This is what we found interesting from the current issue of the “The Economist” (February 27^th - March 5^th 2010).

The Data deluge:

“The way information is managed touches all areas of life.” (Survey, 5)

1. “Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still. Even so, the data deluge is already starting to transform business, government, science and everyday life (see our special report in this issue). It has great potential for good—as long as consumers, companies and governments make the right choices about when to restrict the flow of data, and when to encourage it.” (11)

2. “Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins university, notes that the proliferation of data is making them increasingly in accessible. ‘How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry’, he says”. (Survey, 3)

3. “Data, he says (Hal Varian), is widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.” (Survey, 4)

4. “Between 1990 and 2005 more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class.” (Survey, 4)

5. “…Big data can have far more serious consequences…during the recent financial crisis it became clear that banks and rating agencies had been relying on models which, although they required a vast amount of information to be fed in, failed to reflect financial risk in the real world. This was the first crisis to be sparked by big data—and there will be more.” (Survey, 5)

6. “Many say that technology meant to make sense of it often just produces more data. Instead of finding a needle in the haystack, they are making more hay.” (Survey, 7)

7. “New principles for an age of big data sets will need to cover six broad areas: privacy, security, retention, processing, ownership and integrity of information.” (Survey, 14)

8. “…A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” (Survey, 15)

9. “As T. S. Eliot asked: ‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Survey, 16)

Comment: Information explosion ought to be beneficial for the survival of society. Today economists convey the success of the previous century in terms of a growth rate based on printing and consumption. This kind of data is provided without any rigorous reflection. There will be 9 billion inhabitants on the planet by 2050. The economists talk about ‘inclusive growth’ for the inhabitants of this planet. They hardly say anything about the Earth’s capacity to sustain this ‘dream’ of inclusive growth. This is because Free Market Capitalism has created a brand where information is solely related to its own progress. For instance, more information needs to be disseminated about dangers towards humanity itself. According to ‘The Times of India’, “Latest forecasts predict the world’s population will grow..,placing even further pressure on food production and farming.”

IN the context of the above data and information explosion, it is important to reflect on the wisdom contained in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos:

1. “As the ancient mythmakers knew, we are the children equally of the sky and the Earth. In our tenure on this planet we have accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage…” (318)

2. “We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?” (329)

3. “Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing rather than preparing for the “  (330) next catastrophe…(ours)

4. “We must be willing to challenge courageously the conventional social, political, economic and religious wisdom. We must make every effort to understand that our fellow humans, all over the world are human. Of course, such steps are difficult. But as Einstein many times replied when his suggestions were rejected as impractical; or as inconsistent with ‘human nature’: What is the alternative?” (331)

5. “Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.” (333)

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