Wonderful and inspiring post full of excellent tips for anyone looking to start their own company.  Check it out.

We already know that a tremendous amount of information about ourselves can be found at online social networks. From Facebook, to Twitter, to Foursquare, to Flickr, to, well, you name it.  We've been busy supplying personally relevant information, anecdotes, stories, photos, videos, etc. for the greater part of the past decade.  This article is interesting because it acknowledges that a tremendous amount of information is out there and that various people are beginning the process of mining the data in order to draw various conclusions.  It also acknowledges that most current data mining algorithms are actually quite inaccurate.  Most of the conclusions aren't accurate with respect to correctly identifying the individual, their personality traits, etc.  Yes, data mining has on occasion successfully unearthed certain scary pieces of data about a person, such as the correct social security number, but according to this post we've still got a ways to go with regards to improving the data mining algorithms for accuracy.  The space should be monitored closely, and possibly with governmental oversight, so that the data mining doesn't get out of hand.  Keep your eyes on the data miners.

I've recently taken interest in various large monitoring systems generating large amounts of data.  This story stuck out since it involves a NSF funded company looking to create a giant set of sensors across the United States for the purpose of monitoring various environmental factors.  The data will be available for free to researchers.  This technique is awesome because a vast network of researchers will undoubtedly come up with numerous creative uses and creative experiments using the data.  The ability to take a large amount of data and then tell a story with it is very powerful.  That's why I love data visualization and big data so much.  Visually compelling stories drawn from interesting data sets are very intriguing to me.  Who knows what we'll learn from this planetary monitoring network.  I'm looking forward to finding out.

The other day Vincent and I had a heart-to-heart chat … check it out:

Happy Birthday, Emily!!  Today is my sister’s birthday.  Well, it’s still her birthday in some parts of the United States :)  According to my father’s most recent blog post Emily was born at 2:17pm on July 26.  Luckily, Laura and I had a chance to visit and celebrate with her in Atlanta a few weekends ago.  So, we’ve already been partying and celebrating.  Sometimes you’ve just gotta take your birthday and stretch it out over a couple of weeks!

To further the celebration I’m posting some pictures from the day Emily was born … and another from a few days after that.  Happy Birthday, Em! :)

The time has come to make a change.

Today I bring to you an important bifurcation.  I’m officially splitting my personal and professional interests.  The two will inevitably meld at various moments, but as far as the Internet is concerned, it’s time to make the distinction. Here at cityofthedes you can continue to find personal updates - posts full of photos, videos, updates on my family history project, and anything personal in nature.

My professional focus can now be found at:

Thede Technologies - http://www.ThedeTech.com

I’ve decided to devote the next chapter of my life to technology.  I’m currently incubating several business concepts and have begun the journey of being a technology entrepreneur.

I’m very excited about this new direction and I look forward to updating everyone on my various projects.

Cheers!

An excellent idea.  I recently read a statistic regarding the amount of unharnessed CPU power in the world today.  I can't remember the exact figure but I remember there is a tremendous amount of untapped processing power in the world today.  Whenever a computer is sitting idle it's not utilizing it's computational power.  Very few programs fire up when your computer sits idle.  In fact, the only program I have on my computer that works overtime when I'm not working is CrashPlan.  CrashPlan is an automatic data backup provider - it compresses and encrypts my data and the computer works overtime when it's been idle for 20 minutes.  I wish more software was available today that would work overtime when my computer sits idle.  In the meantime, outsourcing this power is a great idea.

Another post regarding the effect of the internet on memory.  This article has a bit more detail with regards to recent research studying how our memory has adapted to function in a new computer-centric landscape.  As I stated earlier, this research supports the notion that our brains have re-wired so as to remember where to look for information as opposed to actually remembering the information.

I view this as a major benefit.  If we can rely on accessing information via the internet we can free up portions of our brain and memory to ponder greater, larger, more complex issues.  I also believe in the power of recall.  Using the internet as a trusted source of information I often know exactly where to look to recall the specifics of something in particular.  My brain has more-or-less become a roadmap for where to look for a particular piece of knowledge.  I may not remember the specifics of the item, but I remember the item and where to go for the specifics.  As a result, I feel my memory has adapted to function with the internet.