1.

DIGITIZING LETTERS, NUMBERS AND OBJECTS

USING BINARY CODES
Real-world information comes from many sources and in a variety of forms. Converting
information into data that a computer can store and understand presents many challenges. For
example, how can an audio recording, or a seventeenth-century Dutch oil painting or a full-
color page from a textbook or even a fingerprint be stored inside of a computer.

1.1 DATA VS INFORMATION

The major economies of our time have shifted from a primarily industrial base toward an
economy that is based on the generation, capture, and analysis of digital information. The
resulting social and economic climate is known as the Information Age; a period of time that
is characterized by massive amounts of digital data that are easily accessible, quickly
transmitted, and subject to meaningful analysis. Personal computers gained widespread
adoption in the late 1970s and this, coupled with the rapid development of the Internet in the
mid-1990s, served to bring digital data and digital computation into the cultural mainstream.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines data as “the quantities, characters, or symbols
on which operations are performed by computers and other automatic equipment, and which
may be stored or transmitted in the form of electrical signals, records on magnetic tape or
punched cards, etc.”
The OED also makes a distinction between information and data when it defines information
as “knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event; that of
which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news” and adds that information is “that which is
obtained by the processing of data.” Consider the following examples that distinguish
between information and data. Your credit card number is information that is turned into data
when it is stored on the back of your card. The encoding of this information may take the
form of a strip of magnetically charged particles, a one dimensional bar code, a two-
dimensional bar code, or even as a pattern of etchings in a radio-frequency identification
(RFID) chip. Your name is also a piece of information that is turned into data when it is
stored in a computing system. The encoding may be electrical charges stored on a digital
circuit or even as a one- or two-dimensional bar code on the back of an identification badge.

S.No DATA INFORMATION

Data is a variables that helps to

1 Information is a meaningful data
develop ideas/conclusions

2 Data is a text and numerical values Information is refined form of actual data

3 Data doesn’t rely on Information Information relies on Data

Bits and Bytes are the measuring Information is measured in meaningful

4
unit of data units like time, quantity, etc.
 Data can be easily structured as Information can also be structured as
5
Tabular data, Graph and Data tree Language, Ideas, Thoughts

Information carries a meaning that

Data does not have any specific
6 has been assigned by interpreting
purpose
data
7 It is low-level knowledge It is the second level of knowledge

Data does not directly helps in Information directly helps in

decision making decision making
8
Data is collection of facts, Information puts those facts into context
which itself have no
9 meaning
Example of data is student test Example of information is average
10 score. score of class that is derived from
given data.

1.2 TWO TYPES OF DATA

There are two different types of data: continuous and discrete. Data is continuous if there are
an infinite number of possible values for an individual datum, whereas data is discrete if there
are a finite number of possible values. Continuous data is usually associated with
measurements involving the physical or real world, whereas discrete data is usually
associated with things that can be counted.

Orange
As an example, consider measuring the weight of an orange. Although the orange could
weigh exactly 200 grams, it might also weigh 229.3 grams or 229.31533 grams or even
229.31533480185993 grams. The weight of an orange is an example of continuous data since
there are an infinite number of possible values that might describe the weight of an orange.
On the other hand, consider asking your friends how many biological parents they have who
are still living. They may respond with the numbers 0 or 1 or 2. Since no person has more
than 2 biological parents, numbers larger than 2 are not possible and it should be obvious that
it is not possible to have a fractional number of living parents. The number of living parents
is an example of discrete data since there are only a finite number of values that describe this
situation. In electronics, a signal may be either analog or digital. An analog signal is an
encoding of continuous data, whereas a digital signal is an encoding of discrete data.
In digital systems, the smallest unit of data is known as a binary digit, or bit. At any point in
time, a bit can only take on one of two possible values: ON or OFF. You can think of a bit as
an extremely small battery that can be very quickly charged or discharged. When charged, the
bit is ON and when discharged, the bit is OFF. Mathematically speaking, a bit is usually
denoted as the value 0 when OFF and the value 1 when ON. Determining whether a bit is ON
or OFF is straightforward. Computing systems encode all information as a sequence of bits.
Pictures, sound, textbooks, and video are encoded as long sequences of bits. A sequence of
bits is commonly referred to as a bit string. Since the bits in the string are able to vary in the
values that they hold, some bits being 1 while other bits are 0, a bit string is able to display a
great number of different patterns. For a single bit (i.e., a bit string of length one), there are
only two patterns that the string could exhibit at any one point in time. The bit could either be
0 or 1. Consider, however, a string of two lightbulbs. How many different patterns could the
string exhibit? Two of the patterns are obvious: both lightbulbs could be 0 or both lightbulbs
could be 1. Two other patterns are also possible. The first light bulb could be 0 and the
second lightbulb could be 1. It is also possible that the first light bulb could be 1 and the
second lightbulb could be 0.

The four patterns that a string of two bits can exhibit are 00, 01, 10, and 11

There are eight patterns that a string of three bits can exhibit
There are eight patterns that a bit string of length three can exhibit at any one point in time.
More specifically, we note that the number of patterns that a bit string of length N can exhibit
is 2N.

Length of Bit String Number of Patterns

1 21 = 2

2 22 = 4

3 23 = 8

4 24 = 16
 5 25 = 32

8 28 = 256

N 2N

The number of patterns generated by bit strings.

1.3 DATA CAPACITY

Data encoding requires us to know how many bits are required to store a piece of
information. Consider the following scenario. You are given a list of all keyboard symbols
and you are also given a bit string of length three. Your task is to generate a unique bit pattern
for each of the symbols in your list. You begin with the symbol “A” and decide to encode this
symbol as 000. As you move through the alphabet, you choose to encode “B” as 001, “C” as
010, “D” as 011, “E” as 100, “F” as 101, “G” as 110, and “H” as 111. At this point you
realize that there are no patterns left to encode the remaining symbols of the keyboard and
hence a bit string of length three is not sufficient to encode one keyboard symbol. In general,
the number of bits required to store a piece of information is proportional to the number of
values that the information may take. A single day of the week can be encoded as a bit string
of length three since there are seven days in a week and there are eight patterns available. A
single month of the year can be stored in a bit string of length four since there are 12 months
in a year and 16 patterns available. Information that involves a large set of possible values
will therefore require longer bit strings to encode while information of little content can be
encoded in shorter bit strings. A byte is a bit string of length eight. A single byte, therefore, is
able to store 28 or 256 unique patterns. One other measure of data capacity is known as a
word, which is a unit of data capacity that is based on the hardware of a computing system.

Type of Information Number of Values Number of Bits

Coin toss 2 1

Day of week 7 3

Month of Year 12 4

Day of Month 31 5

Keyboard symbol -104 7

Day of Year 365 9

The approximate number of bits required to store various types of information

A word is a fixed-length sequence of bits that are processed as a single item by the
processor. The number of bits in a word varies by computing system but will typically
be a multiple of eight. You may have heard of 32 bit processors or 64 bit systems.
These phrases describe the word-length of a particular computing system. Common
word lengths include 8, 16, 32, and 64. Prefixes are used as multipliers to measure
very large data capacities and the symbol B is used to denote a single byte. The
computing industry uses terms such as kilobyte, megabyte, and gigabyte, and
corresponding symbols KB, MB, and GB as common measures of data capacity.

Prefix Symbol Power of 2 Decimal

Kilo K 210 103

Mega M 220 106

Giga G 230 109

Data capacity prefixes

Digital music players can record, store, and play back vast libraries of audio
recordings. Cell phones can store and display high-quality video streams, while other
systems gather and analyze massive amounts of scientific data for weather prediction
or advancing scientific knowledge. The data capacity required by various types of
information varies since the richness of the information content varies by type.

Type of Information Data Capacity (Bytes)

Keyboard symbol 1 KB
10 page paper 40 KB
5 minutes MP3 audio recording 5 MB
High resolution digital picture 5 MB
CD audio disk 800 MB
DVD 8.5 GB
Amount of memory required to store certain types of information