The Web of Knowledge

19 May 2012

🏷️Knowledge Representation: On Data (Quotes)

"Mathematicians obtain the solution of a problem by the mere arrangement of data, and by reducing their reasoning to such simple steps, to conclusions so very obvious, as never to lose sight of the evidence which guides them." (Antoine Lavoisier, "Elements of Chemistry In a New Systematic Order". 1790)

"Before anything can be reasoned upon to a conclusion, certain facts, principles, or data, to reason from, must be established, admitted, or denied." (Thomas Paine, "Rights of Man", 1791)

"The modern age has a false sense of superiority because of the great mass of data at its disposal. But the valid criterion of distinction is rather the extent to which man knows how to form and master the material at his command." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "On Theory of Color", 1810)

"The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data." (Charles Babbage, "On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures", 1832)

"In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data." (James C Maxwell, [letter to Lewis Campbell] 1851)

"It usually happens in scientific progress, that when a great fact is at length discovered, it approves itself at once to all competent judges. It furnishes a solution to so many problems, and harmonizes with so many other facts, - that all the other data as it were crystallize at once about it." (Edward Everett, "The Uses of Astronomy", [An Oration Delivered at Albany] 1856)

"The ignoring of data is, in fact, the easiest and most popular mode of obtaining unity in one's thought." (William James, "The Sentiment of Rationality", Mind Vol. 4, 1879)

"It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", 1892)

"Physical research by experimental methods is both a broadening and a narrowing field. There are many gaps yet to be filled, data to be accumulated, measurements to be made with great precision, but the limits within which we must work are becoming, at the same time, more and more defined." (Elihu Thomson, "Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution", 1899)

"The data with which any scientific inquiry has to do are trivialities in some other bearing than that one in which they are of account." (Thorstein Veblen, "The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays", 1906)

"The first step in beginning the scientific study of a problem is to collect the data, which are or ought to be 'facts'." (John A Thomson, "Introduction to Science", 1911)

"The man of science, by virtue of his training, is alone capable of realising the difficulties - often enormous - of obtaining accurate data upon which just judgment may be based." (Sir Richard Gregory, "Discovery; or, The Spirit and Service of Science", 1918)

"Philosophy, like science, consists of theories or insights arrived at as a result of systemic reflection or reasoning in regard to the data of experience. It involves, therefore, the analysis of experience and the synthesis of the results of analysis into a comprehensive or unitary conception. Philosophy seeks a totality and harmony of reasoned insight into the nature and meaning of all the principal aspects of reality." (Joseph A Leighton, "The Field of Philosophy: An outline of lectures on introduction to philosophy," 1919)

"A 'poor evaluation' of the probability of anything may reflect ignorance of relevant data which 'ought' to be known. (Clarence I Lewis, "Mind and the World-Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge", 1924)

"No human mind is capable of grasping in its entirety the meaning of any considerable quantity of numerical data." (Frank Yates & Ronald Fisher, "Statistical Methods for Research Workers", 1925)

"Take the situation of a scientist solving a problem, where he has certain data, which call for certain responses. Some of this set of data call for his applying such and such a law, while others call for another law." (George H Mead, "Mind, Self, and Society", 1934)

"The laws of science are the permanent contributions to knowledge - the individual pieces that are fitted together in an attempt to form a picture of the physical universe in action. As the pieces fall into place, we often catch glimpses of emerging patterns, called theories; they set us searching for the missing pieces that will fill in the gaps and complete the patterns. These theories, these provisional interpretations of the data in hand, are mere working hypotheses, and they are treated with scant respect until they can be tested by new pieces of the puzzle." (Edwin P Whipple, "Experiment and Experience", [Commencement Address, California Institute of Technology] 1938)

"Not even the most subtle and skilled analysis can overcome completely the unreliability of basic data." (Roy D G Allen, "Statistics for Economists", 1951)

"When evaluating the reliability and generality of data, it is often important to know the aims of the experimenter. When evaluating the importance of experimental results, however, science has a trick of disregarding the experimenter's rationale and finding a more appropriate context for the data than the one he proposed." (Murray Sidman, "Tactics of Scientific Research", 1960)

"Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data." (Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1962)

"We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data-processing situations the capability for describing data." (Grace Hopper, "Management and the Computer of the Future", 1962)

"Modern science is characterized by its ever-increasing specialization, necessitated by the enormous amount of data, the complexity of techniques and of theoretical structures within every field. Thus science is split into innumerable disciplines continually generating new subdisciplines. In consequence, the physicist, the biologist, the psychologist and the social scientist are, so to speak, encapusulated in their private universes, and it is difficult to get word from one cocoon to the other." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "General System Theory", 1968)

"At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too." (Willard v O Quine, "The Web of Belief", 1970)

"Statistical methods of analysis are intended to aid the interpretation of data that are subject to appreciable haphazard variability." (David V. Hinkley & David Cox, "Theoretical Statistics", 1974)

"In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data." (Carl Sagan, "The Dragons of Eden", 1977)

"If we gather more and more data and establish more and more associations, however, we will not finally find that we know something. We will simply end up having more and more data and larger sets of correlations." (Kenneth N Waltz, "Theory of International Politics Source: Theory of International Politics", 1979)

"There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead." (Norman Cousins, "Human Options : An Autobiographical Notebook", 1981)

"Data in isolation are meaningless, a collection of numbers. Only in context of a theory do they assume significance […]" (George Greenstein, "Frozen Star", 1983)

"Data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself. In computer parlance, a spreadsheet generally starts out by holding data." (Russell L Ackoff, "Towards a Systems Theory of Organization, 1985)

"Information is data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This 'meaning' can be useful, but does not have to be. In computer parlance, a relational database makes information from the data stored within it." (Russell L Ackoff, "Towards a Systems Theory of Organization", 1985)

"Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data." (John Naisbitt, "Re-Inventing the Corporation", 1985)

"The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data." (John Tukey, "Sunset Salvo", The American Statistician Vol. 40 (1), 1986)

"Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading." (Isaac Asimov, "Forward the Foundation", 1993)

"Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information." (Peter Drucker, "Managing in a Time of Great Change", 1995)

"Paradigms are the most general-rather like a philosophical or ideological framework. Theories are more specific, based on the paradigm and designed to describe what happens in one of the many realms of events encompassed by the paradigm. Models are even more specific providing the mechanisms by which events occur in a particular part of the theory's realm. Of all three, models are most affected by empirical data - models come and go, theories only give way when evidence is overwhelmingly against them and paradigms stay put until a radically better idea comes along." (Lee R Beach, "The Psychology of Decision Making: People in Organizations", 1997)

"Data is discrimination between physical states of things (black, white, etc.) that may convey or not convey information to an agent. Whether it does so or not depends on the agent's prior stock of knowledge." (Max Boisot, "Knowledge Assets", 1998)

"The unit of coding is the most basic segment, or element, of the raw data or information that can be assessed in a meaningful way regarding the phenomenon." (Richard Boyatzis, "Transforming qualitative information", 1998)

"While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom." (Henry Mintzberg, "Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management", 1998)

"The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it." (Nassim N Taleb, "Fooled by Randomness", 2001)

"Data is a fact of life. As time goes by, we collect more and more data, making our original reason for collecting the data harder to accomplish. We don't collect data just to waste time or keep busy; we collect data so that we can gain knowledge, which can be used to improve the efficiency of our organization, improve profit margins, and on and on. The problem is that as we collect more data, it becomes harder for us to use the data to derive this knowledge. We are being suffocated by this raw data, yet we need to find a way to use it." (Seth Paul et al. "Preparing and Mining Data with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Analysis", 2002)

"Good communication is not just data transfer. You need to show people something that addresses their anxieties, that accepts their anger, that is credible in a very gut-level sense, and that evokes faith in the vision." (John Kotter, "The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations", 2002)

"Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere." (Victor J Stenger, "Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe", 2003)

"The best scientists aren't the ones who know the most data; they're the ones who know what they're looking for." (Noam Chomsky, [Guardian] 2005)

"Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. [...] We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out picture is clear and accurate. But is it?" (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)

"Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise." (Nate Silver, "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't", 2012)

"The inherent nature of complexity is to doubt certainty and any pretense to finite and flawless data. Put another way, under uncertainty principles, any attempt by political systems to 'impose order' has an equal chance to instead 'impose disorder'." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"The value of having numbers - data - is that they aren't subject to someone else's interpretation. They are just the numbers. You can decide what they mean for you." (Emily Oster, "Expecting Better", 2013)

"A study that leaves out data is waving a big red flag. A decision to include orxclude data sometimes makes all the difference in the world. This decision should be based on the relevance and quality of the data, not on whether the data support or undermine a conclusion that is expected or desired." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"Another way to secure statistical significance is to use the data to discover a theory. Statistical tests assume that the researcher starts with a theory, collects data to test the theory, and reports the results - whether statistically significant or not. Many people work in the other direction, scrutinizing the data until they find a pattern and then making up a theory that fits the pattern." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"Data clusters are everywhere, even in random data. Someone who looks for an explanation will inevitably find one, but a theory that fits a data cluster is not persuasive evidence. The found explanation needs to make sense and it needs to be tested with uncontaminated data." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"Data without theory can fuel a speculative stock market bubble or create the illusion of a bubble where there is none. How do we tell the difference between a real bubble and a false alarm? You know the answer: we need a theory. Data are not enough. […] Data without theory is alluring, but misleading." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"If somebody ransacks data to find a pattern, we still need a theory that makes sense. On the other hand, a theory is just a theory until it is tested with persuasive data." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"Self-selection bias occurs when people choose to be in the data - for example, when people choose to go to college, marry, or have children. […] Self-selection bias is pervasive in 'observational data', where we collect data by observing what people do. Because these people chose to do what they are doing, their choices may reflect who they are. This self-selection bias could be avoided with a controlled experiment in which people are randomly assigned to groups and told what to do." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"These practices - selective reporting and data pillaging - are known as data grubbing. The discovery of statistical significance by data grubbing shows little other than the researcher’s endurance. We cannot tell whether a data grubbing marathon demonstrates the validity of a useful theory or the perseverance of a determined researcher until independent tests confirm or refute the finding. But more often than not, the tests stop there. After all, you won’t become a star by confirming other people’s research, so why not spend your time discovering new theories? The data-grubbed theory consequently sits out there, untested and unchallenged." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"We naturally draw conclusions from what we see […]. We should also think about what we do not see […]. The unseen data may be just as important, or even more important, than the seen data. To avoid survivor bias, start in the past and look forward." (Gary Smith, "Standard Deviations", 2014)

"Any knowledge incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge." (Jerry Coyne, “Faith Versus Fact”, 2015)

"The term data, unlike the related terms facts and evidence, does not connote truth. Data is descriptive, but data can be erroneous. We tend to distinguish data from information. Data is a primitive or atomic state (as in ‘raw data’). It becomes information only when it is presented in context, in a way that informs. This progression from data to information is not the only direction in which the relationship flows, however; information can also be broken down into pieces, stripped of context, and stored as data. This is the case with most of the data that’s stored in computer systems. Data that’s collected and stored directly by machines, such as sensors, becomes information only when it’s reconnected to its context." (Stephen Few, "Signal: Understanding What Matters in a World of Noise", 2015)

10 May 2012

🏷️Knowledge Representation: On Information (Quotes)

"Probability, however, is not something absolute, [it is] drawn from certain information which, although it does not suffice to resolve the problem, nevertheless ensures that we judge correctly which of the two opposites is the easiest given the conditions known to us." (Gottfried W Leibniz, "Forethoughts for an encyclopaedia or universal science", cca. 1679)

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." (Samuel Johnson, 1775)

"What is called science today consists of a haphazard heap of information, united by nothing, often utterly unnecessary, and not only failing to present one unquestionable truth, but as often as not containing the grossest errors, today put forward as truths, and tomorrow overthrown." (Leo Tolstoy, "What Is Art?", 1897)

"There can be no unique probability attached to any event or behaviour: we can only speak of ‘probability in the light of certain given information’, and the probability alters according to the extent of the information." (Sir Arthur S Eddington, "The Nature of the Physical World" , 1928)

"As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances." (Alfred Korzybski, "Science and Sanity", 1933)

"Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems." (Norbert Wiener, "The Human Use of Human Beings", 1950)

"Knowledge is not something which exists and grows in the abstract. It is a function of human organisms and of social organization. Knowledge, that is to say, is always what somebody knows: the most perfect transcript of knowledge in writing is not knowledge if nobody knows it. Knowledge however grows by the receipt of meaningful information - that is, by the intake of messages by a knower which are capable of reorganising his knowledge." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)

"This is the key of modern science and it was the beginning of the true understanding of Nature - this idea to look at the thing, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained might lie a clue to one or another theoretical interpretation." (Richard P Feynman, "The Character of Physical Law", 1965)

"[...] 'information' is not a substance or concrete entity but rather a relationship between sets or ensembles of structured variety." (Walter F Buckley, "Sociology and modern systems theory", 1967)

"There are as many types of questions as components in the information." (Jacques Bertin, Semiology of graphics [Semiologie Graphique], 1967)

"The idea of knowledge as an improbable structure is still a good place to start. Knowledge, however, has a dimension which goes beyond that of mere information or improbability. This is a dimension of significance which is very hard to reduce to quantitative form. Two knowledge structures might be equally improbable but one might be much more significant than the other." (Kenneth E Boulding, "Beyond Economics: Essays on Society", 1968)

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness", 1969)

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Herbert Simon, "Computers, Communications and the Public Interest", 1971)

"What we mean by information - the elementary unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)

"Science gets most of its information by the process of reductionism, exploring the details, then the details of the details, until all the smallest bits of the structure, or the smallest parts of the mechanism, are laid out for counting and scrutiny. Only when this is done can the investigation be extended to encompass the whole organism or the entire system. So we say. Sometimes it seems that we take a loss, working this way." (Lewis Thomas, "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher", 1974)

"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the derivative results of the new discoveries but the work of creative imagination influenced by contemporary social and political forces." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)

"Data, seeming facts, apparent associations-these are not certain knowledge of something. They may be puzzles that can one day be explained; they may be trivia that need not be explained at all." (Kenneth Waltz, "Theory of International Politics", 1979)

"To a considerable degree science consists in originating the maximum amount of information with the minimum expenditure of energy. Beauty is the cleanness of line in such formulations along with symmetry, surprise, and congruence with other prevailing beliefs." (Edward O Wilson, "Biophilia", 1984)

"Knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that it's intent is to be useful. Knowledge is a deterministic process. When someone 'memorizes' information (as less-aspiring test-bound students often do), then they have amassed knowledge. This knowledge has useful meaning to them, but it does not provide for, in and of itself, an integration such as would infer further knowledge." (Russell L Ackoff, "Towards a Systems Theory of Organization", 1985)

"Probability plays a central role in many fields, from quantum mechanics to information theory, and even older fields use probability now that the presence of 'noise' is officially admitted. The newer aspects of many fields start with the admission of uncertainty." (Richard W Hamming, "Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics", 1985)

"Probabilities are summaries of knowledge that is left behind when information is transferred to a higher level of abstraction." (Judea Pearl, "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Network of Plausible, Inference", 1988)

"Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists." (Tom Stonier, Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe: An Exploration into Information Physics, 1990)

"What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be ‘boiled down’ and ‘simplified’? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information." (Edward R Tufte, "Envisioning Information", 1990)

"Knowledge is theory. We should be thankful if action of management is based on theory. Knowledge has temporal spread. Information is not knowledge. The world is drowning in information but is slow in acquisition of knowledge. There is no substitute for knowledge." (William E Deming, "The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education", 1993)

"The science of statistics may be described as exploring, analyzing and summarizing data; designing or choosing appropriate ways of collecting data and extracting information from them; and communicating that information. Statistics also involves constructing and testing models for describing chance phenomena. These models can be used as a basis for making inferences and drawing conclusions and, finally, perhaps for making decisions." (Fergus Daly et al, "Elements of Statistics", 1995)

"[Schemata are] knowledge structures that represent objects or events and provide default assumptions about their characteristics, relationships, and entailments under conditions of incomplete information." (Paul J DiMaggio, "Culture and Cognition", Annual Review of Sociology No. 23, 1997)

"Each element in the system is ignorant of the behavior of the system as a whole, it responds only to information that is available to it locally. This point is vitally important. If each element ‘knew’ what was happening to the system as a whole, all of the complexity would have to be present in that element." (Paul Cilliers, "Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems" , 1998)

"Complexity is that property of a model which makes it difficult to formulate its overall behaviour in a given language, even when given reasonably complete information about its atomic components and their inter-relations." (Bruce Edmonds, "Syntactic Measures of Complexity", 1999)

"It [the Internet] is inherently destructive of memory. You think you’re getting lots more [information] until you’ve found out you’ve made a bargain with the Devil. You’ve slowly mutated, and have become an extension of the machine." (James Billington, [interview] 1999)

'It would be a serious intellectual mistake to confuse Information that functions as entertainment with actual, or knowledge-based, information. It would be a mistake as well to simply ignore the cognitive implications of information processing as entertainment." (Joseph Urgo, "In the Age of Distraction", 2000)

"There is a strong tendency today to narrow specialization. Because of the exponential growth of information, we can afford (in terms of both economics and time) preparation of specialists in extremely narrow fields, the various branches of science and engineering having their own particular realms. As the knowledge in these fields grows deeper and broader, the individual's field of expertise has necessarily become narrower. One result is that handling information has become more difficult and even ineffective." (Semyon D Savransky, "Engineering of Creativity", 2000)

"A model isolates one or a few causal connections, mechanisms, or processes, to the exclusion of other contributing or interfering factors - while in the actual world, those other factors make their effects felt in what actually happens. Models may seem true in the abstract, and are false in the concrete. The key issue is about whether there is a bridge between the two, the abstract and the concrete, such that a simple model can be relied on as a source of relevantly truthful information about the complex reality." (Uskali Mäki, "Fact and Fiction in Economics: Models, Realism and Social Construction", 2002)

"Information needs representation. The idea that it is possible to communicate information in a 'pure' form is fiction. Successful risk communication requires intuitively clear representations. Playing with representations can help us not only to understand numbers (describe phenomena) but also to draw conclusions from numbers (make inferences). There is no single best representation, because what is needed always depends on the minds that are doing the communicating." (Gerd Gigerenzer, "Calculated Risks: How to know when numbers deceive you", 2002)

"Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information." (Hans C von Baeyer," Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"The use of computers shouldn't ignore the objectives of graphics, that are:

1) Treating data to get information.

2) Communicating, when necessary, the information obtained." (Jacques Bertin, [interview] 2003)

"While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information." (Nassim N Taleb, "The Black Swan", 2007)

"Put simply, statistics is a range of procedures for gathering, organizing, analyzing and presenting quantitative data. […] Essentially […], statistics is a scientific approach to analyzing numerical data in order to enable us to maximize our interpretation, understanding and use. This means that statistics helps us turn data into information; that is, data that have been interpreted, understood and are useful to the recipient. Put formally, for your project, statistics is the systematic collection and analysis of numerical data, in order to investigate or discover relationships among phenomena so as to explain, predict and control their occurrence." (Reva B Brown & Mark Saunders, "Dealing with Statistics: What You Need to Know", 2008)

"Complexity has the propensity to overload systems, making the relevance of a particular piece of information not statistically significant. And when an array of mind-numbing factors is added into the equation, theory and models rarely conform to reality." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"Complexity scientists concluded that there are just too many factors - both concordant and contrarian - to understand. And with so many potential gaps in information, almost nobody can see the whole picture. Complex systems have severe limits, not only to predictability but also to measurability. Some complexity theorists argue that modelling, while useful for thinking and for studying the complexities of the world, is a particularly poor tool for predicting what will happen." (Lawrence K Samuels, "Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action", 2013)

"In a physical system, information is the opposite of entropy, as it involves uncommon and highly correlated configurations that are difficult to arrive at." (César A Hidalgo, "Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies", 2015)

"One of the most powerful transformational catalysts is knowledge, new information, or logic that defies old mental models and ways of thinking" (Elizabeth Thornton, "The Objective Leader", 2015)

13 April 2012

🦉Knowledge Management: On Information (Quotes)

"Probability, however, is not something absolute, [it is] drawn from certain information which, although it does not suffice to resolve the problem, nevertheless ensures that we judge correctly which of the two opposites is the easiest (facilius) given the conditions known to us." (Gottfried W Leibniz, "Forethoughts for an encyclopaedia or universal science", cca. 1679)

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." (Samuel Johnson, 1775)

"It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge. Mal-information is more hopeless than non-information; for error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase. Ignorance is contented to stand still with her back to the truth; but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds in the same direction. Ignorance has no light, but error follows a false one. The consequence is, that error, when she retraces her footsteps, has further to go, before she can arrive at the truth, than ignorance." (Charles C Colton, "Lacon", 1820)

"The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience." (William K Clifford, "Lectures and Essays", 1879)

"As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Endymion", 1880)

"The object of statistical science is to discover methods of condensing information concerning large groups of allied facts into brief and compendious expressions suitable for discussion. The possibility of doing this is based on the constancy and continuity with which objects of the same species are found to vary." (Sir Francis Galton, "Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, Statistical Methods", 1883)

"Education is habit-forming rather than information; illumination rather than indoctrination, inspiration rather than compulsion." (Edwin G Conklin, "Science in the World Crisis", 1939)

"The scientist, if he is to be more than a plodding gatherer of bits of information, needs to exercise an active imagination." (Linus Pauling, "Tomorrow", 1943)

"[…] there is something wonderful in the idea that man’s brain is the greatest machine of all, imitating within its tiny network events happening in the most distant stars, […] On our model theory neural or other mechanisms can imitate or parallel the behaviour and interaction of physical objects and so supply us with information on physical processes which are not directly observable to us." (Kenneth Craik, "The Nature of Explanation", 1943)

"The concepts and methods of cybernetics are by no means restricted to the problems of servo-mechanisms, or even neural physiology, though the impetus came from these areas. […] Cybernetics analyzes all purposive behavior and provides an exact notion of communication and the transmital of information." (C West Churchman & Russel L Ackoff, "Purposive Behavior and Cybernetics", Social Forces, Volume 29 (1), 1950)

"[…] observation is not enough, and it seems to me that in science, as in the arts, there is very little worth having that does not require the exercise of intuition as well as of intelligence, the use of imagination as well as of information." (Kathleen Lonsdale, "Facts About Crystals", American Scientist Vol. 39 (4), 1951)

"[…] the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously." (Erwin Schrödinger, "Nature and the Greeks", 1954)

"There comes a stage, however, as the system becomes larger and larger, when the reception of all the information is impossible by reason of its sheer bulk. Either the recording channels cannot carry all the information, or the observer, presented with it all, is overwhelmed. When this occurs, what is he to do? The answer is clear: he must give up any ambition to know the whole system. His aim must be to achieve a partial knowledge that, though partial over the whole, is none the less complete within itself, and is sufficient for his ultimate practical purpose." (W Ross Ashby, "An Introduction to Cybernetics", 1956)

"Cybernetics is the science of the process of transmission, processing and storage of information." (Sergei Sobolew, Woprosy Psychology, 1958)

"Cybernetics is the general science of communication. But to refer to communication is consciously or otherwise to refer to distinguishable states of information inputs and outputs and /or to information being processed within some relatively isolated system." (Henryk Greniewski, "Cybernetics without Mathematics", 1960)

"The process of formulating and structuring a system are important and creative, since they provide and organize the information, which each system. "establishes the number of objectives and the balance between them which will be optimized". Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts. Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts which make up its 'diverse, specialized structures and subfunctions'." (Harold Chestnut, "Systems Engineering Tools", 1965)

"[…] cybernetics studies the flow of information round a system, and the way in which this information is used by the system as a means of controlling itself: it does this for animate and inanimate systems indifferently. For cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science, owing as much to biology as to physics, as much to the study of the brain as to the study of computers, and owing also a great deal to the formal languages of science for providing tools with which the behaviour of all these systems can be objectively described." (A Stafford Beer, 1966)

"There are as many types of questions as components in the information." (Jacques Bertin, Semiology of graphics [Semiologie Graphique], 1967)

"It is not enough to observe, experiment, theorize, calculate and communicate; we must also argue, criticize, debate, expound, summarize, and otherwise transform the information that we have obtained individually into reliable, well established, public knowledge." (John M Ziman, "Information, Communication, Knowledge", Nature Vol. 224 (5217), 1969)

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness", 1969)

"Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)

"Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the derivative results of the new discoveries but the work of creative imagination influenced by contemporary social and political forces. " (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)

"Information is carried by physical entities, such as books or sound waves or brains, but it is not itself material. Information in a living system is a feature of the order and arrangement of its parts, which arrangement provides the signs that constitute a ‘code’ or ‘language’." (John Z Young, "Programs of the Brain", 1978)

"Data, seeming facts, apparent associations-these are not certain knowledge of something. They may be puzzles that can one day be explained; they may be trivia that need not be explained at all. (Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 1979)

"Information is recorded in vast interconnecting networks. Each idea or image has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of associations and is connected to numerous other points in the mental network." (Peter Russell, "The Brain Book: Know Your Own Mind and How to Use it", 1979)

"Cybernetic information theory suggests the possibility of assuming that intelligence is a feature of any feedback system that manifests a capacity for learning." (Paul Hawken et al, "Seven Tomorrows", 1982)

"Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information." (David Marr, "Vision", 1982)

"We provisionally define statistics as the study of how information should be employed to reflect on, and give guidance for action in, a practical situation involving uncertainty." (Vic Barnett, "Comparative Statistical Inference" 2nd Ed., 1982)

"Information is data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This "meaning" can be useful, but does not have to be. In computer parlance, a relational database makes information from the data stored within it." (Russell L Ackoff, "Towards a Systems Theory of Organization", 1985)

"There is no coherent knowledge, i.e. no uniform comprehensive account of the world and the events in it. There is no comprehensive truth that goes beyond an enumeration of details, but there are many pieces of information, obtained in different ways from different sources and collected for the benefit of the curious. The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Farewell to Reason", 1987)

"Probabilities are summaries of knowledge that is left behind when information is transferred to a higher level of abstraction." (Judea Pearl, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Network of Plausible, Inference, 1988)

"Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists. (Tom Stonier, Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe: An Exploration into Information Physics, 1990)

"Just as dynamics arise from feedback, so too all learning depends on feedback. We make decisions that alter the real world; we gather information feedback about the real world, and using the new information we revise our understanding of the world and the decisions we make to bring our perception of the state of the system closer to our goals."( John D Sterman, "Business dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)

"A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point." (Nassim N Taleb, "Fooled by Randomness", 2001)

"The use of computers shouldn't ignore the objectives of graphics, that are:

1) Treating data to get information.

2) Communicating, when necessary, the information obtained." (Jacques Bertin, [interview] 2003)

"A mental model is conceived […] as a knowledge structure possessing slots that can be filled not only with empirically gained information but also with ‘default assumptions’ resulting from prior experience. These default assumptions can be substituted by updated information so that inferences based on the model can be corrected without abandoning the model as a whole. Information is assimilated to the slots of a mental model in the form of ‘frames’ which are understood here as ‘chunks’ of knowledge with a well-defined meaning anchored in a given body of shared knowledge." (Jürgen Renn, "Before the Riemann Tensor: The Emergence of Einstein’s Double Strategy", "The Universe of General Relativity" Ed. by A.J. Kox & Jean Eisenstaedt, 2005)

"Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"Errors in individual judgment won’t wreck the group’s collective judgment as long as those errors aren’t systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people’s judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information." (James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2005)

"Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made." (Al Gore,"The Assault on Reason", 2007)

"While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information." (Nassim N Taleb, "The Black Swan", 2007)

"We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out picture is clear and accurate. But is it?" (Leonard Mlodinow, "The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives", 2008)

"One of the most powerful transformational catalysts is knowledge, new information, or logic that defies old mental models and ways of thinking" (Elizabeth Thornton, "The Objective Leader", 2015)

"A mental representation is a mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about. […] Because the details of mental representations can differ dramatically from field to field, it’s hard to offer an overarching definition that is not too vague, but in essence these representations are preexisting patterns of information - facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on - that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations." (Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool," Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise", 2016)

05 November 2011

Technology x.0: Nowadays Frustrations of Software, Devices and Services – The PDF Editor for Tablets

    We are dreaming about a Semantic Web, about semantic, intelligent and multifunctional tools and devices, though the paradox is that most of the software and electronic devices out there don’t address basic needs! Frankly I don’t care if my device can talk with my refrigerator and can make a list of what I need to buy, or that my book reader recommends me other books, based on what I read or browse. Sure, this kind of functionality is nice to have, though I can live without it and sometimes I found it irrelevant or even annoying, as the recommendations are fuzzier than the techniques they use. The example of books reader is not random, because my recent frustrations are related to it.

    Two years ago or so I bought a Digital Book Reader from Sony (Sony PRS-700BC), I founded it great at those times especially because it allowed me to annotate, highlight, extract and review the extracted text from a document (See Finally the Digital Book Reader). Unfortunately the functionality was not scaling good with documents’ size, waiting sometimes for half a minute until the change was made and I could continue to read. In some cases, I was spending more time on waits than on reading. In addition the display of formulas and images was quite problematical, being almost impossible to read a technical book. And then appeared the tablet…

   I found iPad a little too expensive for my reading needs, so I waited until Toshiba’s Folio 100 appeared on the market, almost in anonymity. It was much cheaper than the iPad, was having a 10.1 inch widescreen display, relatively a small weight, and thus ideal for reading. In addition, the future support for Flash made it a good candidate for watching video learning content, another of my request. In three words: I loved it (and I still do). When I started to use it, I was kind of disappointed, because in came only with FBReaderJ reader, too limited for my needs and useless for my small electronic library mainly composed of PDF, DJVU and DOC files. After a short visit in Toshiba Market Place available through my tablet’s application, I bought myself, for small money, Documents To Go from DataViz Inc, a Software for viewing and editing of Microsoft Office 2007 documents, and for viewing PDF documents. A few months later I discovered in the same store the Office Suite Pro from MobiSystems, which provided almost same functionality as Documents To Go, with a plus for PDF viewer because it kept track of the page I was last time viewing and the scrolling of pages was more stable. There were PDF documents I could read with one software and not the other, and vice-versa, so they were kind of complete each other, however I was having two problems:
- there were PDF books I couldn’t read correctly with any of the two applications.
- my reading experience was quite static as I was having no possibility to annotate or highlight the text. It’s true that Documents to Go allowed me to copy a chunk of text, though because it doesn’t remembered the page I was in, the feature was almost useless.

   A few months ago, during the summer more exactly, given the fact that both solutions deal pretty good with Word files, I thought of converting some of the important PDF files to Word. My first thought was to check first the Adobe site. As they have nice tools and even nicer prices, I ended by buying Nitro PDF Professional. It covered the functionality I needed, unfortunately the size of output files and the conversion of images and formulas was not functioning as expected. I managed to address the first issue by splitting the initial PDF files in smaller files, and then convert them to Word. It worked, though it remained the problem of formulas and images, and they were present in most of the books I read.

   This week, taking advantage of some free time I had, I tried to look more into this. Toshiba’s Market Place was not offering other software for PDF so I had to look somewhere else, and the best place seemed to be the Android Market, where a multitude of software products wait for mobile and tablet proud owners. I found several PDF readers and editors, and in the end I decided to go for RepliGo Reader from Cerience. What appealed to me was the fact that I could cross and underline text, or add sticky notes in PDF files. Its price, 3.99 was quite appealing so there I am proceeding to check out, and then the surprise – I can’t buy it! I tried to go around the message: “There are no Android phones associated with this account.”. I checked the help, the various functionality, of how I can register a device, though I kind of lost myself in there. Finally I arrived to Google Mobile and everything looked like it made sense, I thought… I was following my own tail. As it seems, you can buy a product only if you are having an Android device with a phone number, that passed Google’s compatibility requirements. In addition, “manufacturers must obtain a license from Google in order to install Android Market on their devices”, so if your device isn’t in the list of Supported Devices, then there is no way you can consider the Android Market! Folio 100 isn’t in there, so I can go and … anyway, there must be other way!

   Frustrated I searched on Google if RepliGo Reader is available from other sources. My first stop was on Amazon where RepliGo Reader was available for 4.99. Good! I’m progressing. I downloaded Amazon Appstore (Amazon_Appstore-release.apk) and installed it on my Folio. It works great but it doesn’t do anything no matter what button I click. I tried to install it several times, without success. Probably the application isn’t compatible with my device. Who knows?

    Even more frustrated I checked on Android Market several PDF readers, trying to see if I can buy them from other stores. Again, no luck! During my searches I observed that Adobe has finally a reader for mobile devices (iOS & Android), the Android version being available only through Android Market. WTF!!! (pardon my language) I continue to search and discover a few sites of file sharing, though that’s not a solution! Finally I find a blog post on Adobe site with a link to a FTP location where Acrobat Reader can be downloaded. I installed it and it seems it works. It has very basic reader functionality (more basic it can’t be), though it comes from Adobe and is supposed to render with high fidelity PDF documents. As far I tested it, I’m having problems with the scanned old books that come from Google Books. It seems Adobe has several other products for mobile market (e.g. CreatePDF, Photoshop Express), reflecting that they are moving onto this market too.

    I continued searching and thus I found the AppBrain site. I tried to download RepliGo Reader, though the installation doesn’t work neither on my built-in browser, nor on Opera. Then I fond out that I have to install the Fast Web Installer and AppBrain App Market. Great, they I can’t install them neither! I searched for them on Google and I discovered them on Handster (here and here). I installed them without problems, though it seems AppBrain App Market uses Android Market, and as I don’t have it I can’t go any further. In the end I found Android Market 3.2.0 from APKTOP. I tried to install it but it didn’t work. Later I found a post from TalkAndroid, where is specified that the device need to be rooted – getting root access to the file system. I found an “How to Root Toshiba Folio 100” article, though it hasn’t helped too much, Super One Click freezing each time I started to use it.

    Browsing through APKTOP website, I found out several downloadable PDF reader apps available also on Android Market: RepliGo Reader, Documents To Go, Go Book, Acrobat Reader 10.1, EBookDroid, Aldiko Book Reader, etc. They are quite cheap on Android Market and some even free, though as they aren’t available for devices as mine, I would expect users will go and downloaded from such more or less legal sites. Excepting the legal issues, there are also some security concerns, some of such applications could be tampered, so you are using them on your own risk!

    Looking back at this long story and the long hours I spent attempting to find a PDF reader with annotation capabilities, I have to highlight several points:
1. It’s incredible how un-intuitive are web sites like Android Market or AppBrain Market. Un-intuitive not necessarily from the perspective of navigability, but of not making visible aspects like: how, why, where, why not!
2. I wonder why Toshiba doesn’t comply to Google’s compatibility requirements? Maybe they tried to make a honest buck through their store, but then why haven’t tried to attract more apps vendors and have more applications ported on their device.
3. I observed that there are great apps out there, though because they are sold only through sites like Android Market reduces considerably vendor’s profits!
4. I don’t understand why even if some apps are Free, Goggle still imposes restrictions on who can download them. I would expect that they try to force vendors to comply to Google’s compatibility requirements. Is this the way to go?
5. It seems the speed with which smartphones and tablets entered the market has created some breaches in vendors’ strategy, breaches from which the customers will suffer, and indirectly the vendors themselves. Here I could put the lack of compatibility and adherence to standards, lack of documentation and tools.
6. I’m afraid apps vendors will arrive in media vendors position of blaming people for pirating software. Even if apps are cheap, the inexistence of an adequate infrastructure for making apps available, will lead more likely to such issues.
7. Frankly it sucks to spend so many hours in order to find, install and troubleshoot software! All I was looking for was an app that allows me to read and annotate or highlight text in a PDF document. It isn’t rocket science! I would even expect to have such a software coming by default with a tablet, given that’s one of the main purposes of such a device.

23 July 2011

🕸️Web x.0: Search Queries Tools (Part II: Soovle)

Soovle is a customizable engine that provides suggestion services from several major search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Answers) and content providers (e.g. Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia), several others being available within just a simple drag and drop away (see Engines). Soovle blog provides additional information, like a short history of the tools used for developments (current version was built with jQuery) and several tips. You should check the demo too, even if the tool it’s quite easy to use.

I tried Soovle using as input the “knowledge” keyword:

search comparison - Soovle knowledge google

As can be seen, excepting several common terms (e.g. “knowledge”, “knowledge management”), the output for each engine it’s quite different. Because there is no visual aid, the extraction of common terms between engines it’s not so easy as it should be. Maybe something should be done in this direction – for example using colors, font weight or sorting.

When multi-term words are used (e.g. “data information knowledge wisdom”) the output becomes difficult to read, so maybe some styling would be useful in order to help determine the start/end of a group of terms.

Currently, the tool allows selecting a group of 7, 11, respectively 15 search engines. It would be useful to reduce maybe the number of search engines and increase the number of terms, allowing to compare the results for only 2-3 search engines. A matrix (terms vs. engines) could facilitate maybe the visualization of data.

As it seems the spaces influence the output, for example “DIKW” vs. “DIKW ” vs. “ DIKW” will return different results.

I really like the fact that by providing a first letter of the second term (e.g. “knowledge a”), the output can be limited only to the terms whose second terms start with the specified letters. (I needed this kind of functionality some time ago and I had to rely entirely on Google’s autocomplete feature.)

I was searching for my favorite quote from J. Keats “a thing of beauty is a joy forever” (with quotes). Unfortunately, none of the default 7 engines returned the quote, even if Bing’s result included some “joy”-related results. I tried the same search directly in Google and Bing, and matches were found?! Same result for “joy+forever”. Without some deeper knowledge of the architecture of the search engines and the tool itself, it’s hard to find what causes this behavior or to identify some of the differences in processing.

Comment:
In the initial post it seems I misquoted Keats. I can't recall if then I used the misquoted chunk of text or the actual quote. Rechecking Soovle, it actually returns results for Google, YouTube and Bing.

🕸️Web x.0: Search Queries Tools ( Part I: Web Seer)

Since quite some time, Google provides an autocomplete feature extended to combinations of words. That’s quite an useful feature because often it “saved” my time from typing full words or combinations of words. What’s interesting is that the autocomplete algorithm provides the terms based on user’s search activities. I was asking myself if we could do more with search queries. This evening, while browsing, I discovered A. Smarty’s post on “How To Visualize and Play with Google Suggest Results”, in which she shortly presents three interesting tools: Web Seer, What do you suggest and Soovle. As I found out there are several other tools like Übersuggest, Quintura, etc. In this post I will focus only on Web Seer, following to review shortly several other similar tools in the next posts.

Web Seer allows users to compare the “matches” between two Google queries, for example “are man” vs. “are women”, “will he” vs. “will she”. To remain in blog’s thematic , I checked tool’s output for “data” vs. “information” and “information” vs. “knowledge”:

The query results for both terms are somehow predictable – “data mining”, “data warehouses”, “data entry” and “data values”, respectively “information architecture”, “information management”, “information security”, “information technology”, “information is beautiful” (see also the book) are quite popular terms in the scientific and non-scientific literature. I would expect the comparison is based on the most popular terms, because the two concepts don’t share many common terms, and even if there are some common terms within the above results (e.g. “data architecture”, “data systems”) they aren’t highly ranked. Arrows’ weight depicts the number of occurrences of the respective terms, which combined with the terms themselves, help to make an idea of the strength and resemblance existing between two concepts.

Climbing the DIKW scale here are the comparisons between information and “knowledge”, respectively “knowledge” and “wisdom”:

As it seems the results are consistent between relations, same combinations being used in two comparisons in which the same term is involved, life in the above diagrams. It’s natural that the results are also commutative, in order words “knowledge” vs. “information” renders same result as “information” vs. “knowledge”.

The association is also reflexive:

And transitive, as “data” vs. “information”, and “information” vs. “knowledge” lead to “data” vs. “knowledge”:

The algebraical operations are not so important, though some consistency of the results is needed between representations. It’s interesting that the comparison is influenced by a space placed at the beginning (e.g. “ data”) or end (“data ”), as can be seen in the following representation of the two:

I would expect other similar signs (e.g. punctuation signs, special characters) influence the comparisons too. Talking about DIKW, the knowledge pyramid, let’s see the comparison between “DIKW” and “data information knowledge wisdom”:

As the two concepts have close semantics, “DIKW” is the acronym for “data information knowledge wisdom”, here’s the comparison between two synonyms: “distribution” vs. “diffusion” (like in distribution/diffusion of knowledge). As can be seen the association is stronger.

search comparison - distribution vs diffusion

Actually the first attempt with the tool was a comparison “concept map” vs. “mind map”:

Which looks slightly different than “concept maps” vs. “mind maps” (so the plural form of words introduces variances):

search comparison - concept vs mind maps

Considering the few examples run, the tool is quite intuitive and catchy. I would consider its utility as relative, even if the above examples are not representative and the relationships between them are more contextual. Still it’s a good tool for identifying automatically the relations/associations between concepts, to identify associations’ strength and maybe several semantic connotations. It would be interesting to see only the common terms, as many K-maps focus on this aspects, to introduce language and context, and the possibility to compare more than two terms (for example using Venn diagrams) or to show more/less common terms.

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