Back To School

The school craze has started once again. As an eighth grader in my school I am now used to school life and there don't seem to be any surprises in store this time around. Within a day of getting to back to school, I realized that my summer was just a distant blur. School has become such a prominent and important part of my life that everything else takes a back seat once I have to go back.



Once I realized how quickly the memories built over summer can topple down, I recognized the immense value of photos and home videos. Without these tools, our lives can become absorbed by our occupations.



I remember reading about a very creative solution to this dilemma in the book Moonwalking with Einstein. One person the author interviewed records every second of his conscious life. If he ever wants to see what he did on a random date, he just has to look through his volumes of hard drives, find the correct day and comb through the footage. This would be especially useful for resolving family debates and finally proving who in the family really has the best memory!

The Numerati

I am currently reading The Numerati, a book detailing the rise of computer science and technology geniuses. A couple things that caught my interest so far:


Supermarkets have been gathering data on our purchases for a long, long time. They just haven't found out how to implement their ideas and send us specially targeted ads that should catch our interest according to our shopping patterns.


Of course, gathering the data is the easy part: every day, we are corporation's willing test subjects. The hard part is finding the patterns. Not only do computers have to search through thousands of possible patterns, but there are so many complexities involved that could throw the computer off track and give researchers the wrong idea. It is the job of researchers to find these complexities and teach the computer what they mean and how to avoid them. Or, they could send the computer on a hunt and learn a thing or two about us from it!