The Half-Way Point - Five of Ten is My Guiding Principles
Moore’s Law & The Ripple Theory
The other day, I stated my creed. I believe in the Power of Public Records.
From there, I am guided by two principles. Moore’s Law and the Ripple Theory. One I made up, the other I kinda extrapolated.
Moore’s Law is a real thing. As laid out by a giant of the chip business, Gordon Moore, it both described advances in transistor usage and predictions on future use. The crux of the law is that it would be more and more possible to use more and more transistors in the same amount of space. Wikipedia illustrates this on their Moore Law page with an image of an 1982 luggable Osborne computer against a 2007 iPhone. Moore’s Law explains how so much more computer power could be in that tiny phone compared to that clunky version of a PC. In the real world, Moore’s Law also means that computers continue to become faster and better. We get to do a lot with that faster and better.
What it means for me as a researcher is this. The world is at my fingertips. When I first started doing research on organized crime, I needed microfilm to find old newspaper articles. The past existed but it took a long time to find. Interestingly, Lexis/Nexis was developed by a paper company who saw way back, that computer searching would put an end to paper. Nexis made it possible to search across thousands of sources over many years in a blink. The only thing that slowed us down back then was the pace of our modems. The online world, no matter how limited, changed the way I could research.
As Moore foretold, micro-processor power took off, and things really changed over the 1990’s. It meant way more things to find online, and it meant it was way easier to find things online. What also changed greatly with the power of Moore’s Law was the way to search. When I first started searching, it took a bit of doo-dad, various search syntax, special language, to do things. In fact there were a lot of librarian types who felt the whole skill was the ability to understand the strange language of a service called Dialog. As computer power got better, searches became way more straightforward. My career is based on the fact that there is so much I can find, and it is so easy to search for it.
The Ripple Theory is my creation. If Moore’s Law’s gives me the resources to search, the Ripple Theory gives me the things to search. A ripple is an effect. Something dropped in the water or a breeze moved the water creates something. We call that something a ripple. When we see a ripple, we know something happened without having to have seen it happen. In life, we are surrounded by ripples. And I’m not talking karma or anything big. I mean that all sorts of things we do are like stones plopped in water. Some ripples are created because they are in the public interest or need; some we put out their ourselves. We make people publicly file a piece of paper on real property to ensure clarity of ownership. If you go bankrupt, you must disclose information to make it possible to discharge your debts. Public companies must provide various facts to protect investors. On the other hand, people just put it out there: professional histories on LinkedIn, political beliefs on Twitter, crazy teen escapades on Facebook. There is, of course, a middle ground. If you are in the public eye, famous for whatever reason, your ripples are exposed whether you want it or not.
There are ripples everywhere. My job as a researcher is to gather them in and make sense of what they mean.. We buy a house. The ripples we leave are a deed and maybe a mortgage loan. We apply for a credit card and a ripple is the address we supply. Establish a company and there is a filing. Put up a website and it’s there on the Internet. All these ripples are the building blocks for business background investigation.
The Ripple Theory gives me a lot of things to search. Moore’s Law makes it possible for me to do the searching in fast and furious ways. Along with the Power of Public Records, they make up the foundation of my practice and a great way to wrap up week one of the Blogger Challenge. Come back in a few days for number six.