- Why anonymity isn’t anonymous
Chris Kelly, the Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, recently testified about privacy before members of Congress regarding online privacy and advertising. Nick O’Neill of The Social Times highlighted this portion of the testimony:
The critical distinction that we embrace in our policies and practices, and that we want our users to understand, is between the […]
- Function (and searchability!) follows form
Until very recently, search engines have had to make a Heisenbergian choice. Heisenberg, you’ll recall, observed that when studying quantum particles, you could study position or momentum of a given particle, but not both. Position and momentum in quantum mechanics are determined in terms of probability, but this added another level of uncertainty to the […]
- The tyranny of dichotomy, part 1
An informational cascade is a perception—or misperception—spread among people because we tend to let others think for us when we don’t know ourselves. For example, recently John Tierney (tierneylab.blog.nytimes.com) discussed the widely held belief but little-supported belief that too much fat is nutritionally bad. Peter Duesberg contends that the HIV hypothesis for AIDS is such […]
- Lunchtime rant: How not to ask questions
From the NY Times, Yes, Running Can Make You High, 27 March 2008:
Yes, some people reported that they felt so good when they exercised that it was as if they had taken mood-altering drugs. But was that feeling real or just a delusion? And even if it was real, what was the feeling supposed to […]
- Leveraging Google for internal search
Recently Google added a feature to organic search results: when Google’s algorithm decides a user probably wants information from within a specific domain, they provide a search field for that domain. Results look like this:
Searching within domains on Google is not a new thing. Users have been able to do this through the advanced […]
- Messy is fun: Stepping away from Occam’s razor
The scientific method is the most popular form of scientific inquiry, because it provides measurable testing of a given hypothesis. This means that once an experiment is performed, whether the results were negative or positive, the foundation on which you are building your understanding is a little more solid, and your perspective a little broader. […]
- How excluding data limits thought
I have never understood the desire to delete articles in Wikipedia solely on the basis of the highly subjective concept of “notability,” and I’ve fought against deletion of such articles. It’s easy to store the information, and it’s useful to someone or it wouldn’t be there. To these reasons I would add another: the more […]
- In defense of buckleyspeak
William F. Buckley, Jr., has died, and while I will not miss his politics, I will miss the intellect that paid us all the compliment of never talking down to us, never using less than the full arsenal of words and thoughts at its disposal, never pretending it was less than it was in order […]
- Web eye candy done right
I rarely approve of purposeless, animated eye candy on the web. This, though, is delightful.
HEMA is a Dutch department store. Click to view their product page, and just watch what happens….
- Thinking about Facebook
The Online Journalism Review, of which I am an avid and appreciative reader, recently posted In defense of Facebook, in which they play devil’s advocate to the outcry against users’ inability to delete information from the site, and the site’s privacy-invasive policies.
I respect the attempt, but it fails to persuade. Of course I had […]
