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Home/ IT100_52/Fall 2009/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by zhenni gong

Contents contributed and discussions participated by zhenni gong

zhenni gong

Becoming Screen Literate from the New York Times - 0 views

  • As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words. Fluid images­ made up of bits flow rapidly onto new screens and can be put to almost any use. Flexible images migrate into new media and seep into the old. Like alphabetic bits, they can be squeezed into links or stretched to fit search engines, indexes and databases. They invite the same satisfying participation in both creation and consumption that the world of text does.
    • zhenni gong
       
      Images can be created, annotate, also can combine into complex narratives, and remanipulated easier and easier. Images are more fluid and flexible used in media. It makes great progress.
  • The site organizes the sprawling threads of these visual chats so that they can be read like a paragraph of dialogue.
    • zhenni gong
       
      It is true. Because most of us do like that, using the visual chats to read like a paragraph of dialogue. It is really convinent for us.
  • Currently, the smartest object-recognition software can detect and categorize a few dozen common visual forms. It can search through Flickr photos and highlight the images that contain a dog, a cat, a bicycle, a bottle, an airplane, etc. It can distinguish between a chair and sofa, and it doesn’t identify a bus as a car. But each additional new object to be recognized means the software has to be trained with hundreds of samples of that image.
    • zhenni gong
       
      It is amazing that the software can be so smart! It can search so many things, contains a dog, a cat, a bicycle or something else. It can distinguish the stuffs, although not that exact, but it is alread so magic.
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  • It took several hundred years for the consumer tools of text literacy to crystallize after the invention of printing, but the first visual-literacy tools are already emerging in research labs and on the margins of digital culture.
    • zhenni gong
       
      Everthing is changing and it needs enough time to change. It tells the truth. The first visual-literacy tools are emerging in research labs and on the margins of digital culture. It is much more convenient for us.
zhenni gong

The Technium - 0 views

shared by zhenni gong on 21 Sep 09 - Cached
  • This store of order is a surprise. Earth's great heap of structure, complexity and knowledge does not seem to be contained "in" the physics that govern non-extropic stuff. Where do you hide 10^29 bytes of organization? The rules behind the fundamental behavior of the elemental particles and energies that make up our reality are very spare, almost naked.  It might take books and books to explain them in words, but the laws themselves can be compressed into a very small amount of information. If you were to take all the known laws of physics, formulas such as f=ma, E=mc^2, S= K log W, and more complicated ones that describe how liquids flow, or objects spin, or electrons jump, and write them all down in one file, they would fit onto a single gigabyte CD disk. Amazingly, one plastic plate could contain the operating code for the entire universe. Even if we currently know only 0.1% of the actual number of laws guiding universal processes, many of which we are undoubtedly still unaware of, and the ultimate file of physical laws was 1,000 times bigger, it would fit onto one high-density "disk" in a few years from now.  The total code for matter/energy is an infinitesimal fraction compared to mountain of extropic information that has accumulated on this planet. In fact the genome of a single living organism contains more information than required by all the laws of physics
  • universe
  • That thread (DNA) learns something new each generation, and adds that hard-won knowledge to its code.  Geneticist Motoo Kimura estimates that the total genetic information accumulated since the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago is 10 megabytes per genetic lineage. 
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  • But what is order? Despite our intuitive sense, we lack a good operational definition of order, which seems to be tied up with complexity (see Ordained Becoming). For simple physical systems, the concepts of thermodynamics suffice, but for the real world of cucumbers, brains, books, and self-driving trucks, we don't have useful metrics for extropy. The best we can say is that extropy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information.
    • zhenni gong
       
      It defines the extropy to let us know what is the extropy, and know what is order. Extropy makes us easy to find information. Extroy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information.
  • In an important way, this unfolding information is not contained in the physical realm. To be clear, I do not mean that it is supernatural. Either extropy must exist in the universe it is transforming, or it must exist outside of it as a supernatural force. If outside, then its dynamics are outside the range of science and of this book. I make the assumption that extropy is not a mystical supernatural force but operates in the lawful realm of physical reality. That is, we can measure it.
    • zhenni gong
       
      The author use an assumption that exropy is not a mystical supernatual force but operates in the lawful realm of physical reality. He wants to show that extropy is alomst supernatual.
  • Another way to read the long-term trajectory of extropy is to view it as an escape from the material and the transcendence to the immaterial. In the early universe, only the laws of physics reigned.
    • zhenni gong
       
      Tell us a good way to read the long-teem trajectory of extropy is to view it as escape from the material, only the laws of physics reigned.
  • Most people can appreciate how the essence of living things might be information and order. Information is vague enough to be similar to the idea of a "spirit." But if my hypothesis is true — that life is an extension of a 14 billion-year old inanimate autonomous order, one that now continues into the machines of technology — then this same spirit of information must reside at the core of the non-living world as well
    • zhenni gong
       
      Information is vague enough to be similar to the idea of a "spirt." He gives an assumption. To show that information must rest in the essence of matter. That's a lot less intuitive.
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