“The car is the ultimate mobile device,” said Venkatesh Prasad, a technical leader in the Ford Research & Advanced Engineering team. “We’re researching how to responsibly and safely harness the Internet to enhance drivers’ time behind the wheel.”
Our only method of tracking ourselves was to notice what we were doing and write it down. But even this written record couldn’t be analyzed objectively without laborious processing and analysis.
Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.
Awesome piece in the NYTimes.
According to the report, in 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes (10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes) and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person/day. Note: Information at work is not included.
The report defines “information” as "flows of data delivered to people," and measures the bytes, words and hours of consumer information. Not surprisingly, video dominated, with 1.3 zettabytes from television and approximately 2 zettabytes of computer games.
A few highlights from the report:
Download the report.
Every year, I stumble on a host of great research and data that helps me write presentations. Here is some of the best [free] stuff I’ve found this year. Happy New Year!
This is ace work from Facebook (I know I’m a little late here). ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ is similar to Facebook’s trend-tracking tool, Lexicon. Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook. To determine if a particular status update is happy or sad (basically sentiment analysis similar to Nielsen and Radian6), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.
The graph contains several metrics. GNH represents Gross National Happiness. The other two, Positivity and Negativity, represent the two components of GNH: The extent to which words used on that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores.
On holidays like Christmas and Obama’s inauguration, we were pretty happy. Conversely, we were sad when Asian stock market crashed and when Michael Jackson died.
It’s amazing what we can do with data these days.
It’s dataviz, inforgraphics, Internet awesomeness. We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion presents the euphoria, the despair, the passion, the dreams, and the desires that make us human.
We live in a world where numbers and data help us lead better lives and squeeze every ounce of inefficiency out of our day. And these days, the numbers are easier to understand and easier to use because of data visualization and infographics. I really like this simple execution from The Weather Channel. In addition to displaying the weather conditions, it also illustrates the kind of clothing you can expect to have on. This is useful and easy to get. The Obama part just makes it viral.
Here's the idea. NYC releases 170 datasets. Whoever can best make use of the data will win part of the $20,000 in prize money. The individual or startup with the best Web or mobile application gets an invite to a dinner with NYC mayor, MIchael R. Bloomberg.
