science of social blog

If you received $1,000, what would you do with it? 

Earlier this year (in January), Lithium help me published “The Science of Social” with the goal of making my research more accessible to the business audience. After launching the book at the Big Thinker Dinner Party, we didn’t do much to promoting this book. Since the goal is knowledge dissemination, we made it a Kindle e-book, available from Amazon for only $4.99, or you can download it FREE from Lithium. If you like to read a book as a real physical book, hard copies (both soft and hard cover) are available.  However, we decided early on that any of the proceeds and royalties we gain from physical sales, we should donate to charity.

If you stare at the data-information inequality long enough, you may start to wonder how we measure information. In order for this inequality to hold, we must be able to quantify the amount of data as well as the amount of information and compare them. It is pretty straight forward to measure the amount of data you have, because that is just the storage volume of the data. If you are really dealing with big data, then the data would be on the order of hundreds and thousands of terabytes. But how can you quantify how much actual “information” is in the data you have?

Today, we are going to talk about data and information and the difference between them. Although they are different, many people speak of them as if they are synonymous, which is almost never true. However, the difference between data and information is quite subtle, so let’s try to understand it.

Data is simply a record of events that took place. It is the raw data that described what happen, when, where, how, who’s involved, etc. Well, isn’t that just informative?