Pile of Index Cards

I have been thinking that my experience about information management can be expressed in a single equation. My experience about information (or a stuff) is,

• If a stuff is far from me, I don’t access (dependency on spacial distance)
• I easily forget about a stuff (dependency on elapsed time)
• Frequency of access drastically decrease with space and time
• If I don’t see a stuff, I forget it (dependency on visibility)

I assume they are represented as following simple equation,

where A is frequency of access (or just “accessibility”), V is visibility (0

In case you see it (V = 1)	In case you don’t see it (V = 0.1)

This equation is visually understand through above two graphs. Assume you are at origin (x=0, t=0). Accessibility is maximum at the origin, and it decrease exponentially with spatial distance and elapsed time. The left graph is for V = 1, that is you see a stuff all time. Something just in front of you. Then the accessibility is the highest. The right graph is for V = 0.1, that is you don’t see a stuff. For example, a stuff in a closed drawer. In this case, the accessibility is almost zero even though the stuff is spatially and temporally close to you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 11:49 am and is filed under Discovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.