Author: Blake Ellison

See Roger Bohn speak on HMI

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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 →

HMI Bonus Material: Video Game Screenshots

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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 →