The Quality of Information and What We do with IT

I started my search using the Texas A&M Library as my main aid in finding a scholarly article to write about. I then searched the terms Information and Quality, after retrieving over a few hundred articles I then went through the ones that were related to my field of study the most. Then I searched through the Full Text tab to find whether or not it was a scholarly article or just some journal entry.
The article I choose was “Impact of information quality and decision-maker quality on decision quality: A theoretical model of simulation analysis”. The article is about how information technology (IT) is represented when talking about information quality and the decision making that comes as a result of it all. It says how the quality of decisions improves with higher information quality being that the person making the decision is knowledgeable. But if not then the reverse will happen and the will make a lesser decision with the increase of quality.
This is something that we bother with constantly and affects us in everything we do daily. We as a people make snap judgments on a subject that we don’t really know anything about, just received a brief summary of the topic. That makes for a very uneasy reassurance in peoples decisions on a day to day operations, based on they don’t know much about what they are saying.

Escaping Information Overload

            People in today’s world have a constant overload of information that they must sort through, prioritize, and then decide which to do first and so on.  This is the way of the world and for the moment and the foreseeable future it is not going to change. 

            It does however make you start to wonder what would happen to people if they didn’t have all that information to look at.  Most people have been doing it for so long that they would go insane from not doing it.

            Today, all I did was ride around with my grandfather and talk about the past and the timeline of my family history with him.  That was it, and it felt so good just to do almost nothing and not worry with the million things that I had due tonight.  But as time has shown I had to resort to juggling a million things and creating much more stress in my life. 

            This concept is not thought of by many because we are taught from an early childhood that if you aren’t doing something productive then you shouldn’t do it at all.  I believe that every needs to unwind and relax because if you don’t, then you will end up actually insane then just having a case of temporary insanity.

            So here is my challenge for you, stop everything at least once a month or even once a week, just go drive and don’t answer your phone or even look at it.  Leave it at home and just go anywhere from a park, lake, or somewhere where there are no people and just be you.

The Quality We Leave Behind

            When writing a research paper, gathering information for court, or even just doing something for your family; you must always be weary of the information you get.  It seem like you have to do more research into your information to see if it is quality information or if it’s just fabricated.

            I am doing research into my family lineage right now, but around every corner, every person, and every page of information there is another twenty pages of information that I have to look at and ensure that it is from a legitimate source and that everything matches up with each record.  Most of the information I am looking at is from a legitimate source, but there are a few times that I have to cross check the information against three or four different records.  So were it only should have took me a few hours to complete this assignment, its taking a few days of staring endlessly at a computer screen.

            This makes for an interesting topic on that subject; just because it’s something we do now and don’t even realize how we do it.  We leave our digital marker online every day and in a multitude of ways.  Maybe we ought to rethink a lot of this because as I am doing research I am finding that just one written record is all I can find usually about a single person, or if it is more than one pieces its two; makes it hard to do accurate research with so many holes. 

            So, with all these missing files, burnt records, or incomplete documents; we should look not at the quality of what they did one hundred years ago, but how we should learn from their example and improve on it.  This will be the only way that our information of the present can better inform the people of the future.

Welcome to the Jungle!!!

In today’s world of retail, every store created is designed in a way to do nothing but make you spend more time in the store, thereby, causing you the consumer to spend more money.

            The article I choose was one from the Time, called Time Ideas (Essential Insights, Great Debates, Informed Opinions), and it was about how one man’s journey led him to the fact of how research is conducted to make the consumer slow down and buy things that they are not there to buy. 

            Using the Toulmin Analysis, to analyze this argument, first we have to identify the claim that was presented by the author or the article.  The claim is this, with the global economy down, people are spending less money and trying to save every penny; the retailer is applying every kind of scientific and psychological technique to make the consumer spend money on things they don’t need while in their store. 

            The data or the proof of this claim is noted very clearly by the author in his article.  He was able to see firsthand at a research facility where people stare at monitors and watch the consumers go down aisles in a supermarket that are designed for research. They test on everything from the tiles on the floor to the size of the shopping cart that is used to buy groceries.  Then show the percentages of how each had an effect to the consumers shopping style and time spent in the store.

            The warrant to this is that, most all people must go to the grocery store to live.  We as a people cannot live without food, so we must go to a place that supplies food so that we can live and our family as well.  The retailers know this, and must prey on your survival instincts to buy food for you and your family, so they present ways to keep you in the store as long as possible so that you will spend money.

http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/21/what-your-supermarket-knows-about-you/?iid=op-main-lede&hpt=hp_t2

Information We've Learned & How It's Overloaded

            The older we get as a person, the more information we learn, therefore, the more information we are trying to store and hopefully later recall.  But in today’s world of information, the information changes daily and by the time we learn one piece of information; it is replaced with five different types.  We never really forget the first piece of information that we learned, we just store it and learn more. 

            I am a gamer; my first video games were the arcade games, Super Mario Bros. and Centipede.  I grew up with them, for only a little while until my parents let me play their Atari game system.  In 1986 my parents bought a Nintendo Entertainment System, I was 6 and I played it every waking moment I was aloud too.  I learned how to play ever system that was introduced from Atari to the now PS3’s, Xbox 360’s, and Computer’s.  If ask to go back and play one of the older systems I can with very little trouble, while remembering all the games that I played when I was playing those systems.  This was my life of being a kid, and I loved every minute of it.

            My mind is so overloaded with the information of playing those games and how to play them.  I can recall almost every piece of information of those games with disturbing accuracy.  But once you learn that information, your life is now ruled by it.  I think of how this situation would make a great game, or fantasize about being characters in the game and what I would do in that situation.  That is the result of holding so much information of a specific type in for so long.  My life is ruled by those games and the overload of that information does affect my life and while it is constantly trying to force itself out, I am using more brain function trying to keep it hidden from others grasps. 

            So while we learn more information, our information doesn’t leave it simply gets stored and stored until we get so much of it in us that we can’t tell the information apart and can’t keep it from ruling our lives.

whAt thE eFfeCt Of InFOrmAtioN OVERload IS haVIng

            Today I will compare two different people’s outlook on what Information Overload is and what we are doing about it as a society.  Using a blog from the Harvard Business Review and a blog from ARMA Information Overload, I will compare how each says that we as a society take in the information and horde it to ourselves, constantly trying to stockpile it.

            In the blog from the Harvard Business Review, they show how this is not something new to humans to do, being that it’s been going on since print was first introduced.  They use Logos by explaining details in how society has been collecting books and written text throughout the ages and has only grown as time has gone by.  They show how libraries are some of the biggest of these collectors, not to mention private libraries at people’s houses.  How we have volumes of different books and magazines just stacked up on a shelf collecting dust in the hope of one day maybe reading it again.

            The blog from the ARMA also uses Logos to support their claims but also describes it to persuade the audience with mental images, so bring out Pathos in its argument.  It describes how in today world of online data is sharing, how people will just keep saving information on their computers and back up disk just in case they need it again.  They explain how file storages have become unmanageable and how everything has to be saved and stored, not just the important things but all things.

            These concepts of using Logos mainly to explain how Information Overload happens and has happened throughout our history helps us to understand it better.  But in each blog they use Logos in different ways to portray different ideas about the same idea.

Learning How to Read the 1's and 0's of Your Daily Life

        Today’s world of letters and symbols that make up the languages we communicate with in our everyday lives.  Most of the Digital Natives today know what everyone is and every acronym made up.  But they have failed in learning the most important of all the languages ever put on a computer.  The:

00010

01001

01110

00001

10010

11001

00000

00011

01111

00100

00101

is what represents all those letters and symbols that we use so much.  Every letter in the alphabet can be represented with the correct combination of “1 and 0”. 

            We as a society use this concept every day in almost every aspect of our lives.  We surf the web, talk on the phone, and share digital media.  We do this all day long; even in a class where we are suppose to be paying attention to the teacher.  The ease of use that computers and cell phones have made communicating from one person to another person has been felt in all classrooms around the world.  Students have out their computer and claim to be taking notes but soon as the teacher goes away they switch pages and pull up games, live chats, or other forms of distractions. 

            To learn how to use a computer or cell phone does not take a whole lot of effort, my 3 year old nephew knows how to work my sister’s cell phone and computer better than most.  But where all of us have failed is learning how they work, their communications.  We as a society have been brought up in a world where everything is just a mouse click away.  This mouse click though has a lot of secondary task assigned to it that the user never will see.  Every time you click your mouse and open a new screen, you are telling the computer to access its memory and open a certain file.  This is millions and millions more of 1’s and 0’s arranged perfectly to perform a specific task.  This allows us to communicate our ideas to the world, a simple arrangement of numbers, which only a few have learned.

            The question I have is this, if you had to type everything you said out with the numbers 1 and 0, would you still communicate as much as you do now?  Would people leave their computers for a pen and piece of paper?  How long would it take for people to learn and respect their computers for all of what they do and not just call it junk?

What Happens When the Qulity is Removed

The Meltdown at Three Mile Island, an ugly image for the nuclear power plants that were in operation and the plants that are in operation.  This is a message of deception and miscommunication. 

            This picture was taken at night, which aloud the haze of the normal lights in the back ground to produce a haze of an unnatural type.  This portrays the message that everything is going wrong and situation is as bad as the media is saying it is.  When the photograph was taken, it was also at the exact moment the red lights on the cooling tower are lit up.  This allows us as the general public to think that all has gone wrong because there is red and red is bad.  The cooling tower of a nuclear reactor is nothing more than a heat sink for the steam in the secondary water system to cool off, after all of its energy is used in the steam turbines to create electricity, and return to liquid form before repeating the process.  The words of the picture are in 2 different sizes and colors.  The small white letters “The Meltdown at” are placed in location so that the background around it is completely black.  Even though you might not be able to read them, this allows them to jump out at you from a distance.  The words “Three Mile Island” are in a much LARGER font and also in the color RED, which as I said before portray something bad, negative, or evil.  The whole of this picture is something gone wrong, gloom, destruction, death, and chaos.  This is a very good picture to explain something that you as a reader have no knowledge on and to sway your thoughts.

            This tactic of illusion is a very useful tool when trying to explain something that is bad, but was blown out of proportion by the media and government due to the communication at that time and the knowledge that people had on the subject.  Most people in this day and age still do not have a very good idea on how nuclear power works or what’s involved in the safety of ensuring that if an accident occurs that nothing goes airborne. 

            If Nuclear Power interests you and you have a question about it, please ask and I will answer it?

Information Overload

Today we will focus on in the realm of OVERLOAD.  Most people still don’t understand that all things are good for us and all things are bad for us.  We must take everything in life with its proper portions.  People, though, just don’t understand that concept and just want to take it all in and as fast as they can.  Then they wonder why they like millions others around the world; have medical problems, obesity, poor nutrition, migraines, or just poor health.  If I sat at a computer 24/7 trying to gather up all information available to me and didn’t get off until I had absorbed it all in, I would be a dead man sitting in front of my computer.  We as a society must learn to take information with a certain proportion size, not just give it to me now, now, now.  Most people when they want stuff like information, they remind me of a quote in a movie called “What About Bob?”, when Bob says, “gimme, gimme, gimme, I need, I need, I need”.  If they would just pace themselves and take everything in small portions, then they would realize that they are full without taking in a ton of information.  But your status quo is on how much more you know than anyone else.  Nobody wants to seem like the dumb one on a topic, so they try and learn as much as possible until their brain explodes and they have a mental breakdown, and then wonder why it happened.  So do we live as mindless zombies that act as though they were a source of all known information on the planet or do we act as people who know how to say “I DON’T KNOW, but I can find out”?

Quality of the Digital Life

My area of discussion and interest is on Information Overload, Information Quality, and Learning.  The interest in this area intrigues me due to its nature on how information is looked at and what people see it as.  Quality is a big part of how information is perceived by individuals looking it up for knowledge on a specific subject.  If something is put out on the internet as a fact when it is a false statement then when someone uses this information it destroys all credibility of that person and all sites used by them.  The overload part of the topic also interest me because of how most people say that they can process so much information but in all reality its lie.  Most people can only remember a given amount of information at a single time and with the world’s online data usage increasing by an astronomical rate every year, which is just more and more information that we will soon forget or not even comprehend in the first place.  As a whole, our society is still trying to keep up with this information ramp up that has happened in the past decade.  We are trying to learn as it were, on how to deal with people basically living online and pushing aside the wonders on the living world around us.  Most would rather see a picture rather than visit, but referring back to quality, nothing is as good or can live up to actually seeing the picture of it with your own eyes and not through a digitally enhanced, photo shop, drawing.