by using artificial intelligence and creating more algorithms we will get it all sorted. The data, the sensors, the rules and the optimization algorithms will seamlessly make the best decision to produce the right outcome at the Read more…
Whatever happened to infographics? For a short time, infographics were all the rage in marketing circles. Infographics were good at conveying information in a pleasing visual format, but they were also somewhat more sinister and manipulative. By definition infographics have a bias and they tend to oversimplify complex information. There Read more…
The invisibility problem is a huge issue for most organizations. Making information visible to the right people at the right time is a challenge that is not easily addressed. The reality is that most information that gets digitized is invisible. You can’t see the bits and bites that are encoded Read more…
The conventional wisdom is that information scales well. While data and information can scale, knowledge and context don’t scale at the same pace. There is lag time when either the data changes or the context changes. How do you know if it is just a blip or if it is Read more…