Today in 1870, the U.S. Weather Bureau made its first meteorological observations using 24 locations that provided reports via telegraph. For the first time, weather observations from distant points could be “rapidly” collected, plotted, and analyzed at one location. A great example of how the value of information increases when it’s shared or what Metcalfe’s Law should have been about.
“As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.” —Benjamin Disraeli
More than 50 percent of U.S. hospitals aren’t in a position to effectively share data about patients to maximize quality of care and eliminate redundancies and error.
Only 10 percent to 15 percent of U.S. hospitals are using some form of patient discharge software.
Access to online patient information from remote location: Physicians, 96%; Patients, 12% (HIMSS 2010 survey).
88% of American physicians would like their patients to be able to track and monitor their health at home; 30% of US consumers are willing to use their smartphone to track and monitor their personal health; 63% of the physicians surveyed said they are using mobile health solutions that aren’t connected to their practice or hospital IT systems;(PwC survey).
17% of cell phone users have used their phone to look up health or medical information and 9% have software applications or “apps” on their phones that help them track or manage their health. “Even with the proliferation of mobile and online opportunities, however, most adults’ search for health information remains anchored in the offline world” (Pew Internet survey)
“Machines might give us more time to think but will never do our thinking for us” –Thomas J. Watson Jr., 1957
“Machines will follow a path that mirrors the evolution of humans. Ultimately, however, self-aware,s elf-improving machines will evolve beyond humans’ ability to control or even understand them.” –Ray Kurzweil, Scientific American, June 2010
Today in 1927, the first Movietone newsreel was shown at the Roxy Theater in New York, 22 days after the opening of the feature-length film that ushered in the era of the “talkies.” In The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson spoke the first line of dialogue in a full-length movie: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”
Weekly movie attendance rose from 57 million in 1927 to 95 million in 1929. U.S. population in 1929: 121 million. By 2000, with the US population growing to 281 million, weekly movie attendance dropped to 27 million.
Today is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. “To safeguard the world’s audiovisual heritage is to preserve our collective memory, and to ensure its transmission to future generations. We must understand the past to shape a common future founded on dialogue and understanding.” –Irina Bokova, Director-General, UNESCO
See here and here for great examples.
On June 13, 1894, J.W. Clark, then Registrary of Cambridge University, delivered a lecture titled “Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods.” He wanted to give his audience “some idea of the surroundings in which our forefathers read and wrote.” Clark exhorted his audience to rise above the disdain, typical of the period, of “ancient” modes of thought. “The more we study what they did,” he said, “the more we shall realise how laborious, how artistic, how conscientious they were; and amid all the developments of the nineteenth century, we shall gratefully confess that the Middle Ages rocked the cradle of our knowledge.”
Clark posited to his Cambridge audience two library models: The Workshop and The Museum.
“We think the telephone remains one of the greatest brand inventions ever. Where else can you get customers’ undivided attention today?” –Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, St. Petersburg Times, October 19, 2010
“With an estimated 84 billion messages send worldwide each day … it’s sometimes hard to put your finger on the efficiency of e-mail while digging out from a pile of it …. E-mail Backlash 2.0’s features include an overtendency to send it, an inability to respond to it, and a conversation slower than smoke signals. That’s why the telephone is looking ever better these days.” –Jared Sandberg, “Employees Forsake Dreaded E-mail for the Beloved Phone,” The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2006.
“It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us – the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage – may eventually be gathered in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss – except the inventor of the telephone” –Mark Twain, 1890
Today in 1861, the transcontinental telegraph, the first instant communications link between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, was completed. That evening, the first messages were sent to President Abraham Lincoln. The message from Horace W. Carpentier, president of the Overland Telegraph Co., read: “I announce to you that the telegraph to California has this day been completed. May it be a bond of perpetuity between the states of the Atlantic and those of the Pacific.”
Instant communications made the Pony Express obsolete, and it officially ceased operations two days later. For its 18 months of operation, the Pony Express reduced the time for messages to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to about ten days.
Life without instant communication (and before travel by railway), is described well by Stephen Ambrose in Undaunted Courage: ““A critical fact in the world of 1801 was that nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse. No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat … no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster. Nothing ever had moved any faster, and, as far as contemporaries were able to tell, nothing ever would.”
Today is World Development Information Day. “The effective use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) holds the potential of boosting economies, improving healthcare delivery, enhancing education and learning processes, and strengthening democratic processes.”– UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, Report of the Secretary General, 2009
The Story of Information 