Is this art or this is data? Anna Dorfman tracks the movements, and rests, of her computer’s mouse during the course of a day.
Tracking the number of mouse movements that make up a day
Posted by John Lampard on Wednesday, 10 February, 2010 to the design and art subset
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A snap shot look at analogue and digital storage devices
Posted by John Lampard on Wednesday, 27 January, 2010 to the technology subset
An infographic tracking the growing capacity of data and media storage devices from vinyl records, photo albums, and floppy discs, to iPods and hard drives.
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We are exposed to 34 gigabytes of information each day
Posted by John Lampard on Friday, 18 December, 2009 to the comment subset
Information overload appears to have reached epidemic proportions…
Through emails, texting, internet surfing, reading and other media, our brains are being deluged with increasing quantities of information. Although we may not actively read 100,000 words a day, that is the approximate number reaching our eyes and ears. Add images, such as videos and computer games, [...]
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Does data in any form last for 57,000 years before decaying?
Posted by John Lampard on Friday, 18 September, 2009 to the web subset
If – for some reason – you decided to print out all the data on the internet using an ink jet printer, the task would take about 3,800 years to complete. It would then take you 57,000 years to read – non-stop that is – all of that information.
That’s quite a feat, I’m thinking there [...]
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Convicted on hundreds of shreds of evidence
Posted by John Lampard on Monday, 3 August, 2009 to the technology subset
In the same way a lot of data thought to be deleted from a computer hard drive can be restored, so to can paper documents that have been shredded, so long as they have been shredded in a certain way:
In a typical reconstruction process, technicians feed all the available shreds into a scanner. An automated [...]
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Disappearing data and self destructing email
Posted by John Lampard on Thursday, 23 July, 2009 to the technology subset
New technology using key-based encryption will soon give people the option of allowing email messages and other forms of electronic data to “self delete”, or vanish, after a certain period of time.
The pieces of the key, small numbers, tend to “erode” over time as they gradually fall out of use. To make keys erode, or [...]
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An infographic probably speaks more like a million words
Posted by John Lampard on Wednesday, 6 May, 2009 to the design and art subset
A collection of infographics, or visual presentations of data or information.
This would be my favourite… simple and to the point.
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Intrusive algorithm may link up hidden social network profiles
Posted by John Lampard on Wednesday, 1 April, 2009 to the technology subset
Data from apparently disparate social network profiles, including Flickr accounts, even when created with a nom de plume or pseudonym, can still be linked together (albeit rather laboriously), potentially uncovering personal information that was believed to be private.
To use the algorithm, a person must start by revealing the “shape” of the different networks of interest, [...]
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A Big Bang of information overload
Posted by John Lampard on Tuesday, 6 January, 2009 to the comment subset
Brian Cox on the amount of data the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will generate once it is operational:
The sheer quantity of data the LHC will generate – estimated at a petabyte per month – presents an enormous challenge in terms of sorting the digital wheat from the chaff. Banks of computers at CERN will sift [...]
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The best way to erase a hard drive: destroy it
Posted by John Lampard on Thursday, 18 December, 2008 to the technology subset
Reformatting a hard drive is next to useless when it comes to erasing the data stored on it. And even files that have previously been deleted can still be recovered if someone knows what they are doing.
While there are a number of applications that claim to effectively and completely “clean” a hard drive, the [...]
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