Jonathan B. Spira's Blog: Overload Stories, page 11

All the News That’s Fit to View

So much news, so little time…

The volume of news we create, and by news I mean news reporting, not newsworthy events, is mind-boggling. As someone who studies this as a form of Information Overload, the sheer quantity of reporting never ceases to amaze me – and it is this quantity that makes it difficult to search and find items of interest.

Starting with early news programs such as the Camel News Caravan with John Cameron Swayze and You Are There with Edward R. Murrow, and moving into the current 24-hour news cycle that started with the advent of CNN, a good part of the population has come to depend on television to keep current.

This is all well and good but, unlike newspapers, which today are easily searchable online and previously somewhat searchable using microfiche and microfilm, it was not possible to easily go back and find TV news spots on a particular topic.

Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, wants to change that. For the past few years, the archive has been digitizing news broadcasts from twenty outlets and over 1,000 programs. This means every last second of every CNN broadcast as well as all sixty minutes of 60 Minutes.

Currently the archive has collected over 350,000 news programs that are fully text searchable, thanks to the archive’s using the closed-captioned text that accompanies the videos.

To use the system, I clicked through to TV News on the Internet Archive’s website. There I found a dedicated page with a cloud tag showing recently accessed topics. One can search all sources or narrow the search down by network (e.g. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc.) or program name (e.g. BBC World News, ABC World News Tonight, Meet the Press, Nightline, and more).

I searched on (fasten your seatbelts here) “Information Overload.” The system returned 98 results, displayed horizontally (out of 248), with a video above and the relevant text excerpt below. The video was almost always queued to start at the right place, i.e. where the person was starting to mention “Information Overload” and I was generally satisfied with the choice.

The interface itself is easy to use and features a handy timeline for moving quickly to a specific spot in time, for example, looking at a spike in coverage in December 2011.

The Internet Archive has already digitized almost every Web page known to man as well as millions of books, much in the style of the ancient Library of Alexandria. Thankfully, the archive has not resorted to stopping travelers at Egypt’s borders to confiscate their books so they could be copied to the library (anecdotally, the travelers sometimes received the copies back, not the originals). All that the Internet Archive has really needed were very large hard drives and a mission to preserve our history as told to us by newscasters.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Are You Sleeping Well?

All that is missing is darkness…

Look around your bedroom. Are there tiny beams of light, maybe blue ones and/or green ones? Or a red one? Is there a glow emanating from a digital clock or clock radio?

According to both common sense and the National Sleep Foundation, one’s bedroom should be dark, but in the past decade that sanctuary has been infiltrated more and more by electronic devices. In addition to a clock or clock radio (which should automatically dim when the lights are out), there’s the settop box (did you know you can turn the clock off on most of them?). Then there are the tiny beams of light generated by your mobile phone when it’s charging, your laptop if it’s in the bedroom, and perhaps even your high-tech desk phone (for those still with landlines).

There may be more such devices in the bedroom these days because, increasingly, more people find it difficult to disconnect and they bring their smartphones and tablets into bed with them before going to sleep. Seeing these, perhaps as a substitute for reading a good book, many are unaware that studies, including one from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, have shown that exposure to light from a computer tablet could lower the level of melatonin in the body, and therefore impact one’s sleep cycle adversely. (Melatonin levels are regulated by the pineal gland, which responds to darkness by releasing the hormone, triggering drowsiness and sleep; any increase in light impacts the release and thus limits one’s ability to sleep soundly.)

The Rensselaer study, published over the summer in the journal Applied Economics, examined the impact of self-luminous tablets on 13 individuals. “Our study shows that a two-hour exposure to light from self-luminous electronic displays can suppress melatonin by about 22 percent,” stated Mariana Figueiro, the study’s director.

Last November, Cody Burke wrote about the findings from the National Sleep Foundation’s 2011 “Sleep in America” survey. They bear repeating:

- 39% of Americans bring their mobile phone into bed with them and end up using it in the hour before they go to sleep. The number is even higher for younger Americans, 67% of 19-29 year olds. 21% of Americans end up texting during this time.

- Those individuals that end up texting in the hour before sleep are more likely to report bad sleep and not feeling refreshed.

- 1 in 10 Americans is awakened by mobile phone alerts from texts, calls, and e-mail. The number rises to nearly 1 in 5 for 19-29 year olds.

- 36% of Americans use their laptop in bed before they go to sleep, and this group reports that it is less likely to get a good night’s sleep.

Since a lack of sleep can impact one’s productivity and feeling of well-being, take steps to improve your sleep hygiene. Well before going to sleep, stop looking at (and thinking about) e-mail, stop texting, and turn off and tune out. You’ll be surprised at how much better you sleep.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

(Photo: Jonathan Spira)

We Are Talking And Singing on Mars Now

Rendering of Curiosity Rover

The sheer volume of information and content that is produced on Earth is mind numbing. For example, over 35 hours of video footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute. But earthly boundaries aren’t enough. Now, we are accepting submissions from the red planet.

Robotic rovers and satellites have been sent to Mars before. They have gathered images, video, and other data from the planet and sent them back to Earth. Now, for the first time, Earth has received our own voices, broadcast from Mars.

The Curiosity Rover, NASA’s most recent visitor to the surface of Mars, last week broadcast the first human words from another planet. A statement read by Charles Bolden, administrator of NASA, was transmitted to Curiosity, and then back to NASA’s Deep Space Network facility on Earth. The message thanked all of the individuals who worked on the Curiosity mission, and is the first time a recorded human voice has traveled between another planet and Earth.

Not content to stop there, NASA then proceeded to make history once again by broadcasting the first song from another planet, “Reach for the Stars,” an original song by Will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas fame and technology enthusiast.

Impressive work for a robot that can only broadcast at 10,000 bps, or ca. one 10 megapixel image per day. Indeed, Curiosity’s speed is on par with a 1984 computer modem.

Curiosity is also very active on Twitter (@MarsCuriosity), with over 1 million followers, and an irreverent style of tweeting that frequently references dance moves. Sample tweet: “1st drive complete! This is how I roll: forward 3 meters, 90º turn, then back. Electric slide, anyone?”

What NASA has demonstrated with Curiosity thus far shows both scientific advancement pushing the boundaries of what can be transmitted between planets, and also a social savvy that is engaging and exciting space fans and non-fans alike.

(Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Enjoy It While It Lasts: E-mail Overload to Resume Next Week

Traffic resumes next week

In the last week of August, nothing seems to get done.  E-mail goes unanswered, meetings are rescheduled, even my local favorite coffee shop is empty as people sneak away for their vacations.

Indeed, last week, Jonathan Spira’s commentary in this space was a mere 83 words long as he rushed out for a holiday trip.

I enjoy this time of year, but therein lies the rub.  Starting next week, all those same people will be back at work and back in their inboxes, refreshed and flush with a sense of false urgency.

But do we really need to bring those stress levels back to normal?

While you think about it, I’m outta here…

David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.

Gone Fishin’ – For Information

E-mail free: the Lake Neusiedl, Burgenland, Austria

It’s August. The end of August. A Friday at the end of August, specifically.

The number of e-mails has declined dramatically as the number of people away from the office increases.

I practically shake my laptop to see if there are any new e-mails as so few are arriving this morning.

If nothing else, my experience, which I am told is not uncommon, does show that we do know how to disconnect.

And that’s what I am going to do right now…

(Picture: Jonathan Spira)

Gone Fish’n – For Information

E-mail free: the Lake Neusiedl, Burgenland, Austria

It’s August. The end of August. A Friday at the end of August, specifically.

The number of e-mails has declined dramatically as the number of people away from the office increases.

I practically shake my laptop to see if there are any new e-mails as so few are arriving this morning.

If nothing else, my experience, which I am told is not uncommon, does show that we do know how to disconnect.

And that’s what I am going to do right now…

(Picture: Jonathan Spira)

Limits on Recording Everything: Is the Genie Already Out of the Bottle?

Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, famously recorded numerous moments of his life on tape recordings, video, notepads, and the like.  Nelson, whose work in hypertext dates back to the early 1960s and coined the term, was not only ahead of his time in this respect but also in terms of documenting his own life (he claimed that his reason for doing so was his poor memory).

Please speak into my carnation.

An article in the New York Times this past week called my attention to a white paper by John Villasenor, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and electrical engineer by trade, entitled Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments.

While Mr. Villasenor’s point-of-departure relates to the potential for governmental abuse, I was far more interested in the fact that he quantified what I had long suspected, namely that the cost of storage has dropped to the point where anything and everything can be recorded.

The fact that we can is interesting.  But this begs the question, should we?

Today, most individuals generate a vast amount of information each day.  Starting with our conversations and meetings, we move onto e-mail, text messages, social networks, website visits, and cameras.  Our activities, using a credit card, placing a phone call, or sending a text, create additional information (and record our location) on an ongoing basis.

Imagine if all of this were recorded centrally.

Mr. Villasenor estimates that merely storing the audio from a typical knowledge worker’s phone calls throughout a year would require 3.3 gigabytes and cost a mere 17 cents.  That figure, he points out, will drop to two cents by 2015.

Given his focus on authoritarian regimes, he points out that it would cost just $2.5 million to store one year’s worth of phone calls from every person above the age of 14 in Syria (which has a population of 15 million people over the age of 14).  While most of our readers are not planning to record the conversations of their fellow citizens, the $2.5 million figure is mind-numbingly low.

Clearly, things will not end with simply storing the data.  The question is what happens to the data afterwards.  We need to think of all the ramifications that will be the outcome of gathering it, including security and privacy.  Despite their limitations, today’s search tools are more than capable of finding multiple needles in haystacks of recordings.  The question that intrigues me, however, is, what will the impact on an already overloaded society be if and when we start to record our every movement.

Right now, doing so is a curiosity, something an eccentric such as Ted Nelson or a researcher at MIT can do but most mainstream knowledge workers couldn’t and wouldn’t.

There are numerous other issues here besides Information Overload, most prominent among them privacy and government overreach.  At the moment, since we’re at the very beginnings of gathering information on such a massive scale, society does not yet perceive this as a problem.  However, once we really start the ball rolling, we’ll most likely find that it’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

(Photo: Hannes Grobe)

Tweeting Away Your Vacation

Even THEY get a vacation.

A vacation – at least as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary – is “a period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation, especially one with pay granted to an employee.”

That means that, during a vacation, one takes a break from what is considered to be work the other 48-50 weeks a year.

A few years ago, people blogged – sometimes incessantly – about their vacations, typically after the fact. Now, people take their fans and followers along on the journey, a point somewhat driven home by a recent Wall Street Journal piece that focused on how those actively engaged in social media could not – in many cases – take a break.

As the article put it, “the chatter keeps flowing.”

There are two reasons for this, at least as far as the author of the piece was concerned:

Fans and followers won’t accept substitute tweeters and posters
So-called “power tweeters” risk losing traction with their readers

The problem is that, just as with information in general, the number of Facebook posts and tweets is growing by leaps and bounds. One or two posts may simply be the equivalent of a needle in a haystack and will simply go unnoticed.

Douglas Quint, a co-founder of Big Gay Ice Cream, has over 37,500 followers, many of whom want to know where his ice cream truck is on a given day. “We need to appear active,” Mr. Quint says. “We want to appear in people’s Twitter feeds once or twice a day.”

Soon, that may not be enough. As quantity increases, social media posters fight to be noticed. That may mean that, where once just a few posts per day sufficed, following that practice now might not even get one noticed.

Andrew Zimmern, who hosts a Travel Channel program called Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, tweets as often as 50 times a day to his 410,800 followers. But these numbers should give one pause: Using these figures as an example, Zimmern generates what amounts to 20.5 million discrete messages in a single day.

Who has time to follow someone who can post 50 messages a day? For that matter, who has time to post 50 messages a day? This article reminded me of one thing – why I’ve stayed away from Twitter. The temptation is great. It would be easy to get sucked in. But once that happens, I suspect it’s the opposite of a Roach Motel: messages go out but nothing meaningful comes in.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

Trouble Finding Time to Complete Tasks? Take a Deep Breath…

Breath and go to your happy place…

A knowledge worker’s effectiveness depends on completing assignments. Sometimes, work just gets in the way of getting things done.

I’ve been thinking a lot about work. Specifically, what I’ve been contemplating is an increasing inability to spend substantive time writing during the day.

Perhaps it’s indicative of the problem that I am writing this at 10 p.m. Monday evening. I thought about starting to write this several times during the day, but work got in the way.

Of course, for me, writing is my work, so what happened? It isn’t writer’s block; indeed, I have plenty to say (and write).

Let’s look at when I was, and was not, productive for a moment. Over the weekend, I was able to spend a total of six or so relatively quiet hours writing. I finished three articles.

It’s not that I was constantly being interrupted during the workdays of the previous week. Today, with the prevalence of e-mail, my phone rings only once or twice a day.

During the normal workday, the typical nine-to-five, I find that many people are exchanging information and messages in an automaton-like fashion. They equate volume with a depth of understanding, facts with knowledge. They are deluding themselves.

Looking at the world in this fashion is not only misguided but wrong. But I digress.

Our jobs are not to move mounds of information from one pile to another. As knowledge workers, it is our job to digest information and extract a kind of wisdom from it.

Nonetheless, it’s possible to get caught up with my fellow automatons that are out there pushing out information and the day is over before you know it.

Even though I’ve cut back tremendously on my sources of information, I still find that my curiosity gets the best of me. There are so many things to be curious about and so much is available with the tap of a few keys that one can get lost in an abyss without even trying.

A few years ago, I scaled back from two 22” LCD monitors to the single 13” display built into my laptop. I thought I was being far more efficient and effective with wall-to-wall information but I was fooling myself. Instead, I was giving myself more ways to succumb to distraction.

Last year, I cut back on my news intake – and found that the absence of a constant barrage of small bits of news I really didn’t need gave me back the ability to concentrate more effectively.

This year, I find myself fighting to regain more time for thought and reflection. Alert readers will recall that we found that only 5% of the day is typically available to a knowledge worker for thinking and reflecting. That isn’t nearly enough time for a workforce that, essentially, thinks for a living.

What I am starting to see work for me is practicing deep breathing techniques. By doing so, I basically turn off all of my thoughts (it was a struggle at first but eventually it will happen to you too) and focus on my breathing. I feel more relaxed and more focused afterwards, and the result for me was a productive weekend of writing.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex and author of Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous To Your Organization.

 

Google X Lab Hunts YouTube for Cats

That computer is watching me…

When left to its own devices, what does one of the largest neural networks for machine learning in the world use its 16,000 computer processors and one billion connections do? Solve complex environmental problems? Crunch scientific data to illuminate the mysteries of deep space? No and no. Turns out, the huge, powerful neural network taught itself to recognize cats (and humans) in only three days.

Researchers from Google and Stanford working at Google’s secretive X Lab connected 16,000 processors (still far short of a human’s estimated 80 billion neurons) and fed the neural network digital images extracted at random from 10 million YouTube videos. The machine was then left alone to learn what it could with no instruction on how to proceed. For three days, the network pored through the images, making connections and finding commonalities between objects. Next, the researchers attempted to see what the computer could identify from a list of 20,000 items.

By learning from the most commonly occurring images the computer was able to achieve an 81.7% accuracy rating in identifying human faces, 76.7% accuracy at identifying human body parts, and 74.8 percent accuracy when identifying cats. The increases represent a 70% jump in accuracy compared to previous studies.

The network constructed a rough image of what a cat would look like by extracting general features as it was exposed to the 10 million images, in much the same way that a human brain uses repeated firing of specific neurons in the visual cortex to train itself to recognize a particular face. What the experiment proved is that it is possible for the computer to learn what something is without it being labeled; the neural network created the concept of both humans and cats without being prompted.

Machine learning lies in the use of algorithms to allow computers to evolve behavior based on data by recognizing complex problems and making intelligent, data-based decisions. The problem is that when faced with complex problems with large data sets, it is next to impossible for all possible variables to be covered, so the system must generalize from the data it has. In the case of the cats, Google’s neural network was able to generalize what humans and cats look like with relatively high accuracy.

The potential applications of this kind of neural network are broad. Speech and facial recognition, as well as translation software would benefit from machine learning that only requires vast amounts of data with no hints or guidance from human operators. The current Big Data movement is providing huge quantities of data, and it is encouraging to know that there may be actual applications for it.

Reflecting the confidence that Google has in the project, the company is moving the neural network research out of X Lab and into its division charged with search and related services. Expect to see larger neural networks with even higher accuracy rates constructed in the near future. Hopefully we can move on to using them for something more important… perhaps even recognizing dogs?

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex. He can be reached at cburke@basex.com

(Photo: Stavrolo)