From the category archives:

Information Storage & Retrieval

World Population: 7 Billion by the End of 2011

13 January 2011
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Seven billion people. That’s how many people the earth will carry by the end of 2011. I cannot imagine that many people, yet if we all stood shoulder to shoulder, apparently we could all stand in the area of the City of Los Angeles.
National Geographic Magazine has taken on the task of addressing the [...]

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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

10 January 2011
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How would you organize, store, and disseminate data on 35,000 trans-Atlantic ship crossings that carried over 10 million Africans into slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries?
The project team of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has done just that. Data has been contributed by a few dozen people, and the project team consists of two [...]

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Beyond C.S.I.: The Rise of Computational Forensics

6 January 2011
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How can you determine if two fingerprints are merely similar or are an exact match? Is forensics as practiced currently, skill and art — or science?
I was surprised to learn from Sargur Srihari that forensics is not as scientific in its methods as one might think from watching the various TV shows. Neither are the [...]

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Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

3 January 2011
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How do you manage all of the distractions from the data and information thrown at you from social media, email, the Web, chat and [insert name of app here]? Well? Not-so-well? Do you focus on one task at a time, or do you multi-task?
David McCandless of Information is Beautiful created this Hierarchy of Digital Distractions [...]

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Google Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review

30 December 2010
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Google employees put together this video of the struggles, achievements, deaths, milestones, deaths, heroes, and other major “etceteras” that made 2010 the year it was. I hope you enjoy this review of the past year.

Is there any information you would add to or subtract from this montage of 2010?

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YouTube Rewind 2010: Year in Review

29 December 2010
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What were the most popular videos on YouTube in 2010 across all categories? Employees at YouTube put together this compilation of the greatest hits of 2010, below.
You can watch all of the top 10 videos, as well as other video hits of the year, via a timeline of the year 2010 at youtube.com/rewind. The [...]

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The Data Behind Online Retailing

20 December 2010
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How do you brand yourself online? If you run a business, do you provide your customers with an online mechanism by which they can provide comments about your products and services publicly? If so, do you believe online feedback has a positive or negative effect on your company? How much shopping vs. online research do [...]

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What is Old is New Again: the Antikythera Mechanism Lego Version

16 December 2010
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A long, long time ago (100 BCE) in a civilization far, far away (Ancient Greece), someone built a mechanism that could “predict celestial events and eclipses with unprecedented accuracy” (Engadget). The machine — or, at least one of them — was lost in a shipwreck and lay on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea until [...]

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Would You Tame Data from Wikileaks?

15 December 2010
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Would you map the data from Wikileaks’ release of US Embassy Cables? If so — what would you show, and how would you show it?
For example, Mark Graham of Zero Geography visualized some of the data from Cablegate, using The Guardian online’s data store.
He blogged the following on November 28th, 2010; I have put [...]

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Our Lives with Data using Data

9 December 2010
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Can you imagine life without Internet access (email, FTP, etc.)? What about Web access (i.e., anything via a browser)? If you have a smartphone, can you imagine not having one again?
GOOD Magazine decided to take a look at our life with data by creating the somewhat cheesy video below.
The video creators write: “from Google [...]

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