Does Human Knowledge Double Every 5 Years?

Identity Management and Human Knowledge

Identity Management (IDM) is a discipline that tries to supervise how passwords are protected and verified, how IT departments decide what files you have access to, etc.

It's a new field--they're still debating the name, they haven't really defined the limits, and they don't know where the concept should sit inside organisations. Perfect for what we're doing here. We've looked at very long time series, for things such as Mars and Alzheimer's Disease and battlefield injuries. We've looked at timelines for fairly new fields, such as nanotechnology. Here is a field that is just being born.

The first academic work starts to appear in 2000, according to Scirus, and there are only 612 academic publications with the phrase "identity management" in the title, abstract or text overall. Truly nascent.

There have been 1,172 patents filed with the phrase "identity management" in the title, abstract or text overall.

In the extended post below, I show the figures and explain a bit more about how I calculate the compound annual growth rate, and show an alternative means of calculating it.

Using the method I've employed throughout this weblog, the growth rate for academic publications is 34.93%, which would double every 2.31 years, and the growth rate for patent applications is 32.93%, which would double every 2.44 years. and I would then write 'Hooray! We have another winner!'

But the alternative means of calculating growth would look even better, showing growth in academic publications of 71.54% and a doubling time of 1.28 years, and for patents, CAGR of 71.37% and a doubling time of 1.29 years.

I'm going to stick with my method, but if you want to recalculate all of the figures, the tools to do so are here. Click to see the numbers and the explanation.

Two New Sectors To Measure

The project that called me away from this explored the growth of two new 'disciplines'--identity management and information assurance. Both are attempts to put strategic management protocols around all the work that is going on in subsectors relating to passwords, permissions, hand-offs of responsibilities between websites and organisations, etc. They're both new, and they both deal with subsectors that they want to 'control' (i.e., have oversight responsibility for). So I've been exposed to information on the growth of both of them and other sectors as well, such as biometrics.

The next three posts will look at knowledge growth in these sectors. Since two of them were essentially invented after 9/11, the time series will be blessedly short.

Human Knowledge Doubles

The question is how quickly. Here's yet another summary of what is in this weblog. Since April, we have shown that primary evidence of human knowledge, as shown in patents and academic publication, doubles at different rates for different sectors, ranging from 2 years for nanotechnology to 21 years for other sectors.

Secondary evidence, such as the number of university students and funding for research, varies by country. The OECD has reduced government funding for research (and the growth in patents and students in scientific disciplines) has dropped to zero. China and India, among others, are funding research and encouraging students to enter scientific fields, and they are seeing rapid gowth in publications, patents, research funding and students.

But the growth of Asian knowledge engines has not yet replaced the flattening of the growth curve in the developed world. This has led to uneven growth in knowledge--in sexy sectors like nanotechnology, growth is very rapid. In other areas, such as Alzheimer's Disease, it is not as rapid as one would think.

Well, I had a plan...

I have been hijacked away from this project for two months, working on a very interesting project called Blindside, which had the benefit of having a paycheck attached to it. It also is tangentially related to what I am doing here, as my next few posts will show.

No reason why you should care about any of the above (but do follow the link if you're interested in how technology relates to UK government, information assurance issues and identity management), but it has caused me to rethink my scheduling for this. I'm going to do more primary research--maybe through the summer--and then tie it up with a couple of really brilliant think pieces and try to sell it as a book.

I'd like to welcome the flood (well, trickle) of readers who have actually found this weblog--I assume it's academic assignments that lead you here. I hope you feel free to comment or ask questions.

Anyway, back to work.