Talk:2739: Data Quality
Hash tables aren't lossy, maybe Randall means hash functions? Barmar (talk) 17:06, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- I was thinking more a (subset of) a Rainbow table, than an associative array... Although such things tend not to preserve/respect item order (in reading, writing and altering in general), which is potentially information-lossy. 172.69.79.185 18:50, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- Hash tables have an ultra-low collision rate, as compared to the transforms used in packetwise error-correction... Since the comic is primarily focused on contrasting media fidelity with direct alteration of the content, ciphers seem a less direct association than content distribution networks? Given the context presented, my immediate association was the use of both piece & whole-pack hash verification, which has a collision rate so low terms like "number of particles in the universe" start entering the conversation. Upon further consideration, I wonder if Randall is referring to plain old CRC32 hash checking? Or the SHA hashes commonly used to verify disc downloads? (If it passes SHA *and* torrent content checking, I'd say you've probably got better chances of 1:1 integrity, than any original medium has of retaining it?)
- ProphetZarquon (talk) 22:51, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- Maybe it was to be about cuckoo filters, which are probabilistic data structure alternative to classic Bloom filter, which are based on space-efficient variants of cuckoo hashing? --JakubNarebski (talk) 14:05, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
- Hash tables don't have to store the original data at all, technically; they are commonly done as hash table->KEY:DATA or hash table->KEY:Pointer to data (or suchlike), but hash table->present is a valid hashing scheme, which results in a likely verification that you have the right data (but not guarunteed because collisions) but no way of reconstructing the data itself. Mneme (talk) 02:25, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
GIF's aren't lossy either, though often other formats can't be converted to GIF without discarding information. Bemasher (talk) 18:27, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- I think that's the point. 172.68.50.203 20:12, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- GIFs are lossy in the very act of creating them: the actual colors of the real object have to be smashed down into (I think it’s) 256 different colors, resulting in an image that even human perception recognizes as crappy. Even the so-called ‘lossless’ formats such as PNG are lossy in the act of creation, just not as drastically as GIFs. A truly ‘lossless’ format would have to specify the exact intensity of every wavelength of electromagnetic radiation emanating from every atom of the original object. Good luck with that. 172.71.151.99 01:00, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
- It's subjective whether formats (even .gif) can be recognised as 'crappy'. The display format may further tune down everything so that something defined with 65536 colours is more like 256, or it could work well with any given stippling/halftoning/dithering to produce something more like the better original than the file data strictly allows (even from 6bits-per-pixel, or 3) when viewed at sufficient remove. And a .gif of a block-coloured diagram is notably better than a typical .jpg of one, despite the technically superior palette the later has. (Nobody says that an image has to be from a real-life subject, with all kinds of missing data, such as photons thst happen to hit the gap between CCD pixels but might be considered important and might well have been captured with the Mk 1 Eyeball and significantly 'noticed' by the nerves and ultimately the respective processing usters of the brain behind it... Which has a complete set of 'analogue lossiness' to it, anyway.) 172.71.242.203 16:37, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Someone needs to add a table describing all the formats in the chart. Barmar (talk) 19:29, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- Yep. It needs a description of each point on the graph. I'm on my phone though... and feeling lazy after shoveling snow.
- ProphetZarquon (talk) 22:54, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- I'm tempted, but it would require learning how to MAKE a table, and my ideal table would be 5 columns, TOO WIDE!, LOL! Table label, what scale (data quality or item quality), a description (the main thing needed), the cat version from the Title Text, and finally how the cat example applies/parallels the comic version. I could lose the "what scale" as only one isn't data quality, and I guess I could see two tables, Comic and Title/Cat (adding to cat also the Table Label column).NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:38, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
- Tables are actually quite easy to do (if you don't intend to do much complex stuff), but also very easy to slightly mess up (temporarily - Preview is your friend, especially if you need to rowspan/colspan at all). For this purpose, nothing fancy. Header row, other rows, nothing particar special in alignment, sorting, colour (foreground and/or background), etc. It'll be fairly intelligently fitted to the browser window, according to the contents.
- However, here (when you might have large amounts of narrative in one column), perhaps just ";"-prefix a mini-header (can include "(in Title text)" or other shorthand details) and then have ":"-prefixed 'definition' prose that rambles on about each item in freehand text. I would suggest that's as complicated as you need it, no real need for tabling at all. (But, without wanting to show you how to use a hammer, then making every problem now look like a nail to you, I think you could handle learning the basic table-markup/learning where to get the more complex stuff. So there you are.) 172.70.91.197 16:54, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
- I'm tempted, but it would require learning how to MAKE a table, and my ideal table would be 5 columns, TOO WIDE!, LOL! Table label, what scale (data quality or item quality), a description (the main thing needed), the cat version from the Title Text, and finally how the cat example applies/parallels the comic version. I could lose the "what scale" as only one isn't data quality, and I guess I could see two tables, Comic and Title/Cat (adding to cat also the Table Label column).NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:38, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
It seems there are two definitions of data quality that Randall is juxtaposing for comic effect: in one, quality data is data that represents the original phenomenon without error or degradation. In the other, he's applying the concept of quality to the phenomenon itself – data is better if it describes a better phenomenon. My cat is better than your cat, therefore data about my cat is better than data about your cat. I'd like to see this concept in the explanation of the page but don't know how to add into the flow of the current text.K95 (talk) 19:33, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- I already put that in earlier. See the second sentence of the second paragraph, I called it "general excellence". Barmar (talk) 21:45, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
"Data are transferred in bits"...Hear, hear. I'm over 60, I still remember of stuff that is called "analog" ;-) -- 172.71.160.37 (talk) 20:07, 17 February 2023 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
- Note, however, that we are transferring data digitally for over four thousand years. That's how long is technically possible to make a lossless copy of written story. -- Hkmaly (talk) 22:19, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- That's only if you're lucky enough to be still reading it in the original
Klingonlanguage, etc... 172.69.79.184 22:53, 17 February 2023 (UTC)- "It is a Klingon name!" 😾
- Transcription definitely suffers from a Darmok & Jalad type contextual dependency.
- ProphetZarquon (talk) 22:59, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
- That's only if you're lucky enough to be still reading it in the original
I think that "Better data" is a reference to gainful compression, and that "my better cat" doesn't specifically refer to the author but to the lyrical subject (as in poems). 172.68.50.203 20:12, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
TIFF can contain a JPEG, which makes it technically a lossy format. 172.69.109.33 23:26, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
- And an actual JPEG may be lossless. (I still remember JPEG2000 being 'a thing', amongst the other situations mentioned there, but that wasn't even what I was thinking of whn I started this reply!) Yet, I think we're talking broad sweeps here. Not strict accuracy. There's Randall's trolling of us with GIF as 'lossy', frexample... 172.69.79.159
The opening sentence of the explanation, about data loss in transit, seems a bit irrelevant to the comic, which is only concerned with lossiness in information due to format. 172.70.91.197 10:40, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
- Very relevent to the parity ones. (Leads me to believe it's a scale of "amount of provided data to represent original data". You send less than you really ought to, the more left you go, you send more than you should technically need to as you go to the right. Checksums add a little bit extra, once you get to them, and correcting checksums (hamming bits, etc) are significantly extra overhead. The whole 'better data' is basically "send a similar amount of newer information, or even more, on top of the original".) 162.158.34.71 12:55, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
- But that's about adding information to the file (which happens to be mitigation against the potential future loss of data) - not directly about the loss of data itself. 172.71.178.65 11:23, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Since when is CRC-32 obsolete? 162.158.238.6 08:24, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
