And Now, for Something Completely Different: Which Side of the Road They Drive on: A World Map

"Which Side of the Road"

"Map of the world showing driving directions for all countries and any changes that have occurred, beginning with Finland's change in 1858."

Theoretical Skills are Practical, Too

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox post of February 26, 2007, identifies "Life-Long Computer Skills" as generalized skills like search strategies, how to tell if information is credible, and basic debugging techniques (the digital equivalent of "is the unit plugged in?).

This would be a good read for parents or educators. Learning specific button-pushing skills for this year's software can be handy, but such skills get obsolete very fast.

Learning how to think about problems, how to evaluate information, and how to search for data are getting more important as the Internet is becoming as important as the telephone.

My own experience relates here: Back in the early 1970s, I developed a search/evaluate/collect system for gathering information and quotes for term papers.

Later, in library science classes, I learned how hierarchal indexing systems worked: not just what codes applied to which subjects in one system, but why information was organized the way it was.

Much later, in computer science classes, I learned how information is stored, transmitted, and processed in computers: again, not just the 'flange A goes in slot B' stuff, but how and why data is handled.

Today, I believe I use Google and other search resources more effectively because I apply the essence of that term-paper research process to online research.

Understanding how hierarchal systems work, and the how-and-why of how computers and other information systems handle data has been a huge help at work, and at home.

If you're still reading, and agree with me, check out "Life-Long Computer Skills" - it might be useful.

Oral Tradition; Writing; Movable Type; Internet - Exciting Times!

You've heard comparisons between recent developments in data processing, particularly the Internet, and use of movable type, a few centuries back.

I think we're looking at something more on the scale of the development of writing, a couple millennia or so before that.

Our ability to search, sort, and manipulate information today is unlike anything humanity has experienced before.

For a very long time, information storage and retrieval was limited to what people could remember, and re-tell. Stories told around a fire at night were a way to transmit ideas, stories, and values from person to person, and from one generation to another.

The first big breakthrough in information technology was writing, several thousand years ago. For the first time, people were able to store information externally, instead of relying entirely on what could be memorized and held within the human brain.

Movable type was the next important development. Printing presses with movable type made it possible to mass-produce written documents much more rapidly, efficiently, and accurately than was possible with hand-lettered documents.

The result was still a written document: produced in unprecedented quantity, and available at very low cost. Book ownership was no longer limited to the extremely wealthy and large institutions. Fast, relatively inexpensive distribution of information became possible.

Written documents are an excellent information storage medium, but one with very limited search functions, and no ability to sort of otherwise manipulate the stored information.

When I was young, externally-stored information was almost entirely static. We relied on our ability to read books, magazines, and other written documents for almost all access to the recorded store of humanity's knowledge and wisdom. Sound and video recordings not static in one sense, but it was more difficult to search for information in them, than in a book with an index.

Today, an increasing amount of information is in a dynamic medium: one in which information can be searched and manipulated in a way that would have been literally science fiction in my youth.

The change from storing information in a static medium to storing it in a dynamic one is a radical change.

Writing made it possible for us to store information outside our heads: indefinitely. That made it possible for ideas to be

• Recorded in extreme detail
• Transmitted across generations without depending on the vagaries of human memory
• Brought together from vast distances in time and space - in effect bringing together minds separated by thousands of miles, and years

It's not as much fun, in a way, as swapping stories around a fire, but writing made it possible for us to enjoy the tales of Homer thousands of years after the Greek storyteller died.

The transition from handwritten documents to documents created by movable type was very significant, but didn't change the basic nature of writing. We still used permanent marks on a relatively flat surface to record and transmit information.

Now, in addition to the information storage and transmission power of written language, we have the ability to take stored information and rapidly perform tasks that are time-consuming, at best, with written documents:

• Search
• Compare
• Sort
• Count
• Modify

We have something new here.

And exciting.