Monthly Archive for June, 2008

I’m not sure why I find them funny, but I do. I was searching for a bbq related one for Mark, but didn’t come across one. However, this one gets the right kind of message across!

Food for thought from Wired: what happens now we are beyond inundated with data.

• Can the standard hypothesise, model, test approach to science continue to work? (e.g. Google doesn’t understand web quality or languages, but there’s enough out there to let it model them effectively). But what if we find lots of things (patterns, clusters) that we don’t know how to understand?
• We can use satellite images to generate crop predictions (more effectively than surveys).
• The Large Hadron Collider will produce 10 Petabytes of data each second – Google processes 20 Petabytes each day.
• “We detected a gastrointestinal outbreak in Korea,” Mansfield says. “I called my boss, and he asked me, ‘When did it happen?’”. Korea is 13 hours ahead of Washington. So Mansfield simply answered: “Tomorrow.”
• Lowest airfare prices are normally between eight and two weeks before departure (based on a trawl of 175 billion US fares)
• A terabyte of text is more than all the words you’ll hear in your lifetime (unless you are married to an Italian insert suitable stereotype).

Given that I try and have things like email alerts turned off when I am in the office, I guess I have to agree with a lot of the thinking around multi-tasking in this article. I need focused time to work on “thinking” problems; operational issues tend to be dealt with a short, blitty sequence of emails, discussions and phone calls.