The Importance of Being Concise

Here’s a good article by Dr. Donald Wetmore on the importance of being concise in our communications. In a nutshell, appropriate “concision” benefits all parties!

Bypassing Automated Malarky

How would you like to by-pass all the automated malarky we all endure when calling an organization and go right to a human operator? The “Gethuman 500 database” is your dream come true!

Posting the Wrong Kind of Info

Vast segments of the population have turned to online exhibitionism. Writing in the Washington Post, economist Robert J. Samuelson observes says, “ It turns out that the Internet has unleashed the greatest outburst of mass exhibitionism in human history.”

“People seem to crave popularity or celebrity more than they fear the loss of privacy.” However, “what goes on the Internet often stays on the Internet.

Of particular concern: Something that seems harmless, silly or merely impetuous today may seem offensive, stupid or reckless in two weeks, two years or two decades,” says Samuelson. “Henry David Thoreau famously remarked that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Thanks to technology, that's no longer necessary. People can now lead lives of noisy and ostentatious desperation...”

What is Information?

Information: a message received and understood
Information: a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn, "statistical data"
Information: knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction

Information: that which reduces uncertainty. (Claude Shannon)
Information: that which changes us. (Gregory Bateson)
Information must be something, although the exact nature isn't clear

Information must not be a repetition of previously received message
Information must be true; a lie or false or counterfactual information is mis-information.
Information must be about something.

Info Overload at Every Turn

The reality of our times: information overload at every turn. In the last 12 months, in the U.S. alone:
156,000 books were published
1,120 new magazines were launched
7,200 movies were offered on DirecTV
218,000 programs were televised.
658 films were produced

Decide now to only choose the best of information and communication resources; you simply don't have time for the rest!

Ipod and Lightning

Getting struck while wearing your iPod: "Doctors at Vancouver General Hospital in Canada said a 37-year-old jogger wearing an iPod was left with a Y-shaped burn on his chest, neck and face after the man and a nearby tree were struck by lightning in 2005. The lightning then jumped to the jogger."

"Witnesses reported that he was thrown approximately 2.4 metres from the tree, they said. His eardrums were ruptured, his jaw fractured and he suffered first- and second-degree burns from his chest -- where the device was strapped -- up into his ear channels, along the trail of the iPod's earphones. He also had burns down his left leg and foot, where the electricity exited his body, blowing his sneaker to smithereens in the process."

"While lightning usually flashes over a victim's skin, the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports that the headphones of an iPod can act as a conductor, directing a bolt of electricity straight inside the listener's ear - rupturing eardrums and leaving severe burns."

So, there are times when it pays to NOT be connected to the information, communication, sight, and sound network that engulfs us all!

Cell Phones Decrease Freedom

"Cell phones-and, indeed, all wireless devices-constitute another chapter in the ongoing breakdown between work and everything else. They pretend to increase your freedom while actually stealing it. People are supposed to be always capable of participating in the next meeting, responding to their e-mails or retrieving factoids from the Internet. People so devoted to staying interconnected are kept in a perpetual state of anxiety, because they may have missed some significant memo, rendezvous, bit of news or gossip. They may be more plugged in and less thoughtful.
--Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek columnist

Less Chatter in the Sky!

Break out the champagne. The AP reports that the Federal Communications Commission “has officially grounded the idea of allowing airline passengers to use cellular telephones while in flight. Existing rules require cellular phones to be turned off once an aircraft leaves the ground in order to avoid interfering with cellular network systems on the ground. The agency began examining the issue in December 2004.”

“Federal Aviation Administration regulations also restrict the use of cellular phones and other portable electronic devices onboard aircraft to ensure against interference with the aircraft's navigation and communication systems. In an order released Tuesday, the FCC noted that there was ‘insufficient technical information’ available on whether airborne cell phone calls would jam networks on the ground.”

Check out the Story

Before you relay potentially bogus information to others, check out the story on your own:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/
http://www.quackwatch.org/
http://www.straightdope.com/

http://www.snopes.com/
http://www.truthorfiction.com/
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/
http://www.skeptic.com/

Info on Demand: Boon or Bane?

Apple announced the iPhone at its annual Macworld expo. Steve Jobs called the iPhone a "revolutionary mobile phone" that will feature an iPod, phone and "Internet communicator."

The Web as Social Hangout

From the AP newswire in New York:

“The online hangout MySpace got even more popular in November, beating Yahoo in Web traffic for the first time, a research company said Tuesday. News Corp.'s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace's growth was 2 percent over October and triple the 12.5 billion recorded in November 2005.”

“The numbers underscore the rapid rise of a social-networking site that encourages visitors to stay and make friends through free tools for messaging, sharing photos and creating personal pages known as profiles.”

Websites: 100 Million, so Far

• The Web has reached 100,000,000 sites
• In August 1995 there were 18,000 sites

Too Much Info while Driving!

Does this make sense or what? California will become the fourth state in the country to ban motorists from holding cellphones while driving under legislation Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he will sign into law today. It has long been proven that cell phone use demands three different levels of attention: aural, visual and mental, and thus is different than listening to the radio or even speaking with passengers.

Language and Economy

According to the New York Times, only about half of China's population can speak its national language, which is Mandarin. China’s 55 ethnic minorities, and the majority Han population, converse in a total of 1,599 dialects, most of them incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers.

With the bewildering array of information that cannot easily be conveyed, it might be a while before China’s economy becomes all it could be.

Information Defined

Information is a message received and understood.
Information is a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn.
Information is statistical data.
Information is knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction.

“Information is that which reduces uncertainty.” Claude Shannon

Information must be something or about something, although the exact nature – substance, energy, or abstract concept – isn't clear.
Information is not a repetition of previously received message.
Information must be true. A lie or false or counterfactual information is mis-information

“Information is that which changes us.” Gregory Bateson

Gap Between Press and Public

Survey Finds Huge Gap Between Press and Public on Many Issues
By Joe Strupp, a senior editor at Editor & Publisher, May 15, 2005

A survey released last May reveals a wide gap on many media issues between a group of journalists and the general public. In one finding, 43% of the public say they believe the press has too much freedom, while only 3% of journalists agree. Just 14% of the public can name "freedom of the press" as a guarantee in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the major poll conducted by the University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy.

Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press. More than 7 in 10 journalists believe the media does a good or excellent job on accuracy--but only 4 in 10 among the public feel that way. And a solid 53% of the public think stories with unnamed sources should not be published at all.

Perhaps the widest gap of all: 8 in 10 journalists said they read blogs, while less than 1 in 10 others do so. Still, a majority of the news pros do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists.

Asked who they voted for in the past election, the journalists reported picking Kerry over Bush by 68% to 25%. In this sample of 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 3 to 1 -– but about half claim to be Independent. As in previous polls, a majority (53%) called their political orientation "moderate," versus 28% liberal and 10% conservative.

The new poll was carried out in March and April. For the public opinion part, 1000 adults were interviewed.

6 Keys to the Future, circa 1990

In his 1990 book, Powershift, author Alvin Toffler proclaimed that the top six keys to the future are:
* interactivity * mobility * convertibility
* connectivity * ubiquity * globalization.

When combined, said Toffler these six principles point to a total transformation, not nearly in the way we send messages to one another, but in the way we think, how we see ourselves in the world, where we stand in our relationships. Put together, they will make it impossible for any institution to manage ideas, imagery data information or knowledge as they once did.

Still true? Could be.