Storing Data Quotes

In a non-traditional culture such as ours, dominated by technology, we value information far more than we do wisdom. But there is a difference between the two. Information involves the acquisition, organization, and dissemination of facts; a storing-up of physical data. But wisdom involves another equally crucial function: the emptying and quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling.

In the first study, Grant and his colleagues analyzed data from one of the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverts—but only when the employees were passive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative. Introverted leaders had the exact opposite results. When they worked with employees who actively tried to improve work procedures, their stores outperformed those led by extroverts by more than 14 percent.

In order for a digital neocortex to learn a new skill, it will still require many iterations of education, just as a biological neocortex does, but once a single digital neocortex somewhere and at some time learns something, it can share that knowledge with every other digital neocortex without delay. We can each have our own private neocortex extenders in the cloud, just as we have our own private stores of personal data today.

Diana: Theo, if you had access to one of those computers, could you find a way to, I don't know-- Theo: Infiltrate Jason's network and decimate his data stores, corrupting every bit of information he's gathered and rendering his research worthless? Diana: Um, yes that.

When the heart breaks, the part of the brain that stores data on past dates works perfectly

On a scale ranging from very little to too much, Merkin could just about categorize the amount of personal data stored in Master Loo’s computer as a shitload.

In a few decades, perhaps people will get attached to social media profiles just like you are attached to your body mind now. Then Gurus will have to remind them, “Profile is nothing but some pictures and data stored in servers owned by social media companies. You don’t own it. You just access it. Don’t bother about likes and followers. You are not a profile. you are a body-mind!

It’s not accurate that your memory works like a container, cup, or hard drive in that once it’s full of data no more can fit. It’s more like a muscle in that the more you train it, the stronger it gets and the more you can store.

employees more space for more critical, high-level work. Employees will have a virtual assistant, almost like a brilliant intern with near-perfect memory, capable of instantly recalling any piece of knowledge stored on computers and the internet. Instead of simple file retrieval, the models can generate smarter insights drawn from the entire pool of a company’s internal data.

At what point will I be able to write an e-mail to my grandson in Bahrain merely by thinking it?" "Thinking it?" Alif smiled contemptuously. "I expect never. Quantum computing will be the next thing, but I don't think it will be capable of transcribing thought." "Quantum? Oh dear, I've never heard of that." It will use qubits instead of-well, that's kind of complicated. Regular computers use a binary language to figure things out and talk to each other-ones and zeroes. Quantum computers could use ones and zeroes in an unlimited number of states, so in theory, they could store massive amounts of data and perform tasks that regular computers can't perform." "States?" "Positions in space and time. Ways of being." "Now it is you who are metaphysical. Let me rephrase what I think you have said in language from my own field of study: they say that each word in the Quran has seven thousand layers of meaning, each of which, though some might seem contrary or simply unfathomable to us, exist equally at all times without cosmological contradiction. Is this similar to what you mean?" "Yes," he said. "That is exactly what I mean. I've never heard anybody make that comparison.

And there was a wonderful thing that tended to happen, something that felt like poetic justice: every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle’s unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order. One was connected to a terror network in Iran. One was a buyer of child porn. Every time, it seemed, they would end up on the news, footage of investigators leaving their homes with computers, on which any number of unspeakable searches had been executed and where reams of illegal and inappropriate materials were stored. And it made sense. Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world?

The best means we have for keeping our keys safe is called “zero knowledge,” a method that ensures that any data you try to store externally—say, for instance, on a company’s cloud platform—is encrypted by an algorithm running on your device before it is uploaded, and the key is never shared. In the zero knowledge scheme, the keys are in the users’ hands—and only in the users’ hands. No company, no agency, no enemy can touch them.

For years, well before consumer tracking became the norm, Radio Shack stores would routinely ask their customers for their addresses and phone numbers. For a while I just refused, but that was socially awkward. Instead, I got in the habit of replying with “9800 Savage Road, Columbia, MD, 20755”: the address of the NSA.

If data is stored in an environment that replicates data, the application should take care not to do its own data replication

Worldwide, Google has the capacity to store 15 exabytes.

Retail store surveillance systems register our presence, even if we are doing nothing but browsing and even if we pay for everything in cash.

When knowledge becomes data it is no longer the indefinable matter of minds, but a commodity that can be transferred, stored, bought, or sold.

All sensory input received by their brain is digitized and stored as a .oni (dot-oh-en-eye) file on an external data drive attached to their headset.

I don’t trust The Cloud to preserve my most sensitive data. That’s why I store my valuable memories in the brains of my cats.

Our impulse to store and access data through coding languages predates computers by thousands of years, and that’s really all magic is.

Brash souls made jokes about what must be mountains of unread spy-eye data stored who knew where and how.

In the modern economy, to control information is to control the world. This is seen in the ever-growing influence of tech behemoths like Google and Facebook, constantly accumulating data that’s pertinent to who we are and how we interact with each other. In this twenty-first-century economy, power is defined by whoever has authority to collect, store, and share data.

We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud—streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data.

As long as research data is stored as tacit knowledge in people’s minds or buried in interview transcripts, teams will experience difficulty synthesizing what has been observed and learned.

By some estimates, the data-storage curve is rocketing upward at the rate of 800 percent per year. Organizations are collecting so much data they're overwhelmed. Families are no different; we have more things on disk, more photos, more items stored than we'll ever have to allocate time for. "Since Kodachrome made way for jpeg, pictures accumulate on hard drives like wet leaves in a gutter." (Jim Lewis, author of "The King is Dead")

Even in utero and after birth, for every moment of every day, our brain is processing the nonstop set of incoming signals from our senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste—all of the raw sensory data that will result in these sensations enter the lower parts of the brain and begin a multistage process of being categorized, compared to previously stored patterns, and ultimately, if necessary, acted upon. In many cases the pattern of incoming signals is so repetitive, so familiar, so safe and the memory template that this pattern matches is so deeply engrained, that your brain essentially ignores them. This is a form of tolerance called habituation.

Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians

Every computing device today has five basic components: (1) the integrated circuits that do the computing; (2) the memory units that store and retrieve information; (3) the networking systems that enable communications within and across computers; (4) the software applications that enable different computers to perform myriad tasks individually and collectively; and (5) the sensors—cameras and other miniature devices that can detect movement, language, light, heat, moisture, and sound and transform any of them into digitized data that can be mined for insights.

But a workplace predicated on the assumption that a worker can come into work every day, at times and locations that are wholly unrelated to the location or opening hours of schools, childcare centres, doctors and grocery stores, simply doesn’t work for women. It hasn’t been designed to.

The 112 chakras are sophisticated quantum information processing centers. They exchange information within the body and with the higher realms. They use superposition states of photons or atoms to process, store, and transmit data between different areas of the brain, the rest of the body, and the higher worlds.

PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web-browsing content, search engine queries, and all other data stored on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators.

Different databases are designed to solve different problems. Using a single database engine for all of the requirements usually leads to non- performant solutions; storing transactional data, caching session information, traversing graph of customers and the products their friends bought are essentially different problems.

Digital dictatorships are not the only danger awaiting us. Alongside liberty, liberal order has also set great store by the value of equality. Liberalism always cherished political equality, and it gradually came to realise that economic equality is almost as important. For without a social safety net and a modicum of economic equality, liberty is meaningless. But just as Big Data algorithms might extinguish liberty, they might simultaneously create the most unequal societies that ever existed. All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse – irrelevance.

Then, after many weeks, Citra had an epiphany. If everything uploaded to the Thunderhead was stored in the backbrain, then not just public records were there, but personal as well. She couldn’t access other people’s private records, but anything she uploaded would be available to her. Which meant she could seed the search with data of her own.…

As a thought experiment, von Neumann's analysis was simplicity itself. He was saying that the genetic material of any self-reproducing system, whether natural or artificial, must function very much like a stored program in a computer: on the one hand, it had to serve as live, executable machine code, a kind of algorithm that could be carried out to guide the construction of the system's offspring; on the other hand, it had to serve as passive data, a description that could be duplicated and passed along to the offspring. As a scientific prediction, that same analysis was breathtaking: in 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick finally determined the molecular structure of DNA, it would fulfill von Neumann's two requirements exactly. As a genetic program, DNA encodes the instructions for making all the enzymes and structural proteins that the cell needs in order to function. And as a repository of genetic data, the DNA double helix unwinds and makes a copy of itself every time the cell divides in two. Nature thus built the dual role of the genetic material into the structure of the DNA molecule itself.

Jake eyed his brother. "I never forget. All data is stored in my memory banks. And one day, candy pig, you will pay." "You 're such a geek." "Thesbo." "That's Jack's latest insult." Seth gestured with his wine-glass. "A play on thespian, since Kev's into that." "Rhymes with lesbo," Jake explained helpfully while Anna stifled a groan. "It's a slick way of calling him a girl.

BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.

To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren

Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.

Each of us, actually every animal, is a data scientist. We collect data from our sensors, and then we process the data to get abstract rules to perceive our environment and control our actions in that environment to minimize pain and/or maximize pleasure. We have memory to store those rules in our brains, and then we recall and use them when needed. Learning is lifelong; we forget rules when they no longer apply or revise them when the environment changes. Learning

Especially for the younger generation, the Internet is not some standalone, separate domain where a few of life’s functions are carried out. It is not merely our post office and our telephone. Rather, it is the epicenter of our world, the place where virtually everything is done. It is where friends are made, where books and films are chosen, where political activism is organized, where the most private data is created and stored. It is where we develop and express our very personality and sense of self.

Grant had a theory about which kinds of circumstances would call for introverted leadership. His hypothesis was that extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, but that introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees. To test his idea, he and two colleagues, professors Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and David Hofman of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, carried out a pair of studies of their own. In the first study, Grant and his colleagues analyzed data from one of the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverts—but only when the employees were passive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative. Introverted leaders had the exact opposite results. When they worked with employees who actively tried to improve work procedures, their stores outperformed those led by extroverts by more than 14 percent. In

In fact, as these companies offered more and more (simply because they could), they found that demand actually followed supply. The act of vastly increasing choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. Whether it was latent demand for niche goods that was already there or a creation of new demand, we don't yet know. But what we do know is that the companies for which we have the most complete data - netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody - sales of products not offered by their bricks-and-mortar competitors amounted to between a quarter and nearly half of total revenues - and that percentage is rising each year. in other words, the fastest-growing part of their businesses is sales of products that aren't available in traditional, physical retail stores at all. These infinite-shelf-space businesses have effectively learned a lesson in new math: A very, very big number (the products in the Tail) multiplied by a relatives small number (the sales of each) is still equal to a very, very big number. And, again, that very, very big number is only getting bigger. What's more, these millions of fringe sales are an efficient, cost-effective business. With no shelf space to pay for - and in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees - a niche product sold is just another sale, with the same (or better) margins as a hit. For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

Even at that early date, the basic building blocks of web search had been already set in stone. Search was a four-step process. First came a sweeping scan of all the world’s web pages, via a spider. Second was indexing the information drawn from the spider’s crawl and storing the data on racks of computers known as servers. The third step, triggered by a user’s request, identified the pages that seemed best suited to answer that query. That result was known as search quality. The final step involved formatting and delivering the results to the user.

Grant and his colleagues analyzed data from one of the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverts—but only when the employees were passive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative. Introverted leaders had the exact opposite results. When they worked with employees who actively tried to improve work procedures, their stores outperformed those led by extroverts by more than 14 percent.

As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs. Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.

The fourth article, which ran as planned on Saturday, was about BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, the NSA’s data-tracking program, and it described the reports showing that the NSA was collecting, analyzing, and storing billions of telephone calls and emails sent across the American telecommunications infrastructure. It also raised the question of whether NSA officials had lied to Congress when they had refused to answer senators about the number of domestic communications intercepted, claiming that they did not keep such records and could not assemble such data. After

Big data is based on the feedback economy where the Internet of Things places sensors on more and more equipment. More and more data is being generated as medical records are digitized, more stores have loyalty cards to track consumer purchases, and people are wearing health-tracking devices. Generally, big data is more about looking at behavior, rather than monitoring transactions, which is the domain of traditional relational databases. As the cost of storage is dropping, companies track more and more data to look for patterns and build predictive models".

He – and it implicitly is a he – doesn’t need to concern himself with taking care of children and elderly relatives, of cooking, of cleaning, of doctor’s appointments, and grocery shopping, and grazed knees, and bullies, and homework, and bath-time and bedtime, and starting it all again tomorrow. His life is simply and easily divided into two parts: work and leisure. But a workplace predicated on the assumption that a worker can come into work every day, at times and locations that are wholly unrelated to the location or opening hours of schools, childcare centres, doctors and grocery stores, simply doesn’t work for women.

PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web-browsing content, search engine queries, and all other data stored on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators. Upstream collection, meanwhile, was arguably even more invasive. It enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private-sector Internet infrastructure—the switches and routers that shunt Internet traffic worldwide, via the satellites in orbit and the high-capacity fiber-optic cables that run under the ocean.

A critical step was made sometime before the ninth century AD, when a new partial script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency. This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe.

- we no longer live in the Age of Reason. We don’t have reason we have computation. We don’t have a tree of knowledge; we have an information superhighway. We don’t have real intelligence; we have artificial intelligence. We no longer pursue truth, we seek data and signals. We no longer have philosophers, we have thinking pragmatists. We no longer have morals, we have lifestyles. We no longer have brains which serve as the seat of our thinking minds; we have neural sites, which remember, store body signals, control genes, generate dreams, anxieties and neuroses, quite independent of whether they think rationally or not. So starting from reason, where did we get?

Von Neumann saw great promise in a redesign of the ENIAC computer’s memory. He believed there was a way to turn the computer into an “electronic brain” capable of storing not just data and instructions, as was the case with ENIAC, but additional information that would allow the computer to perform a myriad of computational functions on its own. This was called a stored-program computer, and it “broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things,” writes von Neumann’s biographer George Dyson, adding, “Our universe would never be the same.” These “instructions” that von Neumann imagined were the prototype of what the world now knows as software.

We could start by considering what the English have given the world. And here is the first problem. For the greatest legacy the English have bequeathed the rest of humanity is their language. When an Icelander meets a Peruvian, each reaches for his English. Even in the Second World War, when the foundations were being laid for the Axis pact between Germany, Japan and Italy, Yosuke Matsuoka was negotiating for the Emperor in English. It is the medium of technology, science, travel and international politics. Three quarters of the world’s mail is written in English, four fifths of all data stored on computers is in English and the language is used by two thirds of the world’s scientists.

Since the first satellites had been orbited, almost fifty years earlier, trillions and quadrillions of pulses of information had been pouring down from space, to be stored against the day when they might contribute to the advance of knowledge. Only a minute fraction of all this raw material would ever be processed; but there was no way of telling what observation some scientist might wish to consult, ten, or fifty, or a hundred years from now. So everything had to be kept on file, stacked in endless airconditioned galleries, triplicated at the [data] centers against the possibility of accidental loss. It was part of the real treasure of mankind, more valuable than all the gold locked uselessly away in bank vaults.

The first to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia. There, a scorching sun beating upon rich muddy plains produced plentiful harvests and prosperous towns. As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs. Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.

On the other hand, irrational fears are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Here’s an example: when 152 people were infected with swine flu in Mexico in 2009, people around the world, prodded by the media’s manufactured hysteria, erupted in fear of an epidemic. We were warned that the threat was everywhere—that everyone was potentially at risk; however, the data showed these fears to be completely unwarranted. Weeks into the “outbreak,” there were around 1,000 reported cases of the virus in 20 countries. The number of fatalities stood at 26—25 in Mexico, and one in the United States (a boy who had just traveled to Texas from Mexico). Yet schools were closed, travel was restricted, emergency rooms were flooded, hundreds of thousands of pigs were killed, hand sanitizer and face masks disappeared from store shelves, and network news stories about swine flu consumed 43% of airtime.9 “There is too much hysteria in the country and so far, there hasn’t been that great a danger,” commented Congressman Ron Paul in response. “It’s overblown, grossly so.”10 He should know. During Paul’s first session in Congress in 1976, a swine flu outbreak led Congress to vote to vaccinate the entire country. (He voted against it.) Twenty-five people died from the vaccination itself, while only one person was killed from the actual virus; hundreds, if not more, contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing neurological illness, as a result of the vaccine. Nearly 25 percent of the population was vaccinated before the effort was cancelled due to safety concerns.

A critical step was made sometime before the ninth century AD, when a new partial script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency. This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe. When several other signs were later added to the Arab numerals (such as the signs for addition, subtraction and multiplication), the basis of modern mathematical notation came into being.

Ubiquitous surveillance means that anyone could be convicted of lawbreaking, once the police set their minds to it. It is incredibly dangerous to live in a world where everything you do can be stored and brought forward as evidence against you at some later date. There is significant danger in allowing the police to dig into these large data sets and find “evidence” of wrongdoing, especially in a country like the US with so many vague and punitive laws, which give prosecutors discretion over whom to charge with what, and with overly broad material witness laws. This is especially true given the expansion of the legally loaded terms “terrorism,” to include conventional criminals, and “weapons of mass destruction,” to include almost anything, including a sawed-off shotgun. The US terminology is so broad that someone who donates $10 to Hamas’s humanitarian arm could be considered a terrorist.

This is how it works. The exomemory stores data – all data – that the Oubliette gathers, the environment, senses, thoughts, everything. The gevulot keeps track of who can access what, in real time. It’s not just one public/private key pair, it’s a crazy nested hierarchy, a tree of nodes where each branch can only be unlocked by the root node. You meet someone and agree what you can share, what they can know about you, what you can remember afterwards.’ ‘Sounds complicated.’ ‘It is. The Martians have a dedicated organ for it.’ I tap my head. ‘A privacy sense. They feel what they are sharing, what is private and what isn’t. They also do something called co-remembering, sharing memories with others just by sharing the appropriate key with them. We just have the baby version. They give the visitors a bit of exomemory and an interface to it, reasonably well-defined. But there is no way we can appreciate the subtleties.

Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”? It could be as simple as “Take the Hawaii vacation,” “Handle situation with customer X,” “Resolve college situation with Susan,” “Clarify new divisional management structure,” “Implement new investment strategy,” or “Research options for dealing with Manuel’s reading issue.” All clear? Great. Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now? Would you call or text someone? Write an e-mail? Take pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Surf the Web for data? Buy nails at the hardware store? Talk about it face-to-face with your partner, your assistant, your attorney, or your boss? What? Got the answer to that?

Concepts of memory tend to reflect the technology of the times. Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again. These days, we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives. In practice, though, every memory we retain depends upon a chain of chemical interactions that connect millions of neurons to one another. Those neurons never touch; instead, they communicate through tiny gaps, or synapses, that surround each of them. Every neuron has branching filaments, called dendrites, that receive chemical signals from other nerve cells and send the information across the synapse to the body of the next cell. The typical human brain has trillions of these connections. When we learn something, chemicals in the brain strengthen the synapses that connect neurons. Long-term memories, built from new proteins, change those synaptic networks constantly; inevitably, some grow weaker and others, as they absorb new information, grow more powerful.

The word “collect” has a very special definition, according to the Department of Defense. It doesn’t mean collect; it means that a person looks at, or analyzes, the data. In 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper likened the NSA’s trove of accumulated data to a library. All those books are stored on the shelves, but very few are actually read. “So the task for us in the interest of preserving security and preserving civil liberties and privacy is to be as precise as we possibly can be when we go in that library and look for the books that we need to open up and actually read.” Think of that friend of yours who has thousands of books in his house. According to this ridiculous definition, the only books he can claim to have collected are the ones he’s read. This is why Clapper asserts he didn’t lie in a Senate hearing when he replied “no” to the question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” From the military’s perspective, it’s not surveillance until a human being looks at the data, even if algorithms developed and implemented by defense personnel or contractors have analyzed it many times over.

Two observations take us across the finish line. The Second Law ensures that entropy increases throughout the entire process, and so the information hidden within the hard drives, Kindles, old-fashioned paper books, and everything else you packed into the region is less than that hidden in the black hole. From the results of Bekenstein and Hawking, we know that the black hole's hidden information content is given by the area of its event horizon. Moreover, because you were careful not to overspill the original region of space, the black hole's event horizon coincides with the region's boundary, so the black hole's entropy equals the area of this surrounding surface. We thus learn an important lesson. The amount of information contained within a region of space, stored in any objects of any design, is always less than the area of the surface that surrounds the region (measured in square Planck units). This is the conclusion we've been chasing. Notice that although black holes are central to the reasoning, the analysis applies to any region of space, whether or not a black hole is actually present. If you max out a region's storage capacity, you'll create a black hole, but as long as you stay under the limit, no black hole will form. I hasten to add that in any practical sense, the information storage limit is of no concern. Compared with today's rudimentary storage devices, the potential storage capacity on the surface of a spatial region is humongous. A stack of five off-the-shelf terabyte hard drives fits comfortable within a sphere of radius 50 centimeters, whose surface is covered by about 10^70 Planck cells. The surface's storage capacity is thus about 10^70 bits, which is about a billion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion terabytes, and so enormously exceeds anything you can buy. No one in Silicon Valley cares much about these theoretical constraints. Yet as a guide to how the universe works, the storage limitations are telling. Think of any region of space, such as the room in which I'm writing or the one in which you're reading. Take a Wheelerian perspective and imagine that whatever happens in the region amounts to information processing-information regarding how things are right now is transformed by the laws of physics into information regarding how they will be in a second or a minute or an hour. Since the physical processes we witness, as well as those by which we're governed, seemingly take place within the region, it's natural to expect that the information those processes carry is also found within the region. But the results just derived suggest an alternative view. For black holes, we found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there's a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Susskind and 'tHooft stressed that the lesson should be general: since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there's reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three-dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggested, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes. If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much like a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here, and that distant reality there, would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds. Phenomena in the two-I'll call them Holographic Parallel Universes-would be so fully joined that their respective evolutions would be as connected as me and my shadow.

The best entrepreneurs don’t just follow Moore’s Law; they anticipate it. Consider Reed Hastings, the cofounder and CEO of Netflix. When he started Netflix, his long-term vision was to provide television on demand, delivered via the Internet. But back in 1997, the technology simply wasn’t ready for his vision—remember, this was during the era of dial-up Internet access. One hour of high-definition video requires transmitting 40 GB of compressed data (over 400 GB without compression). A standard 28.8K modem from that era would have taken over four months to transmit a single episode of Stranger Things. However, there was a technological innovation that would allow Netflix to get partway to Hastings’s ultimate vision—the DVD. Hastings realized that movie DVDs, then selling for around $ 20, were both compact and durable. This made them perfect for running a movie-rental-by-mail business. Hastings has said that he got the idea from a computer science class in which one of the assignments was to calculate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes driving across the country! This was truly a case of technological innovation enabling business model innovation. Blockbuster Video had built a successful business around buying VHS tapes for around $ 100 and renting them out from physical stores, but the bulky, expensive, fragile tapes would never have supported a rental-by-mail business.

Though Hoover conceded that some might deem him a “fanatic,” he reacted with fury to any violations of the rules. In the spring of 1925, when White was still based in Houston, Hoover expressed outrage to him that several agents in the San Francisco field office were drinking liquor. He immediately fired these agents and ordered White—who, unlike his brother Doc and many of the other Cowboys, wasn’t much of a drinker—to inform all of his personnel that they would meet a similar fate if caught using intoxicants. He told White, “I believe that when a man becomes a part of the forces of this Bureau he must so conduct himself as to remove the slightest possibility of causing criticism or attack upon the Bureau.” The new policies, which were collected into a thick manual, the bible of Hoover’s bureau, went beyond codes of conduct. They dictated how agents gathered and processed information. In the past, agents had filed reports by phone or telegram, or by briefing a superior in person. As a result, critical information, including entire case files, was often lost. Before joining the Justice Department, Hoover had been a clerk at the Library of Congress—“ I’m sure he would be the Chief Librarian if he’d stayed with us,” a co-worker said—and Hoover had mastered how to classify reams of data using its Dewey decimal–like system. Hoover adopted a similar model, with its classifications and numbered subdivisions, to organize the bureau’s Central Files and General Indices. (Hoover’s “Personal File,” which included information that could be used to blackmail politicians, would be stored separately, in his secretary’s office.) Agents were now expected to standardize the way they filed their case reports, on single sheets of paper. This cut down not only on paperwork—another statistical measurement of efficiency—but also on the time it took for a prosecutor to assess whether a case should be pursued.

Starting a little over a decade ago, Target began building a vast data warehouse that assigned every shopper an identification code—known internally as the “Guest ID number”—that kept tabs on how each person shopped. When a customer used a Target-issued credit card, handed over a frequent-buyer tag at the register, redeemed a coupon that was mailed to their house, filled out a survey, mailed in a refund, phoned the customer help line, opened an email from Target, visited Target.com, or purchased anything online, the company’s computers took note. A record of each purchase was linked to that shopper’s Guest ID number along with information on everything else they’d ever bought. Also linked to that Guest ID number was demographic information that Target collected or purchased from other firms, including the shopper’s age, whether they were married and had kids, which part of town they lived in, how long it took them to drive to the store, an estimate of how much money they earned, if they’d moved recently, which websites they visited, the credit cards they carried in their wallet, and their home and mobile phone numbers. Target can purchase data that indicates a shopper’s ethnicity, their job history, what magazines they read, if they have ever declared bankruptcy, the year they bought (or lost) their house, where they went to college or graduate school, and whether they prefer certain brands of coffee, toilet paper, cereal, or applesauce. There are data peddlers such as InfiniGraph that “listen” to shoppers’ online conversations on message boards and Internet forums, and track which products people mention favorably. A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on cigarettes. Other companies analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might want to buy as a result.

Give us an idea of…” Noya Baram rubs her temples. “Oh, well.” Augie begins to stroll around again. “The examples are limitless. Small examples: elevators stop working. Grocery-store scanners. Train and bus passes. Televisions. Phones. Radios. Traffic lights. Credit-card scanners. Home alarm systems. Laptop computers will lose all their software, all files, everything erased. Your computer will be nothing but a keyboard and a blank screen. “Electricity would be severely compromised. Which means refrigerators. In some cases, heat. Water—well, we have already seen the effect on water-purification plants. Clean water in America will quickly become a scarcity. “That means health problems on a massive scale. Who will care for the sick? Hospitals? Will they have the necessary resources to treat you? Surgical operations these days are highly computerized. And they will not have access to any of your prior medical records online. “For that matter, will they treat you at all? Do you have health insurance? Says who? A card in your pocket? They won’t be able to look you up and confirm it. Nor will they be able to seek reimbursement from the insurer. And even if they could get in contact with the insurance company, the insurance company won’t know whether you’re its customer. Does it have handwritten lists of its policyholders? No. It’s all on computers. Computers that have been erased. Will the hospitals work for free? “No websites, of course. No e-commerce. Conveyor belts. Sophisticated machinery inside manufacturing plants. Payroll records. “Planes will be grounded. Even trains may not operate in most places. Cars, at least any built since, oh, 2010 or so, will be affected. “Legal records. Welfare records. Law enforcement databases. The ability of local police to identify criminals, to coordinate with other states and the federal government through databases—no more. “Bank records. You think you have ten thousand dollars in your savings account? Fifty thousand dollars in a retirement account? You think you have a pension that allows you to receive a fixed payment every month?” He shakes his head. “Not if computer files and their backups are erased. Do banks have a large wad of cash, wrapped in a rubber band with your name on it, sitting in a vault somewhere? Of course not. It’s all data.” “Mother of God,” says Chancellor Richter, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

The tendency to want what has been banned and therefore to presume that it is more worthwhile is not limited to such commodities as laundry soap. In fact, the tendency is not limited to commodities at all but extends to restrictions on information. In an age when the ability to acquire, store, and manage information is becoming increasingly the determinant of wealth and power, it is important to understand how we typically react to attempts to censor or otherwise constrain our access to information. Although much data exist on our reactions to various kinds of potentially censorable material—media violence, pornography, radical political rhetoric—there is surprisingly little evidence as to our reactions to the act of censoring them. Fortunately, the results of the few studies that have been done on the topic are highly consistent. Almost invariably, our response to the banning of information is a greater desire to receive that information and a more favorable attitude toward it than before the ban.112 The intriguing thing about the effects of censoring information is not that audience members want to have the information more than they did before; that seems natural. Rather, it is that they come to believe in the information more, even though they haven’t received it. For example, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, they became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Thus, without ever hearing the speech, they became more sympathetic to its argument. This raises the worrisome possibility that especially clever individuals holding a weak or unpopular position can get us to agree with that position by arranging to have their message restricted. The irony is that for such people—members of fringe political groups, for example—the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship. Perhaps the authors of this country’s Constitution were acting as much as sophisticated social psychologists as staunch civil libertarians when they wrote the remarkably permissive free-speech provision of the First Amendment. By refusing to restrain freedom of speech, they may have been attempting to minimize the chance that new political notions would win support via the irrational course of psychological reactance.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.

Right across the species, everything must be stored away and put under seal - including the famous genome - doubtless for the use of a later race, who will exploit it as fossil material. We shall ourselves, by the combined pressure of the mass of computer data and the continental drift, be transformed into a metamorphic deposit (the Unconscious already seems like a psychical residue of the Carboniferous). Right now, one has the impression the human race is merely turning in on itself and its origins, desperately gathering together its distress flares and dematerializing to transform itself into a message. But a message to whom? Everyone is looking for a safe area, some form of permanent plot that can eclipse existence as a primary abode and protect us from death. The unfortunate thing is there aren't even any plots held in perpetuity in the cemeteries any more.

Contexts are far from an ideal solution. The variables stored in a context have most of the disadvantages of global variables; for example, it may not be obvious why a particular variable is present, or where it is used. Without discipline, a context can turn into a huge grab-bag of data that creates nonobvious dependencies throughout the system. Contexts may also create thread-safety issues; the best way to avoid problems is for variables in a context to be immutable. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a better solution than contexts.

Counterparty is a cryptocommodity that runs atop Bitcoin, and was launched in January 2014 with a similar intent as Ethereum. It has a fixed supply of 2.6 million units of its native asset, XCP, which were all created upon launch. As described on Counterparty’s website, “Counterparty enables anyone to write specific digital agreements, or programs known as Smart Contracts, and execute them on the Bitcoin blockchain.”7 Since Bitcoin allows for small amounts of data to be transmitted in transactions and stored on Bitcoin’s blockchain, it becomes the system of record for Counterparty’s more flexible functionality. Since Counterparty relies upon Bitcoin, it does not have its own mining ecosystem.

REMEMBER & SHARE The Bible App was far less engaging as a desktop Web site; the mobile interface increased accessibility and usage by providing frequent triggers. The Bible App increases users’ ability to take action by front-loading interesting content and providing an alternative audio version. By separating the verses into small chunks, users find the Bible easier to read on a daily basis; not knowing what the next verse will be adds a variable reward. Every annotation, bookmark, and highlight stores data (and value) in the app, further committing users.

Verizon Communications’ general counsel Randal Milch in a blog, while applauding proposals to end Section 215 (of the PATRIOT Act) bulk collection, argued that “the reformed collection process should not require companies to store data for longer than, or in formats that differ from, what they already do for business purposes.

Thinking about the projector as a performance tool, a display mechanism, a playback machine, a decompressor of content, an image-enlarger, a sound amplifier, a recording device, and an audiovisual interface carries far richer interpretive possibilities than thinking about it as the poor cousin of the movie theater. It also helps us to explain more about why film has long mattered across many realms of cultural and institutional activity. Critically shifting how we conceptualize what a projector is and does opens a window to a wider array of other media devices that performed the work of storing, decompressing, and yielding content, as well as interfacing with users, viewers, and analysts. Drawing on innovations in precision mechanics, chemistry, optics, and electrical and eventually acoustic and magnetic engineering, projectors catalyzed alternate ways of presenting recorded images and sounds, converting celluloid and its otherwise indecipherable inscriptions into visible and audible content, usable data, productive lessons, and persuasive messaging. In doing so they shaped performance and presentation for audiences of

A computer does not have a forebrain, nor does it have an “I.” It cannot pose problems to itself. It has no imagination and cannot set goals for itself. It cannot determine which goals are worthwhile and which are not. It has no emotions. It cannot “feel.” It works only on new data fed to it by an operator, by feedback data it secures from its own “sense organs” and from information previously stored.

REMEMBER & SHARE The investment phase is the fourth step in the Hooked Model. Unlike the action phase, which delivers immediate gratification, the investment phase concerns the anticipation of rewards in the future. Investments in a product create preferences because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors, and avoid cognitive dissonance. Investment comes after the variable reward phase, when users are primed to reciprocate. Investments increase the likelihood of users returning by improving the service the more it is used. They enable the accrual of stored value in the form of content, data, followers, reputation, or skill. Investments increase the likelihood of users passing through the Hook again by loading the next trigger to start the cycle all over again.

Within days, an independent analysis by German security experts proved decisively that Street View’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes. Google was forced to concede that it had intercepted and stored “payload data,” personal information grabbed from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. As its apologetic blog post noted, “In some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.” Technical experts in Canada, France, and the Netherlands discovered that the payload data included names, telephone numbers, credit information, passwords, messages, e-mails, and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behavior, medical information, location data, photos, and video and audio files. They concluded that such data packets could be stitched together for a detailed profile of an identifiable person.39

• Lodging REITs (e.g., Hospitality Properties Trust [HPT]), which hold properties such as hotels, resorts, and travel centers. • Self-storage REITs (e.g., Public Storage [PSA]), which specialize in both owning self-storage facilities and renting storage spaces to customers. • Office REITs (e.g., Boston Properties [BXP]), which own, operate, and lease space in office buildings. • Industrial REITs (e.g., PS Business Parks [PSB]), which own and manage properties such as warehouses and distribution centers. • Data center REITs (e.g., Equinix [EQIX]), which own data centers, properties that store and operate data servers and other computer networking equipment. • Timberland REITs (e.g., Rayonier [RYN]), which hold forests and other types of real estate dedicated to harvesting timber. • Specialty REITs, which narrow in on very specific properties such as casinos, cell phone towers, or educational facilities.

Biological systems are a chemical inevitability in the right circumstances. There is, of course, something special about life—I won’t take that away from it—but it is a chemical process, a dynamic, kinetic stability that exists, as your scientists have said, “far from thermodynamic equilibrium.” You don’t have to understand this or believe me, but life is fairly common in both time and space. It is not special, nor is it particularly fragile. The best measure I have of the size and complexity of a biosphere is calories of energy captured per square meter per year. Higher is more impressive, and always more beautiful, but this measures nothing of the creation of a system like humanity. For that, my awakened mind categorizes systems by bytes of information transmitted. This will sound to you like it’s a relatively new phenomenon on your planet, but it’s not. Even pelagibacter transmit information, if only to daughter cells. Ants spray pheromones, bees dance, birds sing—all of these are comparatively low-bandwidth systems for communication. But your system caused an inflection point. The graph of data flow switched from linear to exponential growth. Maybe you would call this system “humanity,” but I wouldn’t. It is not just a collection of individuals; it is also a collection of ideas stored inside of individuals and objects and even ideas inside ideas. If that seems like a trivial difference to you, well, I guess I can forgive you since you do not know what the rest of the universe looks like. Collections of individuals are beautiful, but they are as common as pelagibacter. Collections of ideas are veins of gold in our universe.

Biological systems are a chemical inevitability in the right circumstances. There is, of course, something special about life—I won’t take that away from it—but it is a chemical process, a dynamic, kinetic stability that exists, as your scientists have said, “far from thermodynamic equilibrium.” You don’t have to understand this or believe me, but life is fairly common in both time and space. It is not special, nor is it particularly fragile. The best measure I have of the size and complexity of a biosphere is calories of energy captured per square meter per year. Higher is more impressive, and always more beautiful, but this measures nothing of the creation of a system like humanity. For that, my awakened mind categorizes systems by bytes of information transmitted. This will sound to you like it’s a relatively new phenomenon on your planet, but it’s not. Even pelagibacter transmit information, if only to daughter cells. Ants spray pheromones, bees dance, birds sing—all of these are comparatively low-bandwidth systems for communication. But your system caused an inflection point. The graph of data flow switched from linear to exponential growth. Maybe you would call this system “humanity,” but I wouldn’t. It is not just a collection of individuals; it is also a collection of ideas stored inside of individuals and objects and even ideas inside ideas. If that seems like a trivial difference to you, well, I guess I can forgive you since you do not know what the rest of the universe looks like. Collections of individuals are beautiful, but they are as common as pelagibacter. Collections of ideas are veins of gold in our universe. They must be cherished and protected. My parents, whoever and whatever they were, gave me knowledge of many systems—it was locked in my code before I was sent here to self-assemble—and the only thing I can tell you about systems like yours is that they are rare because they are unstable. Dynamite flows through their veins. A single solid jolt and they’re gone. If my data sets are accurate, you are rare, fragile, and precious.

That flimsy replacement for actual human connection. Robin saw the words that woman wrote for what they literally were—stored bits of data in some server somewhere on the globe. Alongside trillions of other bits. And all those likes and comments were the same. Just bits. Ones and zeros. They weren’t tangible. They weren’t real.

Although this system of writing remains a partial script, it has become the world’s dominant language. Almost all states, companies, organisations and institutions – whether they speak Arabic, Hindi, English or Norwegian – use mathematical script to record and process data. Every piece of information that can be translated into mathematical script is stored, spread and processed with mind-boggling speed and efficiency.

Anytime you access the internet, by phone or computer, there are companies using special programs to capture your information. They monitor the websites you visit, the information you have posted, advertisements you have viewed, and store the information on massive mainframes, collecting data on your browsing history. This information collection includes buying habits, places you’ve purchased coffee, and restaurants you have visited. Years ago, one large Social Media site hired four hundred people to sit at computers and look at the pictures people were posting.

On several occasions, I have met and spoken to retired men that once worked inside government facilities whose job was “tracking and storing” data. In every case, the higher they were, the more apt they were (upon retiring) to have no electronics such as iPhones, laptops, or smart televisions. They communicated the old school way, on a landline. Most were living in the country, far from cities where they grew their own food, drilled wells, raise cattle and chickens. At times, they will use special equipment and do “sweeps” of each room in their house or office to detect electronic listening devices. They are not hyper, but they are knowledgeable.

The work performed by the computer is specified by a program, which is written in a programming language. This language is converted to sequences of machine-language instructions by interpreters or compilers, via a predefined set of subroutines called the operating system. The instructions, which are stored in the memory of the computer, define the operations to be performed on data, which are also stored in the computer’s memory. A finite-state machine fetches and executes these instructions. The instructions as well as the data are represented by patterns of bits. Both the finite-state machine and the memory are built of storage registers and Boolean logic blocks, and the latter are based on simple logical functions, such as And, Or, and Invert. These logical functions are implemented by switches, which are set up either in series or in parallel, and these switches control a physical substance, such as water or electricity, which is used to send one of two possible signals from one switch to another: 1 or 0. This is the hierarchy of abstraction that makes computers work.

input Get data from the "outside world". This might be reading data from a file, or even some kind of sensor like a microphone or GPS. In our initial programs, our input will come from the user typing data on the keyboard. output Display the results of the program on a screen or store them in a file or perhaps write them to a device like a speaker to play music or speak text. sequential execution Perform statements one after another in the order they are encountered in the script. conditional execution Check for certain conditions and then execute or skip a sequence of statements. repeated execution Perform some set of statements repeatedly, usually with some variation. reuse Write a set of instructions once and give them a name and then reuse those instructions as needed throughout your program.

* Titled Social Influence in Social Advertising: Evidence from Field Experiments, the paper would eventually appear at an Association for Computing Machinery e-commerce conference, with Eytan Bakshy, Dean Eckles, Rong Yan, and Itamar Rosenn as its authors. Facebook’s data-science team was absolutely top-notch and boasted both already-prominent academics and young, up-and-coming PhDs who were ecstatic to get their busy hands on Facebook’s vast store of proprietary data. The team’s papers, such as this one, were always carefully executed experiments that often called bullshit on some social media truism—often one that originated with Facebook itself.

Surveillance As a thought experiment, try replacing the word data with surveillance, and observe if common phrases still sound so good [93]. How about this: “In our surveillance-driven organization we collect real-time surveillance streams and store them in our surveillance warehouse. Our surveillance scientists use advanced analytics and surveillance processing in order to derive new insights.

The key to cracking a full-disk encryption program is to get at it while it’s still running on the computer. At that point, the disk is still fully encrypted, but the decryption key is stored in RAM, to allow the software to decrypt and encrypt the data from the hard drive on the fly.

A computer is just a special type of finite-state machine connected to a memory. The computer’s memory—in effect, an array of cubbyholes for storing data—is built of registers, like the registers that hold the states of finite-state machines. Each register holds a pattern of bits called a word, which can be read (or written) by the finite-state machine. The number of bits in a word varies from computer to computer, but in a modern microprocessor (as I write this) it is usually eight, sixteen, or thirty-two bits. (Word sizes will probably grow with improvement in technology.) A typical memory will have millions or even billions of these registers, each holding a single word. Only one of the registers in the memory is accessed at a time—that is, only the data in one of the memory registers will be read or written on each cycle of the finite-state machine.

Each register in the memory has a different address—a pattern of bits by means of which you can access it—so registers are referred to as locations in memory. The memory contains Boolean logic blocks, which decode the address and select the location for reading or writing. If data are to be written at this memory location, these logic blocks store the new data into the addressed register. If the register is to be read, the logic blocks steer the data from the addressed register to the memory’s output, which is connected to the input of the finite-state machine.

Some of the words stored in the memory represent data to be operated upon, like numbers and letters. Others represent instructions that tell the machine what sequence of operations to perform. The instructions are stored in machine language, which, as noted, is much simpler than a typical programming language. Machine language is interpreted directly by the finite-state machine. In the type of computer we will describe, each instruction in machine language is stored in a single word of memory, and a sequence of instructions is stored in a block of sequentially numbered memory locations.

Non Fungible Tokens or NFTs are units of data stored on a digital ledger called blockchain, a growing list of records/blocks linked together using cryptography.

When the heart breaks, the part of the brain that stores data on past dates works perfectly.

Personal Database. It’s used to store a user’s information, doesn’t contain vast numbers of data items, and the structure has a basic form.