Welcome busy reader to our new series of blog posts from Chalcid. Here we hope to share with you stories, news, and opinions over a range of topics that we find interesting, novel or just straight out fun. From news of upcoming events both local and international, technology impacts on logistics and insurance, programming and algorithms, to advances in human decision making and intelligent systems, we hope there will be something of interest that catches your eye and feeds your brain.

When the concept of blogging first made its appearance¹ in the 1990’s the internet was a very different place. Wikipedia, Google search, Twitter, Facebook and the iPhone didn’t yet exist. Total internet traffic was in the order of 100GB per hour ² in 1992, by 2017 it had reached 46,600 GB per second ³, driven by increased availability, the addition of mobile data, and advances in media streaming.

With all this going on, we admit, not many of you will read our posts. However, blogging and sharing information is as much about the process of writing and documenting as it is about the reading. So even though we will add a little bit more to the mountain of information around us, we think it's worth it, and hope to see you back.

‘History of blogging’ (2019) Wikipedia. (Accessed: 6 March 2019).
‘Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Trends, 2017–2022 White Paper.’ (Accessed: 6 March 2019)
To put those numbers into perspective, if you could deliver 100 pages of paper in an hour (a stack about 1cm high) in 1997, by 2017 you would be able deliver a pile of papers 17km high. Or 4.5 times the length of the Sishen-Saldanha train (one of the longest production trains in the world).

Written By: David Clark