User:Tin acton

My online handle, Tin_Acton, is a spin-off of the athlete's foot spray commercial with John Madden yelling at the camera, "Get Tough Acting Tinactin!"

Nearly everyone who's seen the commercial and met me instantly thinks of me, and that's not such a bad thing. After about 20 years of hearing it, I've adopted it.

About Me

I live in Champaign, Illinois in a cozy suburb with a home office that lets me spend the majority of my days tapped into the information superhighway.

For the past eight years, I have been an on-again and off-again student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, in addition to working in various capacities inside of journalism. I am especially attracted to design, though I admit to having very little natural talent for creating. That said, I love symmetry and organization; something about it appeals to me. Architecture is especially interesting to me, and I am a lover of all types of architectural innovations. From a young age, when I first heard my father ponder, "Does function necessitate form, or does form follow function?" - I have been interested in the works of Louis Sullivan. I try my best to synthesize his ideas for inspiration.

This love for organization, design and information spills over into the realm of information visualization, the art of explaining complicated information in easy to understand graphical images. I believe our eyes are the largest conveyers of bandwidth to our brain, and so it fits that well built designs lead to a well founded understanding.

Education History

Growing up, I was a rather poor student. Too rambunctious to be trapped into a classroom, and far too eager have adventures with my friends rather than leaving school to do more schooling. My time spent in school prior to college is whole heartily unremarkable, and in fact I placed somewhere about 293 out of 296 graduating students in my high school. Going out every night and staying out late, showing up late to school and sleeping through my classes may have had some contribution to it - to put it mildly, I found school before college to be superficial and unrewarding, with the exception of a few teachers for which I have a particular fondness for. I have been blessed with highly intelligent, well educated and worldly knowledge parents, who filled in the blanks during our nightly family dinners. Their ongoing discussions of history, the arts, government, politics, philosophy and the likes have given me things that I never would have learned in a traditional school setting.

Mark Twain once wrote, "I never let my schooling interfere with my education." And that has been the motto of my life. I humbly admit that having not studied during that time continues to take its toll on me, but I have come up with ways to get past that and concentrate on my better skills. Being well-rounded is important, and I certainly am, but having a short attention span and a love for learning whatever fancies me (while neglecting things that do not) is tricky.

Nearly all of my higher education has been at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, while two years were spent at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

I have B.S. degree from the University of Illinois in journalism, a degree I chose to pursue because of the story telling history and impact journalism has had on our American history. I have a very strong suit of talents with digital technologies, and many years working in IT administration and repair settings, though I wanted to study something I didn't know, as opposed to something I already knew.

I have a M.S. in Library and Information Science from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, with a focus on data curation. This is (currently) an emerging field of study and focus on the issues surrounding how scientists and corporations - entities that generate "Big Data" - are organizing and preserving their data. This field of study has truly opened my eyes to things I never thought of before, and I have grown to love this field a great deal.

I am working on a Ph.D. in the Illinois Informatics Institute, also at the University of Illinois. This is a new field of study in the information sciences that is bridging the growing gaps between the humanities and hard sciences. It turns out, when these fields are combined, amazing things are produced. The Illinois Informatics Institute currently resides at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a fitting home. I am awed at the work done by the faculty and students coming from the program, and continuously humbled by their contributions.

My Hopes

I love Wikipedia, though I never created an account... part of that was due to the "openness" of the project, that we don't need an account to contribute. With time, I have grown more interested in sharing my experiences with the larger community, in a larger capacity. So I hope with this account that I can keep an eye on certain topics, watch how they grow, and help to maintain their posterity.