Pulling Action Out of Information

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American writer and philosopher. "An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage." -- Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. Do we already have a cure for cancer lurking somewhere in the huge mass of uncorrelated medical data accumulated in books, journals, and computers worldwide? How about a solution for global hunger? Or a way to knit broken bones in days? These may all sound like fantasies to you, but some scientists suspect such solutions might already exist...if we could just fit the data together correctly. But our ability to accumulate data has long since outstripped our ability to digest and correlate it. Worse, no single person … [Read more...]