James Drogan

Years ago, when at IBM, I was involved with the Research Division on a project to digitize speech for the purposes of recognition of patterns.  As I recall, one of the factoids of the time was that only five percent of the information in the world was digitized, that much, if not all of the remainder was verbal.  In History, Digitized (and Abridged), Katie Hafner of the Times makes a strong case that the conversion to digital is, in reality, proceeding at a snail's pace; that much of the information in the world is likely never to  be digitized.

I'm perhaps naive on this issue, but Hafner's article gave me something to think about regarding the perceived power of the zeros and ones.

The second article in this section to which I draw attention is Denise Caruso's Knowledge is Power Only if You Know How to Use It.  Caruso reminds me of the importance of know-how.   Know-how (if it's robust it's called "go" according to  Sarewitz and Nelson, researchers  in the area) is what we should be instilling in our students.  I wonder, sometimes, whether they want the know-how or the easier-to-obtain knowledge that is more-or-less certified by a grade and a degree.