Where does stream collide?

In computer science a stream is a sequence of data elements made available over time, read or written one element after another rather than held all at once in memory. The referent is an ordered, often unbounded flow of records: bytes from a file or socket, rows from a sensor, events from a log. Babcock, Babu, Datar, Motwani, and Widom set out the model in 2002, where a data stream arrives continuously, cannot be stored in full, and must be queried as it passes, often over a sliding window. What matters is order and arrival time, not any physical channel. The word borrows the picture of flowing water, but the thing that flows is information, and the questions are about throughput and staleness, not discharge and gradient.[1]

Unit

An ordered, possibly unbounded sequence of data elements

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Throughput, latency, and window size over the arriving element sequence

In psychology the stream of consciousness is the continuous, ever-changing flow of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that makes up a person's inner life. William James coined the phrase in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, arguing that consciousness is not built from discrete separable ideas but runs on like a river, never the same twice and never truly broken into parts. The referent is one mind's subjective experience across time, and the claim is about its felt continuity. This is a metaphor doing descriptive work, not a measured quantity. It shares the image of a current with the hydrological meaning and the ordered-in-time quality with the data meaning, but its subject is private experience, which neither of those touches.[2]

Unit

The continuous flow of one mind's thoughts and sensations

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Introspective description; the construct resists direct quantification