February 12, 2010
If this increase in broadband speeds is correct, the Internet will (finally) begin to make inroads on the number of bytes people receive, not just the number of words. According to our estimates, average effective bandwidth on the Internet was too low to send many bytes, compared with TV. (Remember how awful YouTube videos were in early 2008?) Partly this is because bandwidth in the last mile, which this report apparently covers, is not the only limit on throughput. Latency delays, limits on originating sites, and pauses by users all reduce average throughput. (This is very visible when I surf from UCSD, where I have speeds above 100 Mbps to my desktop. I still encounter delays.)
US Broadband Speeds Rose 28% in 2009SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., February 9, 2010 – The US residential broadband speeds continue to increase, albeit at a slower rate than in 2008. Between year-end 2008 and year-end 2009, downstream bandwidth rose by 28%, reports In-Stat http://www.in-stat.com.
via In-Stat – Press Releases.
The Internet already has a substantial fraction of average word consumption, because of the higher words-per-minute of reading over radio and TV.
If anyone knows of reliable data on average effective home Internet speeds, please send them along.
Leave a Comment » | 
How Much Information? | 
Permalink
Posted by art2science
January 25, 2010
Roger will be appearing at a UCSD colloquium on Wednesday, February 3, to discuss the results of the HMI project.
The event will be held in the Media Center / Communications building on campus (map here), and the nearest parking is just across the way on Muir College Drive. He’s scheduled to speak at 12:40PM in room MCC 201.
Here’s the official blurb:
How much information do Americans consume? At the start we have to define information, consume, and much. All three definitions are unavoidably controversial. …
I will present and discuss our results, most of which are available in our report at hmi.ucsd.edu. We didn’t have strong expectations of what we would find, but we were surprised anyway. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | How Much Information? | Permalink
Posted by Blake Ellison
January 24, 2010
Hello! Blake Ellison here, and I’m Roger’s newest grad student assistant. I’m interested in video games (both academically and personally), so I’m helping the team try to make sense of our findings that video games make up a huge proportion of our data consumption (when bytes are used as the measure).
A simple reason why video games comprise so much of our information is the sheer volume of pixels that get transmitted to your eyeballs. A game running at 60 frames per second at 1080i on a current-generation console like the Xbox 360 is pumping out a huge amount of data. That’s to say nothing of hardcore PC gamers, who have what amount to miniature supercomputers sitting on their desktops.
Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo 5
These ’supercomputers’ don’t have all that power simply to push out 1920 x 1080 pixels 60 times per second. They have the power to do all that and make it look good. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | How Much Information? | Tagged: computer games | Permalink
Posted by Blake Ellison
January 12, 2010
By CHRISTOPHER DREW Published: January 10, 2010
HAMPTON, Va. — As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.
Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.
via Military Deluged in Drone Intelligence – NYTimes.com.
[Actually I'm surprised that the 24 multiplier is not higher, especially since some drones operate at night. On average, only 24 cameras are running.]
Leave a Comment » | How Much Information?, Semiconductor & electronics industries | Permalink
Posted by art2science
January 5, 2010
We document a huge amount of information in our report How Much Information 2009 . Personally I find the 100,000 words per day as startling as the 34 gigabytes. Our report does not go into it, but there is some literature on how constant streams of information affect people. I’ve asked Lin Ong (RA) to pull together some articles, but here is a recent publication about the myth of multitasking, i.e. the claim that people can do several things at once and do them all well. The underlying research the BBC discusses is published here. (fee or license required)
The people who engage in media “multitasking” are those least able to do so well, according to researchers. A survey defined two groups: those who routinely consumed multiple media such as internet, television and mobile phones, and those who did not. In a series of three classic psychology tests for attention and memory, the “low multitaskers” consistently outdid their highly multitasking counterparts. The results are reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
via BBC NEWS | Technology | Multitaskers bad at multitasking.
A Lifehacker column interviews another author on the subject. A psychiatrist with a book on the human effects of overstimulation is discussed in a Business Week column for the frazzled.
Leave a Comment » | How Much Information? | Tagged: cognition, multitasking | Permalink
Posted by art2science
January 5, 2010
The world is awash in data…. a lot of it can be re-used for other purposes. (Anecdote: Much of the early data on sea temperatures comes from the British Navy, whose ships routinely measured a bucket of seawater every morning. Not exactly precise data, and using it requires estimates of things like how long the bucket sat on deck before being measured, and the accuracy of thermometers in the British Navy in 1800.)
The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.
….
The trove of images is “really useful,” said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.
via C.I.A. Revives Data-Sharing Program With Environmental Scientists – NYTimes.com.
Query: What is Google doing to archive its maps and satellite imagery? I can’t imagine they get thrown away, but keeping full resolution versions of everything would be expensive.
Leave a Comment » | How Much Information?, The world | Tagged: data ->information ->knowledge | Permalink
Posted by art2science
December 30, 2009
Can anyone point to more blogs on intellectual property issues? Most of what I have found is industry-written and one-sided. Pamela Samuelson at Berkeley does not appear to have a blog. This is an area where academics are surprisingly consistent, but we don’t seem to be doing much talking about it. (Most academics I’ve talked to agree that current IP protections are much stronger than is good for society in general.) Here’s one note that I found:
In Geneva last Tuesday the Obama administration announced before a subcommittee of WIPO that it supported the WIPO Treaty for Sharing Accessible Formats of Copyright Works for Persons Who are Blind or Have other Reading Disabilities. The Treaty would lessen international copyright protection in order to enable cross-border distribution of DRM-protected digitized books that blind and visually disabled individuals can read with tools like Pac Mate and Victor Reader. …..
Such a move, of course, puts the administration at odds with many US industries including software manufacturers and motion pictures.
via The IPKat – happy to serve the IP communities: Letter from AmeriKat I: Happy Holidays!.
Here’s another site that looks relevant:
http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog
Thanks.
Leave a Comment » | How Much Information? | Permalink
Posted by art2science
December 23, 2009
Paul Kedrosky reproduces some data on supposedly fast growth industries:
According to a new study, here are the best and worst performing industries of the last decade as measured in revenue percentage change terms. Here are the leaders:
source: http://www.ibisworld.com/
Some of these are doubtless valid, but the top 4 are all industries that had virtually no revenue at all in the 1990s, since they basically did not exist were not measured until Internet companies started to go public. It’s easy to have an astronomical growth rate if you make the base number small enough. Startups do this a lot – “our revenue grew 1500% in our first 2 years.” That could mean they had $1000 of revenue in year 1, and $15000 in year 3!
Leave a Comment » | Entrepreneurship, How Much Information?, The world | Tagged: growth rates, statistics | Permalink
Posted by art2science
December 19, 2009
An in-the-closet lesbian mother is suing Netflix for privacy invasion, alleging the movie rental company made it possible for her to be outed when it disclosed insufficiently anonymous information about nearly half-a-million customers as part of its $1 million contest to improve its recommendation system.
The suit known as Doe v. Netflix (.pdf) was filed in federal court in California on Thursday, alleging that Netflix violated fair-trade laws and a federal privacy law protecting video rental records, when it launched its popular contest in September 2006.
via Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit Claims | Threat Level | Wired.com.
(As the article goes on to make clear, this problem has been known for a while. Netflix ignored it at its peril.)
Leave a Comment » | How Much Information?, The world, Uncategorized | Tagged: privacy | Permalink
Posted by art2science
December 19, 2009
The Digital Society blog raises the question of bit rates for computer games.
The study assumed that computer games were effectively compressible to 100 Mbps which the researchers say is 8 times higher than HDTV. But I don’t know how this number came about since computer games (even the most realistic) are not as realistic as live video due to the lack of details. This is why even Hollywood has a hard time convincing us we’re looking at live shots instead of computer graphics. Compression is an arbitrary number because we can choose any level of compression level we want depending on how [much] data we are willing to discard.
Actual 1920×1080 resolution gaming requires 3000 Mbps of data going from the video card to the display and at no time is it ever compressed
We spent a lot of time investigating this issue; as the post says, it has a big effect on our total byte estimate. Read the rest of this entry »
4 Comments | How Much Information? | Tagged: bandwidth, bps, computer games | Permalink
Posted by art2science
