Are you drowning in data? Overwhelmed by e-mail, DVD's, the Internet, GPS, digital phones, HDTV, and hand-held computers? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, what we do to manage the massive amount of information we encounter everyday. Can we transform it into knowledge? Wisdom? Also, taming the algorithm. And James Gleick on why everything's speeding up.

Science writer James Gleick tells Steve Paulson that humans love to go fast, and that technology has helped us speed up almost every phase of our lives. Gleick's book "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything" is now out in paperback. Also, Doug Gordon has a few highly produced suggestions about how we can give ourselves more time.

Mathematician Keith Devlin tells Judith Strasser that data's not enough. We need to process it into information, then transform the information into useful knowledge. He gives examples from air disasters to ATM machines of what can happen when we don't understand data. His new book is "Infosense: Turning Information into Knowledge." Also, David Berlinski tells Jim Fleming that an algorithm is simply a set of instructions, and that we use them for everything. Berlinski is the author of "A Tour of the Calculus" and "The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea That Rules the World."

Historian John Keay tells Jim Fleming about the Great Arc at the Meridian - a cartographic exercise of extreme precision undertaken by the British in India. He says it was an amazing scientific feat, which quickly became completely obsolete. His book is The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named. Also, Miles Harvey, author of "The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime," tells Steve Paulson about the allure of ancient maps. He says famous explorers like Walter Raleigh made things up and eagerly stole maps from other countries.

Distribution dates:

• week of 01/07/2001 - hour 2