Category Archives: Big Data
IDC: IT Industry in 2013 (Infographic)
Source: Uploaded by user via IDC on Pinterest
Preserving Astronomy’s Photographic Legacy
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
Big Data in Egypt Around 3100 B.C.E.
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
How Wikipedia Writers View the World
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
Ray Bradbury 1920-2012
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
Cattle Logs from 1882 to 2012
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
Facebook for Cows?
Three updates on a previous blog post on connected cows and the Internet of Things:
Data Mania, 1971
“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
The Ultimate Question
“[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