How Speeding The "Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime" Could Change This Modern World. Last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms was presented by a group of MIT researchers. It's possible that under certain situations it may be up to ten times faster than the current way we do these.
At this point you are probably wondering: What the hell is he talking about? Let me explain, because improving these three little letters--FFT--may change your life. Here's a quickie explainer: Fourier transforms are a mathematical trick to simplify how you represent a complicated signal--say the waves of sound made by speaking. They work by reducing the complex wave pattern to a simple and pretty short list of numbers that, when run through the system again, result in a very good approximation of the original signal.
How so? So calculating FFTs up to ten times faster is a big deal. It's almost impossible to scope how enormous an impact this new FFT technique could have. The Web's Crystal Ball Gets an Upgrade. Thousands of people every day use the link-shortening service Bitly to tame unwieldy Web links to share on Twitter and other social media sites. Few realize that they’re simultaneously helping the New York company peer into the Web’s future. Bitly analyzes the pages pointed to by the 80 million short links it generates every day to predict changes in the public’s attitude toward people and companies. Now Bitly is set to get access to a slew of new data that could make its Web crystal ball even better at forecasting the future. Bitly has reached a data-sharing agreement with Verisign, based in Dulles, Virginia.
Verisign looks up over 50 billion URLs every day and, like Bitly, gets a handle on what people are doing online as a result. Even without Verisign’s help, Bitly can already predict when a company’s reputation is about to take a dive. Cohen likens Bitly’s service to a smoke detector. Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions. Campus Internet -- interrupted. Wi-Fi is meant to be the cordless, easy path to the Internet, but for some students at Kutztown University, gaining wireless access can be just as annoying as tripping over plug-in cables. Students say the many laptops, iPhones, iPads and other electronics they bring on campus sometimes connect better through 3G mobile networks or through Ethernet, which requires a cable plug-in. The university makes wireless Internet access, or Wi-Fi, available, but some students say hot spots are limited on the 326-acre campus. "There's no point in even trying," said Rachel Snyder, a sophomore from Reading majoring in business.
"I just never use it. KU, with about 10,700 students, is among many colleges and universities nationwide having trouble providing Wi-Fi access across their entire campuses. Part of the problem is that students are bringing more electronics with Wi-Fi capabilities to campuses, and the many devices are taxing the systems. "There's no service.
Internet access is not a human right. Are you being tracked? 8 ways your privacy is being eroded online and off. Google launches a more social search. Google changes search algorithm, trying to make results more timely. Report: Google Controls 44 Percent Of Global Online Advertising. ZenithOptimedia has issued a report that contains both good news and bad news for Google. The good news is: Google controls 44 percent of global online ad revenues. The bad news is: Google controls 44 percent of global online ad revenues. At a time when Google is defending against antitrust investigations on two continents this news is most unwelcome. The shares of all the other major US internet companies are tiny by comparison, though together with Google they control 61 percent of the world’s digital ad spending.
Overall the internet represents only 16 percent of global ad revenue according to ZenithOptimedia. TV, by comparison, is 40.2 percent of all ad expenditures. ZenithOptimedia says that globally paid search will represent about 49 percent of all online advertising this year. Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: Web Search | Google: YouTube & Video | Stats: Spend Projections | Top News. 15 Big Ways The Internet Is Changing Our Brain. Noted science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov predicted that one day, we'd "have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers, be given reference materials, be something you're interested in knowing, from an early age, however silly it might seem to someone else," and with this appliance, be able to truly enjoy learning instead of being forced to learn mundane facts and figures.
His insight has proven to be amazingly accurate, as we now live in a world with the Internet, where nearly the entire wealth of human knowledge can live at our fingertips or even in our pockets, from being able to summon email from our smart phones to earning entire degrees from accredited online colleges. We can also earn these degrees in a variety of options including associate degrees, bachelor degrees, master’s degrees, and even PHDs- all online.
January 8th, 2012 written by Site Administrator. The Internet, peer-reviewed. It could be one of the most important innovations on the Internet since the browser. Imagine an open-source, crowd-sourced, community-moderated, distributed platform for sentence-level annotation of the Web. In other words, a way to cut through the babble and restore some sanity and trust. That’s the idea behind Hypothes.is. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more — without requiring participation of the underlying site. It’s based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O’Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.
Yes, it’s been tried before, and didn’t catch on. I just donated to their Kickstarter fund. Amara D.