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Managing Information Overload

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Posted on March 3, 2008 – 15:16

I’ve written about information overload before but have never really done anything to combat it my own life. Not for the want of trying, mind you – it’s just I’ve never found a method that works for me.

GTD is the closest I’ve ever come to actually utilising an information management system full-time, but I find it too structured – even when not adhered to as rigidly as some purists demand.

However, my dabbling wasn’t a completely failed attempt at Getting Things Done: one of the core GTD principles is the crux of my new system for managing the information I come across on a daily basis: moving tasks out of the mind by recording them. Simple yet effective.

But how to record? I’ve tried and failed with many methods – with del.icio.us being the closest I’ve come to finding a  permanent solution – but I eventually discovered that ‘bookmarking’ was not the method for me.

I want to save websites or articles on obscure and interesting topics, that contain great quotes, or sometimes I just want to save a video that I want to share with some friends at a later date. I don’t want to write a full-blown post on the item here, but if I don’t I’ll have to spend half an hour tagging each page in order to find it again 12 months down the line. Now it seems I’ve come across a method that works… and it’s been staring right at me for almost 2 years. Blogging!

Taking the structure from two of my more regular reads – kottke and BoingBoing – I’m now ‘bookmarking’ with LoneGunman. All it takes is a quick sentence or two explaining the entry, a quote, and a link. Eureka, you’ve got yourself a searchable, elegant bookmarking facility that you can control. So far I’ve found it to be extremely effective.

Take a look.

Podcasts: Like Radio, but Better (and With More 0s & 1s)

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Posted on February 22, 2008 – 15:09

Podcast Wallpaper from OllyHart (flickr)I have never listened to an audio podcast, it’s true. And yes, I know, I know – it’s shocking and it’s a slap in the face to Generation 2.0©. That’s why I’ve decided that now is the time for me to diversify and experiment in this strange medium.

After doing some research and compiling a list of possible subscriptions, I’m presenting them here as a way to keep track of them and also in hope that you may chip in with your thoughts and recommendations to liven up my daily commute.

BBC Worldwide

  • The Naked Scientists – “Stripping science down to its bare essentials” (in association with Cambridge University)
  • BBC Newsnight - Not strictly a podcast, but you can’t miss Newsnight!

National Public Radio (US) a.k.a. NPR

  • Intelligence Squared – also known as IQ2 U.S. While you’re at it, check out the live London Debates.
  • RadioLab – “Science meets culture, and information sounds like music”
  • Science Friday – “Making science user-friendly”
  • Fresh Air – “Probing questions, revelatory interviews and unusual insights”
  • On the Media – “Explores how the media ‘sausage’ is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression”

CBC Radio One

ABC Radio National (Australia)

  • All in the Mind – “From dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting – exploring the human condition through the mind’s eye”
  • Philosopher’s Zone – “Your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics”
  • Big Ideas – “thinking on major social, cultural, scientific or political issues”

IdeaCast – “Breakthrough ideas and commentary from leading thinkers in business and management” from The Harvard Business Review

EconTalk from The Library of Economics and Liberty on “the economics behind current events, markets, free trade, and the curiosities of everyday decision-making”

…Open Source “Inverting the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: not a podcast with a web community; a web community that produces a podcast”

Physics for Future Presidents with Richard Muller – “What every world leader needs to know”

Scientific American’s Science Talk – “Exploring cutting-edge breakthroughs and controversial issues with leading scientists”

Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT) – “promoting ‘slower/better’ thinking”. Part of The Long Now Foundation

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe – “Your escape to reality”

Studio 360 and specifically its Design for the Real World segment – “Get inside the creative mind: a smart and surprising guide to what’s happening in pop culture and the arts”

Philosophy Talk with Stanford University’s Professors of Philosophy – “The program that questions everything… except your intelligence”

The CERN Podcast is recorded in situ at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider with special ‘celebrity’ guests – “A cocktail of entertaining chat shows with a bit of particle physics thrown in”

That’s quite a few isn’t it? Of course there are many more great ones I’ve missed that may be of equal or greater interest to me as all of the above, so if you know of any please let me know (yes, I am actually begging).

How about these popular ones that I left out of the above list purposefully – am I being foolish in demoting these to the footer: Slate’s ‘Daily Podcast’ or ‘Explainer’, This Week in Tech, The Glenn and Helen Show, Shire Network News, This American Life, World Beyond the Headlines, Common Sense, BrainStuff from HowStuffWorks, The Guardian’s Science Weekly, Selected Shorts, The Economist, The Writers’ Block, This Week in Science, Sex is Fun and Open Source Sex with Violet Blue. Regarding those last two: one’s on the physiology of sex and the other is written for women; both are supposed to be interesting; and I imagine they’re both super-NSFW.

Sources or: Where I Found These

A Little Knowledge Can Be a Dangerous Thing

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Posted on February 20, 2008 – 22:17

The Angel of Humorous Birthday - a Flickr Photo by ca_newsomOn discussing inferential statistics, John Allen Paulos (in his book Innumeracy) gives us the example of when Phillip Kunz, a sociologist from Brigham Young University in Utah, decided to check a ‘random’ sample of 747 Salt Lake City obituaries in one year, cross-referencing the decedent’s dates of death with their birthdays.

The expected result, of course, is that there would be an even spread of deaths and birthdays throughout the year with no real correlation between them: 25% of the deceased dying within 3 months of their last birthday.

Surprisingly, however, the results showed that 46% of of those surveyed died within a three month period following their birthday. Furthermore, more than 3 out of every 4 deaths occurred within the half-year following their birthday, with a measly 8% passing away during the three month period prior to another birthday. In Innumeracy, Paulos goes on to show us that the probability of theorising that 46 or more percent would die within this time period can be computed to be so tiny it may as well be considered zero.

Thus we are shown that a person’s mental state plays a large part in their death, and that the desire for (or shock of) a final cultural milestone may be all that’s keeping many aged from their death.

Why am I worrying writing about this now? This Sunday sees me visiting my grandfather (and final grandparent) in hospital on his 89th birthday; after reading that, wouldn’t you be thinking the worst for the coming months? I’ve had my fair share of grievances over the past 6 months, I don’t particularly want more.

Darwin Day, Innumeracy, and Irreligiosity(?)

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Posted on February 14, 2008 – 15:24

This past Tuesday (12th) saw the coming and going of Darwin Day – the celebration honouring the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth in 1809. Nothing particularly extravagant or noteworthy occurred this year, but the astute among you may notice that this means it will be his 200th ‘birthday’ next year, nicely coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. This has got me wondering what publicly funded celebrations will be held to celebrate this rather monumental event; whether or not I may go and join in any festivities; and if there will be controversy surrounding any events due to the beliefs of certain movements.

To cut a long story short, I have now pencilled-in a trip to Shrewsbury for the weekend following next year’s anniversary as not only is Shrewsbury Darwin’s birth place, but it’s also the location of an annual, month-long celebration of his life and work, and also where my father currently lives. Two birds, one stone, and all that jazz.

On a slightly different note, all this talk of hard science is making me want to mention the book I’m currently reading: John Allen Paulos’ Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. Initially sceptical that it would be written for the maths-newcomer, I became impressed as Paulos describes with gusto the common – and frankly dangerous – pitfalls that everyone faces when living in an innumerate country. Encouraging his readers to view the world in a more quantitative way, I found myself grasping for paper and pencil a few times as he succinctly describes potential consequences of innumeracy:

  • Inaccurate reporting of news stories and insufficient scepticism in assessing these stories
  • Financial mismanagement and accumulation of consumer debt, specifically related to misunderstanding of compound interest
  • Loss of money on gambling, in particular caused by belief in the gambler’s fallacy
  • Belief in pseudoscience: “Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence.“
  • Poor assessment of risk, for example, refusing to fly by aeroplane (a relatively safe form of transport) while taking unnecessary risks in a car (where an accident is more likely)

It’s a book I definitely recommend for both the innumerate and the mathematically proficient. The former will learn a lot and hopefully gain a renewed sense of wanting to brush up on those GCSE maths skills, while the latter will get introduced to some interesting topics – a couple of which I covered in my previous post on mathematical ‘paradoxes’.

Off on another slightly related tangent, I recently came across an interesting article Prof. Paulos wrote for ABC News: 12 Irreligious Questions to the Candidates (via kottke):

Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?

Ah to hell with it, have another tenuously-linked topic… The above book (Innumeracy) has renewed my interest in performing mental math and better thinking – a personal development subject I first started working on about 12 months ago with the help of the Mentat Wiki – an interesting website from the author of Mind Performance Hacks. Providing you with new memory ‘systems’, you can use these to perform some useful (and not-so-useful) memory feats and improve your maths, all without the use of a calculator or other aid.

Yeah, that’s right baby: squaring and cubing large numbers… in my head! Hell yeah, that’s how I roll!

And seeing as it’s Valentine’s Day, have some VD cards you can send to your ‘loved’ one. Perfect. (Bitter? Me?  No.)

The Hobbit’s Labyrinth – Guillermo del Toro to Direct LotR Prequels

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Posted on February 1, 2008 – 15:51

In the first piece of movie news that’s excited me in a long time, I just discovered that Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro is to direct The Hobbit in lieu of Peter Jackson.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and when I first heard that Jackson was having a bit of a rift with New Line and may not direct the two planned prequels (The Hobbit will be shot as two films) I was slightly worried to say least. Jackson did an incredible job with the original trilogy and I couldn’t think of another director who could put the same passion into directing The Hobbit whilst keeping the feel of the movie so close to that of the book.

However, I think del Toro is perfect and I congratulate MGM, New Line, and Peter Jackson (he’s the executive producer) on their inspired choice – del Toro brought Pan’s Labyrinth to life as a work of visual art, and if the same emotion gets poured into The Hobbit, well, we’re all in for one hell of a treat.

Thinking back to when I first saw Pan’s Labyrinth I remember being amazed at the realism of this fantasy film and being blinded by the brilliance of the cinematography. I remember having the distinct feeling that I was reading a brand new – even darker – Lewis Carroll fairy-tale directed by an early Tim Burton; all enhanced by the glorious little cinema I saw it in. It was brilliant.

Pan’s Labyrinth 5 / 5
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 5 / 5
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 4.5 / 5
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 5 / 5