Websites and apps are places where critical parts of our lives happen. We shop, bank, learn, gossip, and select our leaders there. But many of these places weren’t intended to support these activities. Instead, they're designed to capture your attention and sell it to the highest bidder. Living in Information draws upon architecture as a way to design information environments that serve our humanity.
From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
Class-tested and coherent, this textbook teaches classical and web information retrieval, including web search and the related areas of text classification and text clustering from basic concepts. It gives an up-to-date treatment of all aspects of the design and implementation of systems for gathering, indexing, and searching documents; methods for evaluating systems; and an introduction to the use of machine learning methods on text collections. All the important ideas are explained using examples and figures, making it perfect for introductory courses in information retrieval for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computer science. Based on feedback from extensive classroom experience, the book has been carefully structured in order to make teaching more natural and effective. Slides and additional exercises (with solutions for lecturers) are also available through the book's supporting website to help course instructors prepare their lectures.
“Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.
The Book of Really Useful Information provides a broad and fascinating education in 20 easy lessons, from great works of art to political leaders, literature that shaped society to basic science, and everything in between. This is an ideal book for anyone who spent their school days gazing out of the window and now realizes how much they missed out on. It provides a full and fascinating education that covers all key subjects. For clarity and ease of use, the book is divided into five days, Monday to Friday, and then subdivided into four single-subject lessons. Each lesson is based around the five w’s—who, what, when, where, and why—and poses questions such as: Who was Eric Arthur Blair? What happened to the Romans? When was the Big Bang? Where do laws come from? Why is evolution controversial? You can choose to dip into a lesson at random, read through a whole day, or start from the beginning and keep going to the end. Accessible writing and useful fact boxes will help you pick up the key points quickly, and summary boxes provide a concise review of each subject. And for that authentic school experience, each day in The Book of Really Useful Information ends with a test—except this time you get to mark it yourself. If you’re feeling brave, you could even get your kids to take the tests, too, to see which of you knows the most. So sharpen your pencils and get ready to quickly learn everything you need to know in the 20 lessons of The Book of Really Useful Information.
The Indian state till recently denied information about its functioning and decision-making to its citizens, ironically, using laws made during the colonial period. Apart from being an anomaly in a democratic set-up, it created an adverse impact on the quality of governance, accountability, and transparency. It was only in 2005, after a prolonged freedom of information movement, that this situation was finally rectified. The government enacted the landmark Right to Information Act 2005, and gave to all its citizens the right to access information held by or under the control of public authorities. This Handbook is meant to serve as a practical guide to the implementation of the Act. The book begins by locating the Act in the context of a global movement for freedom of information (FOI), and discusses the efforts made by international bodies for adoption of FOI. It also presents a detailed comparative study of FOI in five countries—the US, the UK, Canada, South Africa, and India. In subsequent chapters, the book adopting a step-by-step approach, discusses the provisions of the Right to Information Act, how citizens should make use of the right to information, the comprehensive guidelines for public authorities and their obligations under the Act, which includes relevant central information commission decisions, the role of the public information officers (PIO), who are to be appointed as per the provisions in the Act by all public authorities, the exemptions allowed under the Act, and, finally, the appellate authorities to whom a citizen can appeal in case of unsatisfactory response by the PIO.
As one of the first books to distill the economics of information and networks into practical business strategies, this is a guide to the winning moves that can help business leaders--from writers, lawyers and finance professional to executives in the entertainment, publishing and hardware and software industries-- navigate successfully through the information economy.
Why solving the information problem should be at the core of our pandemic response: essential reading about the long-term implications of our current crisis. COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The COVID-19 pandemic is caused by a lack of good information. A pandemic is essentially an information problem: this is the enlightening and provocative idea at the heart of this book. If we solve the information problem, argues economist Joshua Gans, we can defeat the virus. For example, when we don't know who is infected, we have to act as if everyone is infected. If we actively manage the information problem--if we know who is infected and with whom they had contact--we can suppress the virus or buy time for vaccine development. This is an expanded version of an eBook originally published as Economics in the Age of COVID-19.
With its theme, "Our Information, Always and Forever," Part I of this book covers the basics of personal information management (PIM) including six essential activities of PIM and six (different) ways in which information can be personal to us. Part I then goes on to explore key issues that arise in the "great migration" of our information onto the Web and into a myriad of mobile devices. Part 2 provides a more focused look at technologies for managing information that promise to profoundly alter our practices of PIM and, through these practices, the way we lead our lives. Part 2 is in five chapters: - Chapter 5. Technologies of Input and Output. Technologies in support of gesture, touch, voice, and even eye movements combine to support a more natural user interface (NUI). Technologies of output include glasses and "watch" watches. Output will also increasingly be animated with options to "zoom". - Chapter 6. Technologies to Save Our Information. We can opt for "life logs" to record our experiences with increasing fidelity. What will we use these logs for? And what isn’t recorded that should be? - Chapter 7. Technologies to Search Our Information. The potential for personalized search is enormous and mostly yet to be realized. Persistent searches, situated in our information landscape, will allow us to maintain a diversity of projects and areas of interest without a need to continually switch from one to another to handle incoming information. - Chapter 8. Technologies to Structure Our Information. Structure is key if we are to keep, find, and make effective use of our information. But how best to structure? And how best to share structured information between the applications we use, with other people, and also with ourselves over time? What lessons can we draw from the failures and successes in web-based efforts to share structure? - Chapter 9. PIM Transformed and Transforming: Stories from the Past, Present and Future. Part 2 concludes with a comparison between Licklider’s world of information in 1957 and our own world of information today. And then we consider what the world of information is likely to look like in 2057. Licklider estimated that he spent 85% of his "thinking time" in activities that were clerical and mechanical and might (someday) be delegated to the computer. What percentage of our own time is spent with the clerical and mechanical? What about in 2057?
This book introduces the quantum mechanical framework to information retrieval scientists seeking a new perspective on foundational problems. As such, it concentrates on the main notions of the quantum mechanical framework and describes an innovative range of concepts and tools for modeling information representation and retrieval processes. The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 illustrates the main modeling concepts for information retrieval (including Boolean logic, vector spaces, probabilistic models, and machine-learning based approaches), which will be examined further in subsequent chapters. Next, chapter 2 briefly explains the main concepts of the quantum mechanical framework, focusing on approaches linked to information retrieval such as interference, superposition and entanglement. Chapter 3 then reviews the research conducted at the intersection between information retrieval and the quantum mechanical framework. The chapter is subdivided into a number of topics, and each description ends with a section suggesting the most important reference resources. Lastly, chapter 4 offers suggestions for future research, briefly outlining the most essential and promising research directions to fully leverage the quantum mechanical framework for effective and efficient information retrieval systems. This book is especially intended for researchers working in information retrieval, database systems and machine learning who want to acquire a clear picture of the potential offered by the quantum mechanical framework in their own research area. Above all, the book offers clear guidance on whether, why and when to effectively use the mathematical formalism and the concepts of the quantum mechanical framework to address various foundational issues in information retrieval.
