In the first-ever survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that exclusively examines Twitter users, it was found that 8% percent of the American adults who use the Internet are Twitter users. “It is an online activity that is particularly popular with young adults, minorities, and those who live in cities.”
Today in 1968, Doug Engelbart demonstrated the oNLine System (NLS) to about one thousand technology specialists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference held by the American Federation of Information Processing. The demonstration introduced the first computer mouse, dynamic linking, e-mail, graphical user interfaces, hypertext, object addressing, and video teleconferencing.
The December issue of IEEE Spectrum has a great cover story on Ray Kurzweil’s failed predictions. Says John Renne: Continue reading
“Information isn’t always knowledge and usually falls far short of wisdom. Navigating the information hierarchy is harder than we would like to think and involves more uncertainty than we care to admit.” –David Alan Grier, Investing in Ignorance
[Congratulations to Professor Grier on his 60th essay for IEEE Computer]
Today in 1768, the first weekly installment of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in Edinburgh, Scotland. Continue reading
Today in 1965, Richard L.Wexelblat was the first candidate in a computer science program to complete a dissertation. Many doctorate candidates had performed computer-related work, but Wexelblat’s diploma, presented by the University of Pennsylvania, was the first one to carry the designation “computer science.”
Chris Preist and Paul Shabajee, University of Bristol: “Assuming that the average westerner’s media consumption moves fully online but does not rise substantially beyond current levels, and the global middle class reach western levels of consumption, the researchers estimate the overall demand to be 3,200 megabyte (MB) a day per person, totalling 2,570 exabytes per year by the world population in 2030.” [1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes]
Joseph Galarneau: “The power of the press can be dramatically limited when the power to the press is disconnected.” Continue reading
Bob Metcalfe interviewed in the Wall Street Journal about what he calls the “innovation bubble.” Metcalfe: “You don’t grow the economy by growing government… There are good ways and bad ways of [stimulating innovation] and in my new fifth career [on the faculty of University of Texas at Austin] I hope to help promote innovation and get it to work better.”
Andy McAfee on WikiLeaks: “‘Information wants to be free’ has become a silly phrase; ‘All information needs to be free’ is a stupid one.”
Brook Manville posting on Tom Davenport‘s blog on organizational judgment: “If we hope for better management of large-scale endeavors, our models will have to look beyond what it takes to inform individual, or even organizational, moves . We’ll need to enable cross-boundary judgment.”
The December issue of Communications of the ACM has an article on “Business Impact of Web 2.0 Technologies” by Stephen J. Andriole. As he correctly notes, there has been a lot of talk about the impact of Web 2.0 technologies (wikis, blogs, podcasts, social networks, virtual worlds, RSS filters) in the workplace but little published research on their contribution to corporate productivity and management. Continue reading
The Story of Information 