From the Archives: “My God, it Talks!”

Posted on June 25, 2012 by GilPress

Actor portraying Alexander Graham Bell in an AT&T promotional film (1926)

Today in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell gave a public demonstration of  his new invention, the telephone, at the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “Bell demonstrated three induction telephones to a select jury that included Sir William Thomson, perhaps the best-known British electrical scientist and Dom Pedro, emperor of Brazil. It made an enormous hit: Dom Pedro expressed everyone’s astonishment with the new machine by exclaiming (so legend has it), ‘My God, it talks!'”

Posted in Telephone, This day in information | 3 Comments

Keeping America Informed

Posted on June 23, 2012 by GilPress

Today in 1860, the United States Congress established the Government Printing Office. Congress passed the Joint Resolution (No. 25) which directed the Superintendent of Public Printing “to have executed the printing and binding authorized by the Senate and House of Representatives, the executive and judicial departments, and the Court of Claims,” and authorized him to “contract for the erection or purchase of the necessary buildings, machinery, and materials for that purpose.” Joint Resolution 25 stipulated that the new office would begin its working life on March 4, 1861, the first day of the new Presidential administration.

Posted in Print, This day in information | 1 Comment

The Probability of Common Sense

Posted on June 22, 2012 by GilPress

 

The Great French mathematician Laplace wrote, “The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus.” Voltaire, his much older contemporary, added, “Common sense is not so common.–John Allen Paulos, Once Upon a Number

Posted in Quotes, Statistics | 1 Comment

The Google Turing Doodle

Posted on June 22, 2012 by GilPress

Explanation here

Posted in Computer history | 2 Comments

Big Data in Egypt Around 3100 B.C.E.

Posted on June 22, 2012 by GilPress

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 object that the ancient Egyptians were able to write very large numbers.” See here for the specific Hieroglyphs.

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Imagining Television, 1908

Posted on June 18, 2012 by GilPress

Today in 1908, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton published a letter in the journal Nature titled “Distant Electric Vision” in which he envisioned television as it was developed three decades later. He wrote: “Possibly no photoelectric phenomenon at present known will provide what is required in this respect, but should something suitable be discovered, distant electric vision will, I think, come within the region of possibility.”

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Social Media Decoder

Posted on June 17, 2012 by GilPress

Posted in Infographics, Social Networks | Leave a comment

The Future of Mobile

Posted on June 16, 2012 by GilPress

Posted in Infographics, Mobile, Predictions, The InfoStory Quant | Leave a comment

How Wikipedia Writers View the World

Posted on June 16, 2012 by GilPress

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 about a particular place, to see whether the writers have a generally positive or negative sentiment toward the place at that time.

The result is “an interesting historical atlas of the rise of globalization and warfare….Leetaru said his work was meant to be a snapshot of how Wikipedia writers of today view the world, and not a decisive verdict of history. Examining the content of books and other print media written over a longer period might well register different, and changing, sentiments about historical events over time.” In the time-lapse movie below, each location is plotted against the date referenced and cross referenced when mentioned with other locations. The sentiment of the reference is expressed from red to green to reflect negative to positive.

Posted in Big Data, Textual Analysis | 1 Comment

First Sound on Film Demonstration

Posted on June 9, 2012 by GilPress

Poster for Warner Bros.’ Don Juan (1926), the first major motion picture to premiere with a full-length synchronized soundtrack

Ninety years ago today, Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner publicly demonstrated for the first time a motion picture with a soundtrack optically recorded directly onto the film. In the first sounds ever publicly heard from a composite image-and-audio film, Helena Tykociner, the inventor’s wife, spoke the words, “I will ring,” and then rang a bell. Next, Ellery Paine, head of University of Illinois’ Department of Electrical Engineering (where Tykociner worked), recited the Gettysburg Address. A dispute between Tykociner and University of Illinois president David Kinley over patent rights to the process thwarted its commercial application.

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