From the May 26 issue of the Economist: “In A short story called ‘On Exactitude in Science’, Jorge Luis Borges described an empire in which cartographers became so obsessive that they produced a map as big as the empire itself. Continue reading
James Taylor: “For all the focus on visualization and ad-hoc queries in Big Data systems, the end result is often going to be automation – a Decision Management system. Continue reading
Today in 1896, Charles Dow published the first edition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Continue reading
MercuryNews.com: “With 70 percent of its more than 600 million members outside the United States,Facebook is creating its own foreign service, hiring a network of ambassadors from India to Ireland to represent the Palo Alto-based social network with foreign governments and cultures.
Facebook’s new global policy team will monitor the local political landscape and act as multilingual, TV-friendly communicators in countries and for cultures that, in many cases, have very different values and laws about privacy and personal communications than the U.S.
Facebook is confronting its emergence as a global organization whose membership is much larger than the population of most countries, and whose technology can antagonize both Middle Eastern dictators and European democracies fretful about privacy. The international directors of policy, as Facebook calls them, will grapple with those challenges.”
Amazon.com now sells more Kindle books than print books. The press release says: “Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.”
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, 1840
Today in 1844, Samuel Morse sent the the message “What Has God Wrought” to officially open the first telegraph line, between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, launching an industry and ending a rocky journey that began with the 1837 resolution by the U.S. House of Representatives requesting the Treasury Secretary to recommend how “a system of telegraphs for the United States” should be established.
Today marks the centenary of the official dedication of the New York Public Library. The ceremony was presided over by President William Howard Taft and was attended by Governor John Alden Dix and Mayor William J. Gaynor. Continue reading
Today in 1973, twenty-seven-year-old Bob Metcalfe turned on his IBM Selectric, “pulled out a wad of Ko-Rec-Type, snapped on an Orator ball, and banged out the memo inventing Ethernet,” at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Continue reading
Sixty years ago today, the IBM 701 was formally announced. Its official name was the Defense Calculator, “specifically selected to appeal to the patriotism of the older Watson and to avoid the use of the unacceptable word, computer,” according to Emerson Pugh in Building IBM. Continue reading
Today is World Metrology Day. The press release says that it “has become an established annual event during which more than eighty states celebrate the impact of measurement on our daily lives, no part of which is untouched by this essential, and largely hidden, aspect of modern society.” Continue reading
The Story of Information 