jrtom

This has been making the rounds recently:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/22/pariser.filter.bubble/

The basic premise is that the information that you see on the web is becoming more personalized all the time:

these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us -- what I've come to call a filter bubble -- which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information

and this is problematic for the following reasons:

(1) "You're the only person in your bubble. In an age when shared information is the bedrock of shared experience, the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart."

(2) "The filter bubble is invisible...Google's agenda is opaque. Google doesn't tell you who it thinks you are, or why it's showing you the results you're seeing. You don't know if its assumptions about you are right or wrong -- and you might not even know it's making assumptions about you in the first place."

(3) "You don't choose to enter the bubble...personalized filters...come to you".


Google is not the only organization that comes under fire in this article--Facebook and Amazon also are mentioned--but Google is mentioned most prominently and consistently, presumably because it is the entity through which many people derive most of their information.


I'll start off by saying that much as I think that Google is cool, I hope that it never gets a monopoly on providing search results. It's important that there be viable choices--four or five good ones is a good start--for this service. We can make mistakes, and we won't always do the best job with every kind of information retrieval task. And if there's just one option, it makes it much more feasible for organizations to get access to information that they shouldn't (IMO). Defense in depth, memetic diversity, and all that--these things are critical to the healthy functioning of society.

I've also made specific proposals at work to suggest that we do some random perturbations of our search results in situations where our ranking algorithm doesn't really differentiate much, score-wise, between results, precisely to give our results a bit more diversity when it doesn't cost us anything (as far as we can tell).


All that said, I don't think that Mr. Pariser has really either (a) thought this through all the way nor (b) done his homework, at least so far as Google is concerned.

Before I respond to his specific points above, I'll point out that personalization is an incredibly useful approach to making any tool more useful, and search engines are no exception. If Google can determine that when I search for "latex" I am looking for information on typesetting rather than rubber fetishwear, so much the better. There's a universe of information out there and I don't have time to drink the whole thing. By all means, please do your best to give me the most relevant stuff.


Responding to his points in order:

(1) This is ridiculous. It's like saying that I am the only one who occupies this particular location in space-time and therefore I am isolated. Even if we suppose that I am the only person that has my particular combination of traits that Google measures, there are millions of people out there whose characteristics overlap strongly with mine. It's even stronger than that: customizing my information flow to my interests can help me discover people and communities and information to which I have existing implicit affinities that I might never have been able to run across otherwise.

(2) Dude. Do a search on "how to turn off personalized search". This will give you information on both how to do this and how to find out what kinds of factors are involved in personalization. This is not a new topic.
Could we be surfacing this better? Probably. But we do have to make some decisions about what information to give prominence to, or the search page gets incredibly cluttered. But the process (essentially, click on "view customizations" at the bottom of your search) is not difficult.

(3) There is some justice to this claim: I believe that search personalization is the default and while one can opt out, I don't know that we tell you up front when you create a Google Account that your results will be personalized.

That said: Google is not, and does not aspire to be, the _source_ of all information. We don't, for the most part, create content. We curate it, organize it, and try to make it accessible and useful. You, as a sentient being, are responsible for managing your inputs. We may decide that if you search for "rainforests" that you're more interested in organizations that want to preserve them unchanged than in organizations that want to extract the maximal resources from them at minimal cost, but nothing prevents you, or should, from searching for "rainforest preservation" or "rainforest resource extraction" instead. I don't really think that it's Google's job to help you break out of your rut.

Megan and I have been a tad busy lately. Part of this is the usual round of work-related stuff, part is the kind of busy that one expects of people with four small children.

A large part, however, has been the fact that we sold our house in Renton a bit under a month ago and are now living in an apartment in Bellevue. Basically a confluence of factors came to a head: we wanted a larger place that was much closer to work. So, of course, we moved into an apartment that's 2/3 the size of our old house (that is, undeniably, closer to work) while we look for a new house.

And yes, we bought in a seller's market (June 2006) and sold in a buyer's market. It kind of sucks, but on the other hand, (a) prices are still dropping around here so it would have gotten worse, and (b) at least the ridiculously expensive places around here are now only moderately expensive. Overall I think it will be a win, just a really painful one. (And the pain was essentially dictated by buying a house 5 years ago rather than waiting until, say, now. I am attempting to maintain the emotional stance that (a) we were actually renting our house--which (were it true) would make our losses only moderately ridiculous given rents around here, and (b) we are giving the most awesome wedding present to the almost-married-now couple (that we've never met) that just bought our house for $100K less than we paid for it. It helps a bit.)

So, yay for cutting way down on the soul-killing commute. It is now actually practical for me to ride my bike to work (and in fact that's a constraint that we're imposing on the places we're looking for) or to ride the bus (ditto).

More on this later, but I'd already put this notification off for much longer than I should.

Feel free to contact me via email to ask for the new address.

My Google profile

fourth attempt:

"...let's see what happens."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinion/19friedman.html?src=me&ref=general

There's just a little bit of irony here, as Friedman points out, and I'm not starting to celebrate just yet...but it looks encouraging, at least.

some of which is very funny, some of which is quite raunchy, and some which is both:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/what_are_your_favorite_culturally_untranslateable/?sort=confidence

(I don't often get to use the tags 'linguistics' and 'humor' together. This may actually be the first time.)

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/#

I haven't entirely decided what I think about what Wikileaks has been doing, but this is an interesting look into, and analysis of, what Assange has been trying to accomplish via these leaks.

Of minor professional interest to me: apparently either Assange is not familiar with the terminology of social networks, or he thinks that his audience isn't (possibly fair). Apparently his strategy is an interesting complement to (or inversion of) the US counterterrorism social-network-based strategy, i.e., attempting to disrupt networks by identifying and removing key actors. Instead, Assange is apparently trying to disrupt the network by making the network itself--that is, the connections that make it something other than a collection of individuals--suspect, or at least less efficient.

EDIT: I do look forward to seeing what David Brin (_The Transparent Society_) has to say about this; I'll be watching http://davidbrin.blogspot.com to see when he posts something.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

It makes me feel a little bit better to know that he won't touch math. (Or, presumably, the other hard sciences.) But, you know, not a whole lot.

I've gone on in this space about my own experiences, as a TA, dealing with cheating. (If you missed out, it's not that hard to get me to recap. *wry smile*)

If this really is as widespread a phenomenon as the author suggests--and I suspect that while he exaggerates somewhat, perhaps not much--this really does point to something broken in our educational system.

http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20101104/NEWS/101109939/1078&ParentProfile=1062

WHAT.

or at least their web server:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/22/sears-reaches-out-to.html

I have no particular fondness for the zombie trope, but I have to give Sears credit for this.

(Or a disgruntled and possibly undead web server admin. One of those.)

First day of working in the Seattle office. (Normally I work in Kirkland.) This won't be something I do often, but the new team I'm on has its tech lead in Seattle, and Megan's still on maternity leave, so this is a good time to do it.

Morning: miss the bus I'd intended to take from the Renton transit center to downtown Seattle. Get misdirected by Google Maps Transit as to the number of the bus I'm supposed to be looking for once I finally arrive in downtown Seattle, and unwittingly let it escape. Arrive something like 45 minutes later than I'd intended.

Evening: miss the first bus I try to take (either it showed up early or late enough to be useless) after running up some steep hills for several blocks. Go back where I started to catch a later bus, which is itself late enough that I miss the connection to the bus going to Renton TC. Fail to realize that there's another bus I can take from the stop I'm waiting at that will go to Renton TC, and wait yet another 20 extra minutes in consequence. I'll be getting there about 45 minutes later than I'd intended, and because so much of the wait was in the bus tunnel, I couldn't get any work done (no signal). Plus I missed an event at Corwin's school.

Gaaaaaahhh.

I generally prefer taking the bus to driving when I can, but this sucked.