The back page of IEEE Spectrum this month has, hands down, the worst graph I can remember ever. It takes information on media spending in different countries, and transforms it into a totally confusing picture.
Worst graph in a decade?
NSF pushes for more data sharing on funded projects. Good – let’s hope NSF starts a race with NIH. The culture of data privacy is (superficially) good for individual researchers, but hard to defend for society and for taxpayers. One area in which the wide push for “stronger Intellectual Property (sic) Rights” is going the other way.
Scientists Seeking NSF Funding Will Soon Be Required to Submit Data Management Plans. Government-wide emphasis on community access to data supports substantive push toward more open sharing of research data … In particular, on or around October, 2010, NSF is planning to require that all proposals include a data management plan in the form of a two-page supplementary document. The research community will be informed of the specifics of the anticipated changes and the agency’s expectations for the data management plans.
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.
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.
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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.]
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.
