Policy makers and scientists think of nuclear weapons stockpiles as complex political and technical problems, as James Fuller explains in Arms Control Today. But stores of nuclear weapons are also organizing systems. The people designing these vital systems face many of the same questions and issues information scientists do.
In search of a news article relevant to this week's lecture, I came cross one that provides some intelligence on how to identifying birds (Article: Identifying Birds by Flying Style). For anyone who might have an interest in knowing the name of birds that he sees, he probably will try to identify them by their colours, shapes, looks. This new way that I learned from reading this article is different. It's identifying birds by their flying styles.
At first, these might look like yet another bunch of intriguing pictures, but its interesting how it is difficult to perceive these images as being a century old, just because they are in color.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html
These extraordinary images from 1909-1912 are not colored in photoshop. The photographer clicked successive images with a black and white camera using red, green and blue filters, recombined them, and projected them with filtered lanterns to get true color effects!
The purpose of organizing information is to be able to use it effectively. Stepping into the era of Big data, it becomes almost impossible to process these large volumes of data using database management tools. This complexity thus challenges the financial support offered to old data management tools.
Last Saturday, a new California law went into effect that forces Amazon.com and other online retailers to start charging sales tax to all California customers.