What is Information? The Nature, Growth and Characteristics of Information

1
What is Information? The Nature, Growth and
Characteristics of Information

• University of California, Berkeley
• School of Information Management and Systems
• SIMS 202 Information Organization and Retrieval

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What is Information?

• There is no correct definition
• Can involve philosophy, psychology, signal
  processing, physics
• Cookie Monsters definition
• news or facts about something
• Oxford English Dictionary
• information informing, telling thing told,
  knowledge, items of knowledge, news
• knowledge knowing familiarity gained by
  experience persons range of information a
  theoretical or practical understanding of the
  sum of what is known

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Assignment 1

• What is information, according to your background
  or area of expertise?

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Types of Information

• Differentiation by form.
• Differentiation by content.
• Differentiation by quality.
• Differentiation by associated information.

5
Information Properties

• Information can be communicated electronically
• Broadcasting
• Networking
• Information can be easily duplicated and shared
• Problems of Ownership
• Problems of Control

Adapted from Silicon Dreams by Robert W. Lucky
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Intuitive Notion (Losee 97)

• Information must
• Be something, although the exact nature
  (substance, energy, or abstract concept) is not
  clear
• Be new repetition of previously received
  messages is not informative
• Be true false or counterfactual information is
  mis-information
• Be about something
• This human-centered approach emphasizes meaning
  and use of message

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Information from the Human Perspective

• Levels in cognitive processing
• perception
• observation/attention
• reasoning, assimilating, forming inferences
• Knowledge justified true belief
• Belief an idea held based on some support an
  internally accepted statement, result of
  inductive processes combining observed facts with
  a reasoning process
• Does information require a human mind?
• Communication and information transfer among ants
• A tree falls in the forest is there information
  there?
• Existence of quarks

8
Meaning vs. Form

• Form of information as the information itself
• Meaning of a signal vs. the signal itself
• What aspects of a document are information?
• Representation (Norman 93)
• Why do we write things down?
• Socrates thought writing would obliterate serious
  thought
• Sounds and gestures fade away
• Artifacts help us to reason
• Anything not present in the representation can be
  ignored
• Things left out of the representation are often
  what we dont know how to represent

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Information Hierarchy
Wisdom
Knowledge
Information
Data
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Information Hierarchy

• Data
• The raw material of information
• Information
• Data organized and presented by someone
• Knowledge
• Information read, heard or seen and understood
• Wisdom
• Distilled and integrated knowledge and
  understanding

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Information
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where
is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is
the knowledge we have lost in information?
-- T.S. Eliot, The Rock
Where is the information we have lost in data?
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Origins

• Very early history of content representation
• Sumerian tokens and envelopes
• Alexandria - pinakes
• Indices

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Origins

• Biblical Indexes and Concordances
• Hugo de St. Caro 1247 A.D. 500 Monks -- KWOC
• Book indexes (Nuremburg Chronicle)
• Library Catalogs
• Journal Indexes
• Information Explosion following WWII
• Cranfield Studies of indexing languages and
  information retrieval
• Development of bibliographic databases
• Index Medicus -- production and Medlars searching

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Information Theory

• Claude Shannon, 1940s, studying communication
• Ways to measure information
• Communication producing the same message at its
  destination as that seen at its source
• Problem a noisy channel can distort the
  message
• Between transmitter and receiver, the message
  must be encoded
• Semantic aspects are irrelevant

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Information Theory

• Better called Communication Theory
• Communication may be over time and space

Noise
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What kinds of information are there?

• Text
• books, periodicals, WWW, memos, ads
• published/refeered
• Film
• Photos, other Images
• Broadcast TV, Radio
• Telephone Conversations
• Databases

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How much information is there?(Estimates
courtesy Hal Varian and Peter Lyman
http//www.sims.berkeley.edu/emc)
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How Much Information?

• Stored Information
• Print
• Film
• Optical
• Magnetic

• Communicated
• Internet
• Broadcast
• Phone
• Mail

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Print

• Annual Production
• Books 968,735 8 Terabytes (compressed
  image)
• Newspapers 22643 25 Terabytes
• Journals 40000 2 Terabytes
• Magazines 80000 10 Terabytes
• Office Documents 12x109 pages 312 Terabytes
• TOTAL 357 Terabytes (1824 scanned, 35 text)

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Print

• Library of Congress Printed book collection
• About 18 Million books
• About 130 Terabytes (compressed image)
• For all of LC we should also assume
• 13M photographs, 5MB each 65 TB
• 4M maps, say 200 TB
• 500K files, 1GB each 500 TB
• 3.5M sound recordings, 2000 TB
• Grand total 3 petabytes (3000 terabytes)
• Books in Print
• 3.2 Million titles
• About 26 Terabytes

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Film and Image

• Film
• Photographs 410 Petabytes per year
• Movies 16 Terabytes (Commercial Production of
  about 4000 films)
• X-Rays 12 Petabytes

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Optical Media

• CD-Music 90,000 items 58 TB
• CD-ROM 3,000 items 3 TB
• DVD-Video 5,000 items 22 TB
• Total 83 TB

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Magnetic Media

• Audio Tape 184,200,000 184.2 Petabytes
• Video Tape 355,000,000 1420
• Floppy disks 0.07
• Removable disks 1.69
• Hard Disks 500

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Totals Stored Per Year
Medium Type of content Terabytes/Year
Terabytes/Year
Upper Bound Lower Bound Paper
Books
8 7
Newspapers 25
20 Periodicals
12 12
Office documents 312
312 SUBTOTAL
357 351 Film
Photographs 410,000
100,000 Cinema
16 16
X-Rays 12,000
12,000 SUBTOTAL
422,000 112,016 Optical
Music CDs 58
40 Data CDs
3 3
DVDs
22 22
SUBTOTAL 83
65 Magnetic Camcorder
300,000 300,000
Disk drives 2,555,000
1,000,20 SUBTOTAL
2,855,000 1,300,200 TOTAL
3,277,440
1,412,632
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Internet Traffic -- Historical
Nov 92
Apr 95
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Internet Traffic
Nov 92
Apr 95
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Current Size of Web

• There are an estimated 2.1 Billion pages on the
  Web
• About 21 Terabytes
• About 7500 further Terabytes in web-accessed DBs.
• 610 Billion email messages per year 11285 TB
• Internet Traffic is doubling every 100 days - An
  estimated 62 Million Americans now use the
  internet (US Commerce Dept 1998)
• Radio took 38 years to get 50 M listeners, TV
  took 13 years, the Net took 4 years...

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Internet - Recent Statistics

• 5 M Level 2 Domains (NW June 1999)
• 43.2 Million Hosts (NW January 1999)
• 206/246 IP countries (NW July 1998)
• 300 Million Users (Newsbytes, Mar 2000)
• (830 Million Telephone Terminations)

Source Vint Cerf
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Internet Hosts (000s) 1989-2006
Source Vint Cerf
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Projected Voice and Data Traffic
Gb/s
Source America's Network, May 15, 1998
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Users on the Internet - May 1999

• CAN/US - 90.65M
• Europe - 40.09M
• Asia/Pac - 26.97M
• Latin Am - 5.29M
• Africa - 1.14M
• Mid-east - 0.88 M
• ---------------------------
• Total - 165M

Source Vint Cerf
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• Language Distribution of Web Content

Source Jack Xu Excite
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Language Distribution on a 634 Million Web Pages
Corpus
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Sources on Information, Computer, and Network Use

• http//www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how
  -much-info-2003/
• http//www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/bam/www/
  numbers.html
• Statistical snippets extracted from the news
• http//www.wcom.com
• Vint Cerfs pages
• http//www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_10/coffman
  /index.html
• The size and growth rate of the Internet by K.G.
  Coffman and Andrew Odlyzko

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Human Memory

• Landauer 86 Human brain holds 200MB
• looked at rate of information intake and rate of
  forgetting, and amount of information adults need
  for normal tasks
• 6B people on earth implies total memory of all
  people alive about 1,200 petabytes
• Another way
• estimate that people take in a byte/sec
• lifetime 250,000 days or 2B sec
• result is 2 GB (doesnt count synthesizing new
  info)

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Information Overload

• The greatest problem of today is how to teach
  people to ignore the irrelevant, how to refuse to
  know things, before they are suffocated. For too
  many facts are as bad as none at all. (W.H.
  Auden)