Lecture - September 25, 2002 - Information.1
Overview of Lecture
Significant differences between computer "information"
processing and human information processing
- focus now on technics that specifically gather,
store and retrieve INFORMATION
How do humans process "information"?
- we filter through data (facts/discrete bits/signals)
and process it to find something useful = information (that
which "informs" us about something)
If we can't find any connections among pieces
of data, there is no information.
(list of people I showed you last lecture: if
you didn't recognize any of them, you would see this as a mere
list of "data")
If you recognized a few, you might hypothesize
that they are all somehow related to computer "technologists"
รถ the data would start to look like "information"
Another processing stage later involves knowledge
acquisition:
Just as we build information from data, we build
knowledge from information.
Why may we see different patterns in the same
information? (because we don't all share the same background
knowledge that allows us to make links between information...)
How could we start to build a "knowledge" base
of these figures?
- Establish a timeline
- Divide their work into different categories: operating systems,
interfaces, software development, etc. (with overlaps)
- categorize them into "entrepreneurs/capitalists" and "scientists"
- other ways to make connections?
How is a piece of "information" processed in
a computer? "information" (according to Shannon*)- encoded into
signal --> sent over communication channel --> decoded by receiver
into same information that was encoded. ("Mathematical Theory
of Communication", 1948)
Encoding and decoding is done with bits and bytes:
bit of information (an electronic impulse which
is either on = 1 or off = zero)
combine 8 bits into a byte: 10100001 (decoded
into letter A in ASCII*)
*American Standard Code of Information Interchange
But how is it stored in computers sufficient that
we can RETRIEVE the "information"?
word processors - directories and file name
Relational databases - fields and rows
Hypertext structures - links
Etc.
Let's go back to human information processing.
What if: you couldn't write anything down. How would you remember
important information?
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