Week 5 Readings

Wikipedia:
I read this first, and was slightly lost in the world of data compression. Some of the terms were familiar, but overall, I felt like I definitely wasn't able to discuss data compression to anyone!

Data Compression Basics:
Usually I do much complaining as I do about the technical nature of the articles we read for this course, however, this article was fantastic! My brother-in-law is an animator (computer, of course) and he once tried to explain how compression works in terms of videos. I walked away from that conversation with a headache, but after reading this article, much of what my brother-in-law tried to teach me finally sunk in! I also learned that what he'd told me about different kinds of compression (lossless vs. lossy) was wrong. He told me that when a picture is compressed as a jpeg file, it will lose a lot of it's quality. I understood this article to say that lossy compression (which is what jpeg is?) doesn't necessarily mean loss of quality. Hmmm...
The Transformers reference in there cracked me up!

YouTube and Libraries:
I know of a library in Central PA that has several videos on YouTube... I believe the videos are performances by their Book Cart Drill Team, which is absplutely fantastic! Using YouTube for instructional purposes as well as just library fun makes sense, too.

Imagining Pittsburgh:
It was nice to read about "close to home" experience with creating a database such as this, and to have a tie-in between this week's readings and last weeks, with the Dublin Core stuff being used in this project. Hopefully this weekend I will have time to check out some of the hard work that went into creating this online resource.