[Year 12 IPM] Data vs Information

[Peter Ruwoldt (Wrk)]

What is information to one person is data to another. (aka - one 
person's garbage is anothers treasure)
Consider the scenario of a person from the health commission asking 
students to complete a health survey.  The fact that an individual 
student smokes is not useful to the person from the health commission.  
Sure they are concerned that a youth chooses to smoke.  The fact that 
YOU as an individual smokes is going to be useful information to your 
parents but not the health commission.  When they gather all of the data 
and find out that it is mainly 14-19 year old females that smoke they 
have some information that they can use which will helpful in better 
targeting their quit campaign.
Now we can weave drug education into information technology - that's 
called value adding.
Cheers
Peter

Mike Brookes wrote:

> Ah the joys of what happens when words get hijacked :-)
>
> Once upon a time information was knowledge/understanding/ideas 
> possessed  by a person. Since telepathy has not proved to be reliable 
> method of exchanging information between people it was necessary to 
> represent this information in a form that could be transmitted from 
> one person to another - Data. For example I have some information 
> about the difference between data and information. To pass this 
> information to you I try to represent it using English words (data) 
> and transmit it to you. The actual form of the data may change during 
> the transmission process. eg. from words to ascii code to binary and 
> back. When you read the words on your screen you will hopefully 
> understand what I am writing and have gained some information.  The 
> quality of the "conversion to data"/transmission/"decoding of data"  
> process can be measured by how close your understanding/information 
> corresponds to mine.
>
> Only people can process information - computers only process data - 
> the most elegant of charts/graphs convey no information whatsoever to 
> a blind person. The single piece of data "car" can provide information 
> to anyone who can read English. Even more so if they knew that this 
> was the answer to the question "How are we going to get to the 
> shopping centre at lunchtime?"
>
> Then the IT people came along and hijacked the words "information" and 
> "data" so that they could use the term Information Technology when 
> referring to a system that only processes data.
>
> They said that Data was raw facts - being carefull not to define 
> exactly what a raw fact is.
>
> They said that Information was data that had been processed to make it 
> more usefull - being carefull not to state how anyone could understand 
> anything from a carefully sorted and summarised list stored on a file 
> server.
>
> Mike Brookes
> Chief cook and bottlewasher - Copperfield College
> (Confusionism is our favourite religion)
>
>
> murch at tpg.com.au wrote:
>
>> Is someone able to give me a succint definition of each and hence the 
>> distinct difference between the two.  This is a source of strong 
>> debate in another study method.  Email me direct if you do not want 
>> to clutter up the list.  Thanks in advance
>> Anne Mirtschin
>> Hawkesdale p12 College
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> IPM Mailing List kindly supported by
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> Authority and
> http://www.vitta.org.au  - VITTA Victorian Information Technology 
> Teachers Association Inc
>

-- 
If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in.

Peter Ruwoldt