As you might imagine, in 8 months quite a lot has happened, and I’ve had quite a lot of thoughts that need to be written down and explored. I’m going to make an effort to get some of them down here over the next few weeks. I’m now living in Sydney, working for BVN Architecture as their computational designer, although I have a wonderful amount of freedom to define what that actually means. I’ve been blogging some of the projects internally and I’ll try and get some of them publicly visible as soon as I can. In the meantime here’s a project that I’ve been working on with two computer scientists at the University of Sydney: http://blog.bvn-usyd.com/ . It has some pretty heavy duty posts in there, but even if you just look at the pictures you might well learn something! (I certainly am!)

Then today I was walking through the park thinking about exactly what it is that I do, or would like to do (I’m still no closer to an answer on that one), and the word literacy came up again, but this time in a totally different context.

I was thinking about improving people’s technical literacy, and then realising that ‘technical’ was probably the wrong word to use, and that the right one is still a long way off a, subject for another day perhaps, but also that literacy as a general concept was a bit of a mystery to me.

On the surface it looks simple – the ability to read something, but this gets complicated by the fact that reading is so tightly associated with text.

However, you often hear people talking about ‘reading a drawing’ or ‘reading the mood in the room’ so reading must be a more widespread ability.

In ‘Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom‘, a paper about Russell Ackoff’s taxonomy of content of the human mind there is a staging between data, the raw stuff that comes in from our senses, up to wisdom, which can roughly be though of as the sum of a persons experiences up to that point (real or imagined). I’d posit the acton of reading to cover the first three of these steps, data [gathering], information [interpretation into 'thoughts'], and knowledge [storage, at least temporarily].

So in my imagined situation where I walk into the bar room just after another man, and he exchanges a few heated words with some others in the bar, and then turns and locks the door.

In my reading of this situation, I ought to get out of there as soon as I can, as there is goign to be a full on wild west brawl, but what steps am I going through?

Data, is me looking around and seeing the two opposing factions, and hearing their sounds. It’s tempting to say that I’d be hearing their words, and their tone, but these are a higher level of processing over and above the raw data coming from my ears and eyes.

The information stage would be be turning that raw signal into things like words and shapes, but I still haven’t ascribed meanings to them.

Now that I have that information, I can start to turn it into knowledge. The process doesn’t require any great proccesing to happen in the brain, but more just a job of matching up the prexisting symbols from my experiences, with the new inputs ready for to take the next step of understanding them.

For me, that is as far as reading goes. I’ve often read whole pages of text and come away with no recolection of what that text was actually about. So I’m not convinced that it’s necesary for there to be a level of understanding to be included in the reading process. However, I consider the concept of literacy to require that extra step of understanding.

To explain this, lest assume that I’m still standing up, halfway to the bar when the aforementioned situation unfolds arround me. In a microsecond, the first three steps happen, this is me reading the situation, and then I start to understand that this is a very bad place to be if I want to keep all my teeth. Now I can act on this and start running as fast as I can toward the back door of the bar!

Assuming that the back door is unlocked and I make it out alive, then I can add that experience to my wisdom, the store of situations and symbols to search against next time.

I’m not totally convinced by reading and literacy, being slightly different, but my gut feeling is that literacy is asscribed a slightly higher status than just reading. One can be highly literate, but it’s not often said that one is a good reader (after the age of about 8). So i’m going to stick with it for the moment, and hopefully it’ll make deciding on my grand direction a little easier!

Darts hero, Andy fordham turned up in a lecture i gave recently about genetic algorithms as the hill climbing pirate.This is an article about his diet !!