Too much data not enough information: a survival guide to the information age

Listening to Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, here is a quote from the web: “But it is also necessary to distinguish Shannon information from information that performs a function or conveys a meaning. We must distinguish sequences of characters that are (a) merely improbable from sequences that are (b) improbable and also specifically arranged so as to perform a function. That is, we must distinguish information-carrying capacity from functional information.”  ―  Stephen C. Meyer,  Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design Meyers speaks of 'information that performs a function or conveys a meaning', I think we are employing different definitions of those key words.  Let me try and define his message with my terms. Data: a recorded observation.  Data is a thing, an object, as perceived. Information: a metric of data.  Just like we measure the weight of things in pounds or grams, we can measure that quantity of data in Information. Me...

IV) Abstractions and judgements When the third thing is introduced an abstraction is made. That moment when a continuous function takes on a discrete shape.  The moment when we utilize a metric, so that instead of saying something is better or worse we say it is in a different category.  That is the moment when we create the idea of the category.  The category provides a framework to describe the abstraction we just made by saying these two things are more similar to each other than to a third thing. It is also the moment when we lose something, we go from an infinite potential to a specific realization.  We make a judgement call. https://ashlag-cause-and-kook-affect.blogspot.com/2018/12/being-judgmental-is-necessary-for.html Abstractions are both the key element in learning and the realization of a judgement, a phase transition.   I want to define learning, as opposed to memorization and prediction, as a method for creating a model.  A model i...

III) Metrics One of these things is not like the other -- but two of these things are distant from a third. I grew up with Brisk Torah, more specifically my father was a Talmid of Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik and dialectic thinking was part and parcel of our discussions.  Two things, two dinim, the rhythm in the flow between two things.  Dialectics not dichotomies.  The idea espoused by the Rambam in his description of Love and Awe, mutually exclusive, we travel between them. Why create duality?  Dialectics or dichotomies provide a powerful tool, but what is it that tool? What is the challenge? I think the Rabbinic language might be נתת דברך לשיעורים, 'your words are given to degrees', the idea being that without clear definitions we are left with vague language, something is more than something else, ok, but how much more? This I think is the reasoning for the first of the twenty one questions I was taught by my father's mother, 'is it bigger than a breadbox?',...

II) Too much data Way back when, in the late 90's, before the advent of Big Data, we had little computing.  I was working with the Volcani institute (the ministry of agriculture's research institute) on the problem of quality sorting of tomatoes.  The project, multi-sensor fusion for tomato quality control, required us to analyze tomatoes with vision, smell and touch sensors.  I was responsible for the vision sensor, setting up the lighting and the new digital camera, image processing was an art, very different than the art of Deep Learning today.  I took pictures of several hundred tomatoes stored on CD-ROMs (I think) to analyze.  The basic image processing technique was to break the image up into small windows of 16x16 pixels, create a signature (feature vector) based on texture and color and then cluster those signatures into groups.  With the idea being that sections of the tomato that look alike must also share similar qualities (bruised/sweet/healthy)...

I) The Information Age I remember being introduced to Mosaic, the first web browser.  I was in university studying Neural Computation and someone demonstrated Mosaic's browser to me.  My first reaction was: now what?  There was no content apparent, nothing to see, and no way to find it.  Then came Yahoo organizing the world for you, followed by AltaVista my first content searchable portal.  Google had the simpler interface, not a portal just a search engine, it was faster and that was that. Well there was and is more to the two different approaches.  Portals gather, organize and present the data, they feel limiting to me.  While search engines open up the vast potential to explore all the worlds data, freeing me to discover anything.  Perhaps the subtlety is that even search engines guide your search and organize the data for you, we are not as free as we think we are.  Funny that my current behavior is still a mix, I go to Yahoo and Goog...