Week 5 Readings

Data Compression- wikipdeia
Data compression or source coding is “the process of encoding information using fewer bits than an unencoded representation would use through use of specific encoding schemes.”
But Lossless, I believe means that most of the original picture, music, or whatever data is being compressed, will be seen, heard, or whatever upon decompression. Files should be original upon viewing.

Lossy may lose some data to achieve a higher compression. A digital camera is an example of lossy. When you compress and send, you may lose some data, (picture border), to obtain the best picture.


Data Compression Basics:
The author said, "this article isn't going to be too technical". His idea of technical and mine are Not all all similar. His concluding remarks summarize the article into terms even I could understand though. He states that Lossless is compressed into "exactly" the same as the original, and Lossy is "not guaranteed to be exactly" the same as the original.
He talks about LZ algorithms and how they can compress with a ratio to about 3:1. They can do this by reducing redundancy.


Imaging Pittsburgh: What a neat concept! I love how you could click on a neighborhood and the pictures taken there would show up. You can see the progression of the city and how things have changed. The fact that the University of Pittsburgh from the beginning wanted to make sure that everyone could access the information was admirable. Several people collaborated to achieve the 7,000-10,000 photo exhibit. Mr. Galloway said they had their problems, but they were able to work them out and have a common dialogue between the groups who submitted their subjects.

The YouTube article was very informative. I didn’t know that, “YouTube is the most popular internet television or video distribution site on the Internet and currently ranks number 16 on Alexa for most visited websites.” We have been on YouTube more recently since we finally went wireless. It is so fast to load almost anything you want for your viewing pleasure. The idea of having a ‘library tour’ of your services and facility online somewhere to be available for anyone to see is fantastic. I’d like to do that for our library. Much information can be made available such as instructional videos, or tutorials, for those visual learners. Or you could film part of a story time with the children for other parents to see what they are missing.


Muddiest Point: The LZ algorithms in the second article completely overwhelmed me. The talk about the different color pixels and everything mentioned went right over my head. what do we need to know about all that???


Blog Responses: Alison - http://ab2600.blogspot.com/ ; Lori - http://lhmorrow.blogspot.com/ and Cari - http://bookslingers.blogspot.com