Is a metaphor a form of lightweight model?
The metaphor of information radiation is quite well know to many in the software industry. Did you ask why? Maybe because much of our work is very hidden from view, until we run the program and the computer interprets the code to produce some desired outcome. Even that outcome may be obscured from view, and we must produce reports upon the data that the program produced. So in a world where smoke and mirrors are common, one antidote to the common problem of not knowing where one is along the path toward product completion, a visualization is a powerful tool.
Generally speaking the information radiator has similar properties to the old fashion building heat radiator that used a steam media source to heat heavy iron and radiate the heat from the iron into the room. It feels great to be standing next to a radiator when you've just come in from the cold.
What is the refrigeration process - what's required to cool some air? Currently we use the 200 year old Carnot cycle to produce the cooling effect that your summers are known for. I doubt that my home of Dallas Texas would be the Mecca of IT if not for Mr. Nicolas Carnot and his research into what would become air-conditions environments. A comfortable 70 degrees indoors while the Texas sun is 95 in the shade.
I will leave the internal working of the AC unit to your study (I did it back in college - fascinating stuff).
When we put information is some systems we encode or compress it in such a way that the storage is efficient. Think of a data base, significant work is done upon the data to store it.
When we pull it out of those systems we also must now do work to make the data into information, and then do more work to make the information understandable by the people that have little knowledge of where the data came from, the purpose of storing the data and the context from which that data/info may have resulted. Someone will interpret that context, information and purpose and try to convey all this in a summary of the meaning behind larger data sets that the important people reviewing the information have time for. This expansion of the information and subsequent summarization or generalization takes energy from the system as a whole.
pondering the connections - AC to info refrigeration metaphor.... what do you see in this metaphor?
is there a useful model to play with?
SEE ALSO:
Origin of the term Information Radiator - by Alistair Cockburn from the Harnessing Convection Currents of Information OOPSLA 2001 ppt pdf talk.
"All models are wrong, some models are useful."
-- George Box
The metaphor of information radiation is quite well know to many in the software industry. Did you ask why? Maybe because much of our work is very hidden from view, until we run the program and the computer interprets the code to produce some desired outcome. Even that outcome may be obscured from view, and we must produce reports upon the data that the program produced. So in a world where smoke and mirrors are common, one antidote to the common problem of not knowing where one is along the path toward product completion, a visualization is a powerful tool.
Generally speaking the information radiator has similar properties to the old fashion building heat radiator that used a steam media source to heat heavy iron and radiate the heat from the iron into the room. It feels great to be standing next to a radiator when you've just come in from the cold.
What is the refrigeration process - what's required to cool some air? Currently we use the 200 year old Carnot cycle to produce the cooling effect that your summers are known for. I doubt that my home of Dallas Texas would be the Mecca of IT if not for Mr. Nicolas Carnot and his research into what would become air-conditions environments. A comfortable 70 degrees indoors while the Texas sun is 95 in the shade.
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| Pressure-Volume diagram of Carnot cycle |
When we put information is some systems we encode or compress it in such a way that the storage is efficient. Think of a data base, significant work is done upon the data to store it.
When we pull it out of those systems we also must now do work to make the data into information, and then do more work to make the information understandable by the people that have little knowledge of where the data came from, the purpose of storing the data and the context from which that data/info may have resulted. Someone will interpret that context, information and purpose and try to convey all this in a summary of the meaning behind larger data sets that the important people reviewing the information have time for. This expansion of the information and subsequent summarization or generalization takes energy from the system as a whole.
pondering the connections - AC to info refrigeration metaphor.... what do you see in this metaphor?
is there a useful model to play with?
SEE ALSO:
Origin of the term Information Radiator - by Alistair Cockburn from the Harnessing Convection Currents of Information OOPSLA 2001 ppt pdf talk.
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