Category Archives: Big Data

IDC: IT Industry in 2013 (Infographic)

Posted on February 20, 2013 by

Source: Uploaded by user via IDC on Pinterest

Posted in Big Data, Infographics, Mobile, Stats | Leave a comment

Preserving Astronomy’s Photographic Legacy

Posted on February 12, 2013 by

From FierceBigData.com: “In a 2009 paper called ‘Preserving Astronomy’s Photographic Legacy: Current State and Future of North American Astronomical Plates,’ Wayne Osborn, department of physics at Central Michigan University, and Lee Robbins, department of astronomy at the University of Toronto, … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, Big Data, Digitization, Preservation | 1 Comment

Co-Inventor of Bar Code Dies

Posted on December 14, 2012 by

From the Associated Press: Norman Joseph Woodland, the co-inventor of the bar code that labels nearly every product in stores and has boosted productivity in almost every sector of commerce world-wide, has died. He was 91…. Woodland and Bernard Silver … Continue reading →

Posted in Barcode, Big Data, Internet of things, Retail | 1 Comment

Big Data in Egypt Around 3100 B.C.E.

Posted on June 22, 2012 by

King Narmer’s Macehead at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,  records the capture of 120,000 prisoners, 400,000 captive oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. I. Bernard Cohen in The Triumph of Numbers: “Perhaps the numbers are exaggerated, but we can, even so, learn from this … Continue reading →

Posted in Big Data, Museums, numbers | Leave a comment

How Wikipedia Writers View the World

Posted on June 16, 2012 by

Quentin Hardy reports in The New York Times that Kalev Leetaru, a researcher at the University of Illinois, has mined Wikipedia to reveal the connections between cities around the globe over time, focusing on the type of language used to talk … Continue reading →

Posted in Big Data, Textual Analysis | 1 Comment

Ray Bradbury 1920-2012

Posted on June 6, 2012 by

In 1950, typing rapidly on a pay-by-the-hour typewriter in UCLA’s library basement, Ray Bradbury completed in just nine days the first draft of what will become Fahrenheit 451. In the book, which was published in 1953, Bradbury described a society … Continue reading →

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Big Data, Books, Science | Leave a comment

Cattle Logs from 1882 to 2012

Posted on May 2, 2012 by

After seeing a card catalogue in the Iowa State University library in 1882,  Thomas B. Wales, the secretary of the Holstein-Friesian Association of America, applied the idea to the 40,000 animals in the Holstein-Friesian Herd Book. He estimated that the number … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Big Data, Digitization, Economic Impact, information organization, Social Impact | Leave a comment

Facebook for Cows?

Posted on March 24, 2012 by

Three updates on a previous blog post on connected cows and the Internet of Things:

Posted in Agriculture, Big Data, Internet of things | Leave a comment

Data Mania, 1971

Posted on March 20, 2012 by

“Too many information handlers seem to measure a man by the number of bits of storage capacity his dossier will occupy… The new information technologies seem to have given birth to a new social virus – ‘data mania.’ It symptoms are … Continue reading →

Posted in Big Data, Quotes, Social Impact | 1 Comment

The Ultimate Question

Posted on January 1, 2012 by

“[In Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,] a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings built a computer named Deep Thought to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When the answer was revealed … Continue reading →

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