De Google Paradox

Permalink, 1 April 2009

'Googlen' is een werkwoord geworden in onze taal, synoniem voor zoeken op het Web. Het probleem is dat we er zo kritiekloos mee omgaan, alsof Google alle antwoorden heeft. Ons vertrouwen in Google berust echter op een misvatting volgens Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor in de Bibliotheekwetenschappen:

"....We do not properly understand the nature of the nature of the transaction between us and Google. ...into our relationship with Google we do not grasp that we are not really Google's costumers. Google calls us users, but in fact we are Google's products. Our attention is what Google sells to its customers, which are the advertisers." (BBC interview)

We zijn dus geen klanten van Google, maar Google gebruikt onze argeloze aandacht en nieuwsgierigheid om zijn adverteerders te bedienen.

Volgens prominente linguisten zoals Arbib en Lakoff verklaren spiegelneuronen de biologische ontwikkeling van het menselijk taalvermogen (Arbib, 2005; Gallese, Lakoff, 2007). Ze maken het in alle geval mogelijk dat we elkaar begrijpen zelfs in dubbelzinnige situaties die weinig aanknopingspunten bieden. Omdat spiegelneuronen het mogelijk maken ons in de schoenen van iemand anders te plaatsen kunnen we ook zijn intenties begrijpen. Ook als we zoeken met Google maken we op een of andere manier onze intenties duidelijk. Google krijgt onze aandacht gratis. De vraag is schenkt Google ook aandacht aan ons, of loert het gewoon van achter een doorkijkspiegel naar ons terwijl het ons wat brokjes informatie toegooit die al of niet relevant zijn voor onze vraag.

Google tips and tricks: find definitions and define price ranges

Permalink, 31 March 2009

In a previous article we showed that Google is rather refraining the development of search technology instead of advancing it. But there is more. Google seems also to hide some undocumented search options. When you go to 'advanced search' you can use options like 'site:' , 'filetype:', 'allintitle:' when you want to specify that you only want results from a specified domain, in a specified file type or only those who have your search term in the title. There is another undocumented option: 'define:'

Its quite simple just type

define: adhd

define: swaps

define: schizophrenia

or another word you want the definition of and Google will return 10 to 20 definitions from trusted sites like Wikipedia, princeton.edu, Stanford.edu etc. You can even get those definitions in other languages like French, Italian, German or Russsian.

It's a quick way to find a definition when you do not have the time to read the article in the Wikipedia.

Well Connected? The Biological Implications of 'Social Networking'

Hours per day of face-to-face social interaction declines as use of electronic media increases. These trends are predicted to increase (data abstracted from a series of time-use and demographic studies)."



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Two scientists express their concern about the use of the social Web. According to Sigman’s article, entitled “Well Connected? The Biological Implications of ‘Social Networking.”, it could increase the risk of problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia. Lady Greenfield expressed earlier this month her concerns in a debate in the House of Lords, in which she said that social networking, as well as computer games, might be particularly harmful to children, and could be behind the observed rise in cases of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder.

Research suggested that the number of hours people spent speaking to others face-to-face had fallen dramatically since 1987 as the use of electronic media increased. Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims. Emailing people rather than meeting up with them may have wide-ranging biological effects, said psychologist Dr Aric Sigman.

Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook allow people to keep in touch with friends over the web. They can swap pictures, play games and leave messages which explain how their day is going. But the lack of face to face contacts can cause health problems as to Sigman.

Highlights 2bloggen

Introduction to Contextual Information Search [CIS 1] The point is that computer science has far to long restricted its research in typical domains as logics, statistics and economic Google’s one-way mirror: a business model for privacy invasion [CIS 2] ….we do not properly understand the nature of the nature of the transaction between us and Google. …into our relationship with Google we do not grasp that we are not really Google’s costumers. Google calls us users, but in fact we are Google’s products. Our attention is what Google sells to its customers, which are the advertisers.	Mafia and Mafia-type organizations in Italy by UmbertoSantino Tens of thousands march in Naples against Mafia More than 100,000 people marched in Naples on Saturday in one of the biggest anti-mafia rallies in recent years to commemorate the victims of organized crime and demand an end to its stranglehold on southern Italy.
Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments by Leliana Segura	Carrières d’espion en France
E-reputation toolkit	Democracy-support and the Arab World: after the fall by Tarek Osman

a common ground for search in real life and search using computers

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Googling has become a verb in our language. This shows the deep impact of Google on our culture and our lives. But Google is not primarily about searching. Google is an information shovel selling adds. In a previous article I intuitively described contextual search as finding information on the web not using Google. I was a little bit surprised about the interest for the story, because the idea of contextual search was still an embryonic idea. In this article I will develop this idea of contextual search further correlating to and in opposition to googling trying to find out what it is and what it is not. When looking for better information search strategies I want to compare our search behaviour using CMC based systems like Google with natural communication. This is the starting point. This may sound odd and completely off the record, but in fact I'm only re-joining a tradition that has started in the sixties and seventies at the Biological Computer Lab in Urbana Campaing by Gordon Pask

E-reputation toolkit: Social Web Metasearch

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The Socal Web is fantastic if it is built on top of social relations in the real world. Somebody discribed it ironically: "Twitter is for the friends you want to have while Facebook is for the friends you have had." I have no experience with Twitter, but research demonstrated that  Twitter is not a social network. About Facebook, Myspace... and alike, I can be positive, they are an extra channel for multimedia exchange. For some social Webs are the photo-book we had before... for the activists it's the place where they launche petitions.

A few years ago there was much ado about the long tail, a statistic concept from consumer demographics to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. A frequency distribution with a long tail has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of "non-hit" items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

The Long Tail might be valid for sites like Amazon and Ebay, it doesn't work in social networking. After all social relations are not built on consumer demographics. Maybe the popularity of politicians might work this way, but in politics today, nobody has real friends. So?  A study of Youtube showed that the long tail doesn't work on the social web. The popularity of videos on Yuotube follows rather the  blockbuster model. Based on the viewing habits of people I know that go to YouTube, this makes sense.  Many simply check out whatever is most popular, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.  Desaster tourism works the same way, people slowing down on the highway if there has been an accident. So, beware! It is passing. Once the mess is cleaned, nobody will be looking any longer.

In the real world 'trust building' gives stable results when one invests time, while a reputation is shallow and passing. Trust building' is a process that takes time. One has to give evidence of this truthfulness and trustworthiness, it's about quality. But on Internet things seem to be different. PR based reputation building seems to work all the time. It suffices to get in the picture without getting in jail and that's about it.  But keep in mind, it's about quantity and a self-perpetuating cycle, not about quality.

The tools I list here cost nothing. Look at them, but if you use them, keep in mind that long standing relations are built on trust not on reputation and that relations in the real world are not interchangeable.

Google's one-way mirror: a business model for privacy invasion by Daniël Verhoeven

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Author: Daniël Verhoeven

About the importance of Mirror neurons, also in CMC intention counts

Mirror Neurons were discovered in 1994 in the macaque brain by Gallese and Rizzolatti. What do Mirror Neurons do? They mirror observed actions:

"The observation of an object-related hand action leads to the activation of the same neural network active during its actual execution. Action observation causes in the observer the automatic activation of the same neural mechanism triggered by action execution." (Gallese, 2005).

In the years that follow, Gallese and others (also called the Parma Group because they all work at the university of Parma in Italy) explore the Mirror Neuron system. The Mirror Neuron system is also demonstrated in the human brain.