Friday, February 21, 2003

Intra-Cranial Knowledge Unnecessary

Knowledge-on-demand "When employees, consultants, and executives represent the most important capital in a corporation, and they keep it in their own brains, then metainformation becomes essential for an organisation to survive. Strategies, decisions, historical evaluations, constructions and work-flows must be documented, or else the whole business stands or falls with a certain person's leaving or staying...Everything will become metainformation.

All kinds of traditional knowledge - especially good old basics from elementary school - will become checkpoints, beacons that guide us to other kinds of knowledge, and this knowledge will help us to find a context for what we retrieve from different computer networks, it will help us evaluate veracity and relevance."

This article has some pretty good descriptions of the types of information, some of the problems with the distribution of it over the Internet and how it can all be fixed with a healthy dose of skepticism.

"At the same time, I am glad that I am somewhat well-rounded. For the same reasons that I would not dare trust a calculator without having some idea of multiplication tables, I would not trust the Britannica without having at least a cursory overview of history, geography and other basic facts. That is why I think it is incredibly important that our schools do not make it their primary goal to turn our children into full blown multimedia producers, but rather to teach basic subjects."

The extraction of text from any source resonance greatly with the work that we do. Just about everything we do is based on getting to the extracted text to obtain meaning.

"Thomas Jefferson is often quoted in the discussion of freedom of information. He said that one can share information without loosing anything, in the same way that someone ”who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” It is, of course, a very appealing thought. Still, one has to wonder if that was not an attitude that was easily taken and more affordable when, at the time, the material world was still the focal point for commerce and trade."

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