Data and Information

I will be harping on these two terms forever, so I thought to make my feelings known once and for all.

Ian Sharp of I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA) made this clear to me back around 1985/85. He drew a simple diagram on the white-board:-

Ian said "We take in Data and we Process it to get Information; we base decisions on that information".

That made sense to me.

Before I was young, it was called "Automatic Data Processing". This was the era of Accounting and Tabulating machines. A deck of punched cards sat in the input hopper, a button was pressed, and the cards passed through the machine and ended up sorted and filtered. One of the sorted or filtered decks was then placed in the hopper of another machine, a button was pressed, …

Just before I was adult the name was changed to "Electronic Data Processing". Same sort of deal in that a deck of punched cards sat in the input hopper, a button was pressed, but then the deck of cards was read "into" a computer's memory, a computer program worked on the card-images, and the result was spat out onto freshly-punched cards, or was printed on a 1,200-line-per-minute printer.

While my attention was diverted, the name was changed again, this time to "Information Technology" by people (men, mainly) who thought that by using polysyllabic terminology ("big words"), the problems in programming design and system implementation would go away. They didn't go away – neither the men nor the problems – and to prove my point, it is no longer called "Information Technology", but "IT" (pronounced "eye tea") because who has time to spit out eight syllables when only two will suffice? Now that's progress!

Ian's point was then and still is valid. As sapient creatures our eyes, ears, noses, tongues and finger-tips collect data from our immediate environment and feed the data to our brains in the form of nerve-signals. The brain processes the data, and then institutes an action based on the results of that process. We take in data and process it to make information. We base our decisions, and hence our actions on that information.

We know that if the data is bad, no matter how we process it, we will end up with bad information, and decisions based on bad information are bad decisions that often enough result in actions that are inappropriate for our immediate environment.

Consider, if you will, data that arrives through our eyes. We fail to see a large black-and-yellow striped cat-like camouflaged creature in the trees. We see only the trees. We walk into the trees and – well, you see, bad data.

Suppose we see a large black-and-yellow striped cat-like creature in the trees and tell ourselves "That's a lovely shade of yellow, and it looks so smooth". We walk into the trees with the intention of stroking the large cat-like creature and – well, you see, bad processing leads to bad decisions.

You can prove this to yourself the next time someone tells you that they are suffering from Information Overload or they cry out "Too much information!".

Question them.

Invariably the person's statement is based on faulty processing of the available data.

As a simple example, the person arrives at work to find twenty-four new emails in the Input Box. If the data "twenty-four new emails in the Input Box" is treated as Information, then the decision is based on un-processed data, and un-processed data is effectively bad processing. If the newspaper is full of fear-based stories (Trump, Covid, Trump, Terrorists, Trump, Hurricanes, …) and this data puts the patient in a state of fear and inaction, well, again, the real problem is inability to process data. In this specific example the person is treating the data (words in the news media) as information, and is not processing the data. In essence the news media are telling the individual what to do. The individual has become a mindless robotic automaton.

The obvious answer in these kinds of cases is to start processing the twenty-four emails, one by one, until they are all processed. Maybe install a spam-filtering program. Maybe set aside 8am-9pm and 3pm-4pm as the times when email is processed by the brain, and spend the rest of the time working on the project for which you are paid a salary. (time-management).

Here now is an example of data vs. processing according to the user.

On the front wall of my house is a meter which displays (in Real-Time!) my use of electricity. Every morning since the 11th March 2019 I have walked outside first thing in the morning and "read my meter". This morning the figure read 22,577. Yesterday morning the meter read 22,530, and so on back through time. The electricity supplier – NL Hydro, reads my meter just once a month.

Note that the meter reading is raw data, a number, this morning 22,577. That is unequivocal.

But then note that two different agents (me and the hydro company) will apply two different processes to this raw data (22,577) and come up with two completely different chunks of information.

I came up with "Gee! I used 47 kilowatt-hours yesterday. That's $3.41 of electricity. I should turn down the thermostats a little bit" (or not leave the oven turned on or …).

Here's what the hydro company came up with "You have until December 20th to pay us $156.92 or else we will start charging you interest and take you to court to stand before a judge …".

The data is the same.

The processing is different.

So the information (derived) is different.

And my actions are different; in one case I pull on a warm sweater, and in the other case I go clickety-click and do a bit of online bill-paying.

Over the next week or so, every time you see of hear the word "Information", check to see if it really is information, or if it is instead raw data. If it is raw data, you had better process it!

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