Are we falling or flying … and will we ever know?

Life, the universe, technology, project management, and why change management is so incredibly hard.

Posts Tagged ‘jon and kate plus eight’

Is the Paradigm for Search Engines Changing Again?

October 5th, 2009

Clive Thompson has an interesting article in Wired this month about today’s “real-time Web,” which is changing the playing field for traditional search engines such as Google, Bing, Ask.com, et al; and at least for now, creating a market-changing opportunity for real time search engines such as Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Topsy, Scoopler, and Collecta.

For example – Google‘s PageRank algorithm in part measures which sites have the most links pointing to them, but also a really good job of identifying/filtering out website spam; whereas real time search engines track “trending topics,” which may or may not include web spam; but also offer searchers today’s news and topics as they are right now, not as they were crawled and cached one or more weeks ago.

Read the complete article here.

How to Survive that Impending Zombie Attack.

August 17th, 2009

It’s true.

While our economy still flounders, AIDS remains epidemic around the world, and Earth’s axis unfortunately epine around Jon and Kate plus Eight, at least we now know what to do in case of a Zombie attack.

Four Canadian mathemeticians actually did a study on mathematics of a hypothetical zombie attack, and published it in a book on infectious disease. According to Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad and Robert J, Smith? (and, no that’s not a typo, that’s how he spells his name) – to successfully fend off a zombie attack, “hit hard and hit often.”

Their article, “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection,” was editied by J.M. Tchuenche and C. Chiyaka and actually published “Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress.” (pp. 133-150, 2009). Really.

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead.”

“It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

“Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally,” they wrote. “But possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.”

“If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead,” they wrote. “This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert.”

picture-9 “How fast do we need to deal with the outbreak? Here’s the equation they used, where S = susceptibles, Z = zombies and R = removed. If an infection breaks out in a city of 500,000 people, the zombies will outnumber the susceptibles in about three days.

Then again, maybe the real key for this study is how the reader defines “the undead.” Hmmm…..

(a special thank you to Betsy Mason and Wired Magazine for calling this one out; I’m way behind on my technical reading list, which unfortunately for now doesn’t include “Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress.”)

“It’s end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” – R.E.M.