Blog: Pete Loshin

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Guerilla Knowledge Processing

No matter what our job descriptions, most of what we do every day revolves around manipulating data and turning it into knowledge/intelligence. Enterprises routinely budget hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of thing, so we all know how difficult it can be.

But here's an example of how one guy turned his credit card statements into a vehicle for generating and tracking information--and the surprising discovery he made when the results didn't match his expectations. In A low-bandwidth, high-latency, high-cost, and unreliable data channel, this fellow, Ian Hixie, starts by noting that when he eats at a restaurant in the US, "you never pay what the bill says" because he always adds a tip. Thus, he concludes:

The net effect of this is that you basically get to decide how much you pay. Indeed, credit card bills at restaurants have a space where you fill in how much you want to pay.

The aha moment for Hixie came when he noticed that, to make things simple, he usually rounded this amount to a full dollar:

... there are data bits there, lying unused! It struck me that with every single restaurant transaction I could set the cents field to some number under my control, thus allowing me to communicate with myself at a later date!

Ian goes on to describe a protocol for encoding several different pieces of information about the restaurant into the decimal values available ($.00 through $.99), and--if you want to know how it worked, you'll have to go read Ian's article.

But what's really relevant here is that Ian did some applied business information processing by:

1. First noticing that there were some bits available and under his control
2. Deciding that he could encode some information into those bits in a way that he could use...
3. ...to recover and use that information later on.

Ian discovered a bug in the system, but he's also conjectured a reason for the bug as well as a fix for it; hopefully we'll hear more about the second version of this system--and possible other uses for these data bits.

Where else are there opportunities in your work (or personal) life for adding value through knowledge processing?

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