On June 12th, the US will finally make its transition to digital TV (DTV). Originally scheduled for February 17th, but delayed due to a lack of funding in the government’s converter box coupon program, the new transition date is now less than 3 weeks away. The DTV transition has been fraught with confusion, from poor consumer education to cable companies using the situation for their own gain. We’re going to break it down very simply.
From the category archives:
News
If you’re really into American Idol like Michelle and I are you may have visited Dial Idol, a website that provides predictions about which contestant will win or lose each each week. The predictions are based on analysis of statistics gathered by their software, which allows users to cast their votes with their computer and a dial-up modem. The analysis is rather clever and generally accurate; it’s based largely on the number of busy signals encountered. With tens of millions of votes cast every week, not every call can be answered at once, and the difficulty in getting through can be used to gauge the behavior of people not using the Dial Idol software.
Mashable has an article today about another predictor of Idol results: Google. The theory is that you can see who Google users (i.e. everybody) are more interested in based on the number of searches for different contestants. Mashable looks at the Google statistics for past American Idol contests and makes a good case for the predictive power of the search engine. This year, if history is any guide, there’s a pretty clear front runner.
Google certainly seems to have the pulse of the people these days, and unlike subject specific tools like Dial Idol, Google is a generic tool. American Idol isn’t the only contest to be predicted by analyzing search traffic.
The Information Age is upon us. The barriers to publication have been removed, and the information storage density increases of the last half century mean that we’re able to generate and store an incredible amount of data. The Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the largest English language printed encyclopedias, has about 40 million words in 32 volumes. That requires a considerably sturdy bookshelf to contain. Stored digitally in plain text it might consume about a quarter of the capacity of a 1 GB memory card in your camera, which is smaller than a postage stamp. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is at least an order of magnitude larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.