Nathan Zeldes - Thinker, Speaker, Problem Solver
On October 18, 2022 at 11:00 AM EDT the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) will celebrate Information Overload Day by hosting a webinar dedicated to the theme “The intersection of Mindfulness and Information Overload” The event will be held by Zoom. No registration needed – just mark your calendar and show up! The Zoom link is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89522954198 . The 60-minute program…
Image credit: Peter Merholz on Flickr. Are we running out of alphabet? We have Generation X (born 1965–1980), we have generation Y (a.k.a. Millennials, born 1981–1996), we have Generation Z (1997–2012) so what shall we call today’s children, born (mostly) to millennial parents after 2012? Actually, no worry about running out of letters: not all letters are in the Latin alphabet. The Chinese script…
Video conferencing has a long history much longer as a dream than as a reality; and it is interesting to examine how that dream has evolved. Teleconferencing by voice goes back to the nineteenth century: Jules Verne s “The begum’s fortune”, written in 1879, describes a teleconference at the city council of his utopian “France-ville”: I will immediately convene the Council! , said doctor Sarrasin,…
A younger me at the Babbage difference engine built by the Science Museum Success has many fathers, and so it is hardly surprising that there are numerous claimants to the title “inventor of the computer”. These include innovators like Aiken (constructor of the Harvard Mark I, 1944), Zuse (Z1, 1938), Atanasoff and Berry (ABC, 1942), Flowers (Colossus, 1943), and Mauchly and Eckert (ENIAC, 1946).…
Well, at long last we have a COVID-19 vaccine – many of them, of which two are FDA-approved – and a vaccination drive is underway, just in time for the new year. I just got my first shot! Edward Jenner vaccinating his son. Note the cow outside! Colored engraving by C. Manigaud. [Source] Here I want to share some thoughts and observations about the vaccine situation. Soon after the pandemic became…
The Information Overload Research Group (IORG), which I chair, held its annual Information Overload Day Webinar on October 20th. This year it was dedicated to the theme Information Overload in the Post-COVID Workplace . It was a great session with many interesting presentations and some good discussions, and it is now available for your viewing pleasure here. The program included: Welcome to…
The world around us keeps changing, and many of the changes are caused by, or related to, Information Overload and the instant access to limitless information resources. Recently I’ve come face to face with one more instance of this fact. I’ve been programming computers – sometimes for work, but more often for fun – for over four decades. I’ve written programs on mainframes, minis and micros. I’ve…
In May I went to a large international conference, EcoMotion 2020, devoted to the exciting innovative field of autonomous vehicles and other novel means of transport. There were 3,000 attendees from 54 countries and 211 exhibitors. It was a magnificent event. Welcome speech at the start of the event Of course, in May I couldn’t possibly have gone to a large conference… not with the blasted…
The Corona virus is holding the world hostage at the time I write this, and is probably feeling pretty pleased with itself. For my part, I won’t speculate about when this mess will be over, but I retain my optimism that we humans will overcome it… after all, remember the smallpox virus: it had killed millions of us well into the 20th century, but we’ve finally wiped it right off the face of our…
Back when I joined Intel Corporation in the early eighties the concept of Intel Culture was very real for us employees. I don’t mean the laudable corporate platitudes about respecting everybody and caring for the planet that are standard today; back then Intel was a small company that had yet to win the IBM PC processor contract, and the culture it embodied was the sort of stark “frontier culture”…