The Republicans were better at GOTV in 2004 because of something they called Voter Vault, a massive computer database stuffed with individual bits of information about individual voters; not just their voting history - that's just the start - but also demographic and consumer data about individual voters in individual households.
Abstraction can help a person piece together individual pieces of information or evidence and better enable a person to see the big picture of what the collective information portends.
When young analysts are trained on Wall Street, they often read the CFA Institute's standards and practices handbook, which declares: "The idea behind the mosaic theory is that each individual piece of information is nonmaterial by itself: an individual piece of information would not move the price of the security if disseminated in a public press release.
Google used to be essentially an empiricist machine, crafted with almost no intrinsic knowledge, but endowed with an enormous capacity to learn associations between individual bits of information.
"Rather than relying on individual Freedom of Information requests, we think FOI should be built into contracts when they are agreed.
Ideally, they should anticipate all of the individual items of information that we will wish to find, and how we might choose to combine them.
Compaq, too, has tried to move into the huge field of supplying companies with packages of hardware, software and services instead of selling them individual pieces of information technology.
While the daily toll is noted by the news media in headlines and video clips, many Americans have a hard time incorporating these individual pieces of information into a coherent image over time.
Government officials briefed on the matter said the breach, which was confirmed in April, involved the loss of a drive containing a terabyte of computerized data, which could include millions of individual pieces of information, including personal information about one of then Vice President Al Gore's three daughters.
"Archaeology without ages is like a jigsaw with the interlocking edges removed – you have lots of individual pieces of information but you can't fit them together to produce the big picture," Dr Armitage said.
