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InfoYou: Assessing and Addressing Information Overload

A while ago, it dawned on me that I could never seem to read all the e-mail in my inbox, resist subscribing to just one more fascinating e-letter, or restrict the blogs syndicated to my feed reader to a realistic number. To make matters worse, in the physical world, I was always a week behind on the newspapers and don't ask how far behind on all those essential magazines and journals.

That's when I began seriously exploring information overload -- the sense of being overwhelmed, overstressed, and overtaken by onrushing streams of information.  I became so interested in the subject and so convinced of the need for practical ways to deal with the ever-expanding information universe that my company, Metaforix, embarked on a study of how people manage information and what practical steps they might take to deal with information overload.

The result is InfoYou, an instrument for assessing and addressing information overload. Using many people's responses, the InfoYou questionnaire is designed to generate a series of information management profiles that reflect distinct individual styles. Based on the profiles, InfoYou information tool kits will aid personal productivity through targeted suggestions for collecting, storing, retrieving, and sharing infomation.

We have just opened the InfoYou questionnaire to broad-based testing. It's online at www.surveymonkey.com/infoyou, where everyone interested in information overload is cordially invited to complete it. As a thank-you for completing the questionnaire, you'll be invited to download "Infomaven's Top Ten Free and Inexpensive Tools for Taming Information Overload Online" -- where you're certain to find one or more software gems to add to your webetoire.

In addition, you'll be invited to enter a drawing for a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate.

Most people find the InfoYou questionnaire enjoyable and are able to complete it in fifteen minutes or less, so we're hoping for a large response. (If you are interrupted while taking the questionnaire, you can click on the InfoYou link again and return to the point where you left off.)

I hope you'll complete the questionnaire yourself and pass the link along to any colleagues or friends who might also be interested. Thanks in advance for participating in our study.

Brute source: Computer-generated fiction

Thanks -- at least I think so -- to Daniel Akst for notifying us that computers are writing "brief outbursts of fiction that are probably superior what many humans could turn out."

If you can get through the explanatory jargon at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Brutus.1 website or the StoryBook project at North Carolina State University, you may find yourself astounded at the innovative scientific thinking that produces such readable --even graceful --prose. Conversely, you may feel disspirited at the prospect of computers someday producing "literature" worthy of nomination for the National Book Award. (Unknown human authors already achieve that distinction; why not pseudonymous Macs or PCs?)

At the moment, I'm immersed in a study of information overload.  So what most caught my attention in Akst's essay was his exploration of just how likely it is -- or isn't -- that computers will produce great literature by dint of considering "every possible alternative in a world without end."

Not to worry.  The current state of cognitive science suggests that computers won't be writing great fiction any time soon. Like humans, computers are constrained by enormous amounts of available  information with limited time to process it.  And, like humans, computers must ultimately resort to satisficing.

Satisficing, a concept developed in the 1950s by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, means settling for a good enough outcome, instead of searching endlessly for the perfect one.  This notion piqued Akst's interest in computer-generated fiction. (Perhaps he may have stumbled across Barry Schwartz's recent  book, The Paradox of Choice, an exploration of "the tyranny of overwhelming choices" that draws heavily on Simon's ideas about satisficing and its futile opposite, maximizing.)

Akst wondered if computers might be exempt from the working novelist's practical need to follow an idea "without pausing to systematically consider every [possible] plot twist, character or phrase." As it turns out, even computers "cannot create narratives by using brute computational force to mindlessly try every alternative." The online Monkey Shakespeare Simulator graphically disproves the old saw about monkeys, typewriters, and the Bard.

One useful definition of information is a stimulus or message that reduces uncertainty. Just as it is impossible for novelists to consider every possible alternative in the process of creating literature, it is impossible for any of us Info Age denizens to consider every available message in the process of reducing uncertainty.

New print and electronic information (in the standard units of measurement employed by computer scientists) is growing at the rate of 30 percent per year. In many people's experience, far from reducing uncertainty, this explosion of new messages creates information overload, causing information anxiety that increases stress and inhibits decision-making.

So, Daniel Akst, "writers and computers" are not the only ones locked in "an enduringly dysfunctional embrace." The rest of us are, as well, whether we spend our days online or float more passively in the informational floodplain.  And we all need practical and psychological ways to cope.

One-Trick Panda: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

If you're a language-lover, you may know that Eats, Shoots and Leaves , an odd little volume with an even odder subtitle --The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- has spent 32 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List, and counting. This, after a smash UK debut in 2003.

Self-described stickler Lynne Truss and her one-trick panda have taken both sides of the pond by storm with a book only a grammarphile could love. And not every grammarphile, at that. But for those who have spent many a pleasant evening curled up with the Chicago Manual of Style or have long known Mr. Fowler on a first-name basis, it's clear why this book is both popular and controversial.

Much as we may admire Truss's devotion to punctuation and appreciate the many anecdotes she recounts in support of its essential linguistic functions, very few readers will accept all of her punctuational decrees. Take that panda, for example, the one ripped from a grammar joke and memorialized in the book's title.

The joke's punch line, meant to be a quote from a "badly punctuated wildlife manual," explains why the panda shoots a gun in the air after eating a sandwich in a cafe and before making for the door:

    "Panda. Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves. "

Had I written that last sentence, I would certainly have inserted an additional comma, after the word shoots and before and. A comma placed before the final item in a list is known as the Oxford or serial comma. In Britain, as Truss points out, standard usage is to omit the comma ("Eats, shoots and leaves"), while in the USA, standard usage is to put it in ("Eats, shoots, and leaves"). It would, however, be unwise to make assumptions about a person's Oxford comma predilections based on such a minor point as nationality. Truss, herself, believes that "sometimes a sentence is improved by including it; sometimes it isn't."

Which should give you an idea why this book should hardly be considered a reference work. Rather, it is an extended essay on the history, purpose, and sheer joy of punctuation marks, one that has been left essentially unchanged for the North American market aside from a brief preface highlighting some differences between British and American usage.  Many a critic has found fault with Truss as a stylist, on both logical and aesthetic grounds. Notably, Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, is irritated and perplexed that "a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them [should] bother to produce a guide to punctuation."

From my point of view, the book is breezy, opinionated, and funny, at least for starters. Inevitably, perhaps, it becomes a one-trick panda. How many egregiously misplaced apostrophes, tidbits of printers' lore, and arch paeans to standards can fit comfortably within 200 very small pages of very large print? (That's a rhetorical question, not a light bulb joke.)

Regardless, everyone who loves the English language and avidly follows its fortunes should take a stab at this book. More than likely, you'll find a passage or two or three to make you laugh out loud, and a couple to remind you why care so much about our language in the first place.

Voting in New York

The lever-style voting machine was invented in 1892 and is so obsolete that it's never even mentioned on the cable news channels. But we still use them here in New York City, at least for the time being, and for me, they remain part of the inspiring ritual of voting.

The cafeteria of our local public elementary school houses several election districts. This morning, it was more crowded than I've ever seen it. Unlike neat suburban precincts, here virtually every inch of space is taken up by poll workers, voting machines, and long, snaking lines of voters.

New Yorkers have notably poor queueing habits, as you know if you've ever waited at one of our bus stops, though we usually get things right in the end. So it is notable that hundreds of people, on dozens of lines that are orderly if you know how to look, wait so patiently, almost cheerfully, to cast ballots in an overwhelmingly blue state, in a precinct with no contested races.

People here take this particular civic duty seriously. I think it's our preferred expression of patriotism.

I don't know how accurate those old behemoths are, but they do create paper trails. I don't know how much anxiety, argument, disappointment, or joy awaits anyone in the room after the polls close tonight. But seeing crowds of people waiting to vote makes me wish for a time when no one questioned that his or her vote would be accurately counted and almost everyone joined together on a single day to celebrate our unalienable right to have our say.

E-voting, I believe, will eventually become both secure and routine. We'll all cast our votes from our home computers during a specified period, certainly longer than a single day. When that time comes, though, I think a key rite (and right) of citizenship will lose a bit of its bustling, jostling luster.