Human Brain Is Limiting Global Data Growth, Say Computer Scientists

technologyreview.com

18 points·taylorbuley··6 comments

This is one of the most ludicrous inferences I've ever seen made from a set of data. Theorizing from Weber-Fechner law to this hypothesis might be fun at a bar after a few drinks, but as serious science? Come on.

"This way of thinking about stimulus and perception clearly indicates that the Weber-Fechner law ought to have a profound effect on the rate at which we absorb information."

No it doesn't. It doesn't clearly indicate that in the slightest. This article is complete garbage. Virtually every paragraph has a ridiculous conclusion in it - this has to set some kind of record.

Yea that sounds pretty out there. I don't see why data should be linked to human brain power when you can generate gobs of data and use computers to search through it for the few bits of interesting stuff.

Quite frankly, I'm shocked this was published anywhere. What sort of a distribution would they have expected? A normal distribution where the average filesize was 5GB? And to then infer that this has to do with mental constraints... this will be a laugh with my colleagues.

Article: "Gros and co then plotted the size of each of these files types against the number of files to get the file size distribution...audio and video file distribution followed a log-normal curve..."

Are they concluding that compressed videos fit through our internet pipes best?

Interesting and the full data file can be downloaded at http://www.findFiles.net /public without restrictions.

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