By James Gleick
James Gleick, the writer of the easiest Chaos and Genius, now brings us a piece simply as unbelievable and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that indicates how details has turn into the fashionable era’s defining quality—the blood, the gas, the very important precept of our global.
The tale of data starts off in a time profoundly in contrast to our personal, while each notion and utterance vanishes once it's born. From the discovery of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood conversing drums of Africa, Gleick tells the tale of data applied sciences that modified the very nature of human realization. He presents photographs of the most important figures contributing to the inexorable improvement of our smooth figuring out of data: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the 1st nice mechanical laptop; Ada Byron, the intense and doomed daughter of the poet, who turned the 1st real programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the writer of knowledge concept itself.
And then the data age arrives. electorate of this international develop into specialists willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we occasionally suppose we're drowning, swept through a deluge of indicators and signs, information and photographs, blogs and tweets. The Information is the tale of ways we came and the place we're heading.
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Extra resources for The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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Where E is the n x 1 node-link incidence matrix, f" is the 1 x 1 link flow vector with elements equal to the link flows of copy a, and g" the n x 1 copy flow vector with elements '1 u", g! = -via, 0, if i is the origin of copy flow a, if i is a destination of copy flow u, (23) otherwise. The total link flow and the total network flow are given by superposing the copy flows: 35 8. Flows and Conservation Laws f = Era, a a a i Copy flows have been labeled according to their origin. It is evident that we could just as easily label them by their destinations so that a particular copy flow would be a flow from all origins to a particular destination.
If a cordon line is a ring road encircling the Central Business District of a city, X can be chosen as the set of nodes within the CBD, X the set 24 11. Elements of Network Theory of nodes outside, and (X,x) is the set of roads crossing the ring road outwards from within the CBD. A traffic count on these roads at “external” stations on the ring road would enable the total traffic from within the CBD outwards to be calculated. (f) Undirected and Mixed Graphs For an undirected graph [ N ; L ] , the elements of L are unordered pairs of elements of N and are denoted by (i,j) or ( j ,i ) .
E ) Compressibility and Separability In some of the transportation network problems that we discuss in this text, other conservation equations besides those derived from Kirchhoff's law will be imposed. It frequently happens that the graph [ N ; L ] of a given transportation network is compressed or expanded into a new network [ N ' ; L ' ] . The compressing process may occur, for example, when several nodes and links in [ N ; L ] are combined to form [ A " ; L ' ] ; hence an analysis of flows on the larger network [ N ; L ] is replaced by one on the smaller network [ A " ; L'], where N' c N , L' c L.