Mind the Gap: Spotting the Brown Noise
Part 1 of a series of "noisy" posts about information noise in general, and brown noise in particular: what it is, who creates it, how to spot it, and what we can do about it.
I wrote in my initial post that one of the reasons I’ve started “chirping” online has to do with social responsibility. A responsibility to do something about the growing information noise we find online. I intend to make the case for this during a series of posts, and hopefully convince you that (1) we have a challenging situation on our hands which we eventually have to solve and (2) it’s actually feasible, if more and more folks start doing something about it.
Intro
I used to love crowded and noisy places. Not anymore.
As I got older, I started to enjoy the silence more and more instead. Wait, perhaps that’s a tad radical… I don’t enjoy the silence as much as I started to dislike noise. Not all noise. Some are great and highly enjoyable like birds chirping, crackling open fire, or songs like Norwegian Wood. Some are even useful, like morning alarms. However, some of it, I’m telling ya, I could live now without it very well thank you! The ones which made it to the top of my list are live rock’n roll concerts, dirt motorcycles, drilling, leaf blowers, sirens, car alarms, children screaming, and Waka Flocka Flame’s “music” (and the list keeps growing). Nowadays I’m doing my best trying to avoid these obnoxious noises, either by ignoring, physically moving away from them, or by turning the volume knob all the way down. Other people are way more radical.
Yet, there’s another type of noise around us, one we cannot hear but we can still feel. I’m not talking about sounds we can’t hear because of our own hearing limitations. I’m talking about information noise. All information is data1, and where there’s data there’s some degree of “noise” that goes with it. Data noise is simply errors in the data, due to the nature of data collection, measurement, or sensing procedures. From your customer database, to digital photography, all the way to the news you read online, data is bound to have noise. It might affect decisions you make for your customers in the former, or your believes and understanding of the world in the latter. You can even look at everything around us as a collection of data providers, from food, to objects, to relationships. For instance, a banana that starts to go bad, has a certain degree of visual, taste and maybe even olfactory “noise”. This gets added to the general information our brain has about bananas, and makes us hesitant to eat it. We probably attempt to clean it first before consume it. Quite similar to what you’d probably have to do with your customer database before making any important decisions.
The bigger the noise, the worst the data, and by extension the experience of consuming said data. Put broadly, noise lowers the quality of the original information, and sometimes corrupts it entirely.
And here’s where signal-to-noise ratio, or SNR, comes into play. According to wikipedia “The SNR term is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange”. And use it metaphorically is exactly what I intend to do in the following posts….
And while I’m at it, I willl extend its definition so it includes information we find on and consume from the Internet.
[to be continued…]
One of my high school professors (Mihai Hudrea) used to say “All information is data, but not all data is information“. Right on, Sir!