• 30Jun

    Man of information

    2009 Information Calendar No Comments

    “Mr. Martin, I suppose, is not a man of information beyond the line of his own business? He does not read?”

     

    “Oh yes!-that is, no-I do not know-but I believe he has read a good deal-but not what you would think any thing of. He reads the Agricultural Reports, and some other books that lay in one of the window seats-but he reads all them to himself. But sometimes of an evening, before we went to cards, he would read something aloud out of the Elegant Extracts, very entertaining.”

     

    Jane Austen, Emma, 1815.

     

    “The apothecary had an idea that I was actually dead. This idea I endeavored to confute, kicking and plunging with all my might, and making the most furious contortions-for the operations of the surgeon had, in a measure, restored me to the possession of my faculties. All, however, was attributed to the effects of a new galvanic battery, wherewith the apothecary, who is really a man of information, performed several curious experiments, in which, from my personal share in their fulfillment, I could not help feeling deeply interested.”

     

    Edgar Allan Poe, “Loss of Breath,” 1832.

     

     —From the 2009 EMC Information Calendar

  • 29Jun

    The problem with automation

    Making decisions, ON Magazine 1 Comment
    The U.S. is going to spend in short order more than $30 billion on bringing automation to the health care industry. Listening to the health care experts at the XSITE 2009 event last week, I realized how much of this money is going to go into automating decision-making by health care professionals. Let the buyer beware!  Today’s Washington Post has a great article on the perils of automation (in the context of the Metrorail crash), quoting John D. Lee, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison:
  • 27Jun

    Technology is never the answer

    Giant Brains, Government-Academia Complex, Innovation 1 Comment

    In the June issue of the Communication of ACM, Kenneth Kraemer and others from the Personal Computing Industry Center, analyze the failure of the One Laptop Per Child initiative (a few hundred thousands laptops distributed as of June 2009 instead of the 150 million anticipated to be shipped by the end of 2007).

      Continue reading »

  • 27Jun

    SPAM, SPAM, SPAM

    2009 Information Calendar, Information Overload No Comments
    “Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time.” -Bill Gates speaking to the BBC in 2004

     

    “More than 97 percent of e-mail messages sent over the Internet are unwanted: they have malicious attachments or are phishing attacks or spam.” — Microsoft Security Intelligence Report volume 6 (July through December 2008)

     

    SPAM on YouTube

     

     

     

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