Glen -
Take your own data. Excellent suggestion! For some reason, it made me
remember this site.
The Centre for Investigative Journalism
http://www.tcij.org/
Our own Tom Johnson! No, that is: http://www.analyticjournalism.com/ ...
My own holy grail is *context*. I appreciate pointers to *facts* but
without *context* they mean nothing. It is context that moves data
into information and in another way information into knowledge and (IMO)
at the apex, knowledge into wisdom. Unfortunately this is a steep and
slippery slope to climb. I am seeking (waiting for it to land on me?)
an application of self-organizing behaviour and emergence to make sense
of this chain.
Does data somehow magically (I mean emergently) exhibit it's own
metadata/context enough to bootstrap into becoming information? My work
around the edge of data mining and visual analytics suggests it might.
And my work around the edges of ontologies, etc suggests the same for
"information into knowledge"... "knowledge into wisdom" is way
trickier... maybe as you suggest, *practice* is the only way up that
last bit to the top?
The term (used here in another thread?) of "Received Wisdom" suggests a
form of Faux Wisdom... which is what the likes of (a few?) of us
reject. While it fills the same niche as "Really Real Wisdom" I think
it is intrinsically contingent on sharing a particular world view. I
*do* accept that you (Glen) will likely suggest that what I'm seeking is
a mirage and it is not beneath me to accept that you might be right.
I think there is a middle ground between the sensationalism of our
infotainment outlets and the often daunting task of gathering our own
data. But I have yet to find a reliable middle ground. Each source of
news I find turns out to seem biased (to me). That leads me to question
what type of person becomes a journalist. What types of journalists are
there? Etc.
Oh boy! When I was getting totally jaded by my work as a PI in the late
1970's, it was partly because I had come to learn through my jobs, way
too much about the upstanding citizens and the institutions I was living
amongst. I flirted briefly with shifting over to Investigative
Journalism to capitalize on what I already knew and the skills I'd
developed in "just looking" (Yogi Berra was my mentor). My acute
sense of integrity (lame, but acute) at the time told me that I couldn't
in good conscience take all the things I'd learned (mostly about my
clients while working for them) and cash in on them... I would be
violating some kind of implicit confidentiality relationship. I also
realized that I was getting tired of squirming around in the muck with
the other vermin (Lawyers, Judges, LEOs, criminals, and businessmen)...
I'd had enough of the seamy underbelly...
So off I went to help build weapons of mass destruction instead! (ok...
capture high speed protons and teach them to do a round dance). I never
meant my Physics/Math/CS education to be *practical* but it did turn out
that way. Ronnie Raygun's Buck Rogers planssounded pretty cool to me
(at the time) and where better to put a giant sixgun than in the sky
over the evil enemies heads!
- Steve
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