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mikepellon

7 karma · joined March 25, 2009

Hi, my name is Michael. I am a recent grad­u­ate of Trin­ity Uni­ver­sity, now living in Burlington, Vermont were I am a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Vermont.

I enjoy think­ing about data and information especially how humans and computers can better process, visualize, store and most importantly share it.

Some things I dabble in: agent-based sys­tems; robot­ics and embed­ded pro­gram­ming; mathematical modeling of physical, biological and social systems, computer vision algorithms and genetic and evolutonary programming.

On occassion I hit the road on my Trek FX 7.5 too.

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mikepellon··on Outside.in saves newspapers
Did newspapers give too much away too fast? Would the beauty of things online be ruined if we required a subscription to our favorite local and national news sites?

We have a new printing press and it’s called WordPress, Blogger, Typad, Movable Type, etc. etc. Where there are economies of scale there are new business models and there is change. But, should newspapers have been more careful in how they dealt with the demand for newsI’ve read a few books that say that newspapers’ biggest mistake was when they failed to acknowledge the internet as a new industry, a product and service that wouldn’t just compliment what they were already doing, it would cannibalize and eat away at their pages.

mikepellon··on Tesla Model S Unveiled
It will be interesting to see if amongst these early electric vehicle manufacturers a de facto battery/charging interface standard can be established. I can see that widespread adoption would be difficult to achieve if consumers cannot reliably charge their vehicles in a number of charging station locations because of properity hardware barriers, etc.
mikepellon··on Official Google Research Blog: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data
I think an interesting related avenue of research would be investigating analytically the "emotional" content of the Internet. Johnathan Harris over at http://www.number27.org has made some great strides in the area looking at blog posts and global news content (see http://www.wefeelfine.org and http://www.tenbyten.org). While Harris has some very impressive visualizations of massive amounts of data I believe we are at that point that we can move beyond just looking at massive collections of data and begin to saw something mathematically about the patterns and characteristics that emerge from those sources. With the advent of cheap cloud computing, aka Amazon EC2, such detailed and massive undertakings are now possible by ordinary developers.