https://alpha.app.net/riyad/post/12827299
Month: October 2013
ADN: Eid Mubarak
https://alpha.app.net/riyad/post/12826757
Gitify Your Life
Git was written to manage code, but Richard Hartmann presents a whole range of projects and tools that use Git for all sorts of things. 😀
From tracking personal notes to managing your website, wiki, and blog over tracking system and personal configuration files to managing videos, photos and other large files and making system backups, a lot of tools have been grown around the git ecosystem to help you support most tasks of your digital life. This talk will show you a lot of neat tools and tricks and it’s highly likely that you will adopt at least one of the various solutions.
http://youtu.be/Ln1Ri8kLzok
Watch it on YouTube or get it from the Debian Archives.
Aloha Fluffy
I’m laughing tears … Just watched Gabriel Iglesias‘ new special on YouTube. This is probably the first time I’m benefiting from geofencing. 😀
http://youtu.be/50zDrdBRSTw
ADN: The Essence of Oriental Discipline
https://alpha.app.net/riyad/post/12658687
ADN: “Shake hands with me, man.”
https://alpha.app.net/riyad/post/12404375
Das A und O
OH im Islamologie-Seminar:
lā ilāha illā ʾLLĀH, muḥammadun rasūlu ʾLLĀH, ist das A und O!
… Ich fand’s lustig. 😀
Chinesen auf dem Weg nach Mekka
Das sind echte Pilger! Die wissen die Hadsch noch zu schätzen! Eine Mischung aus einfacher Frömmigkeit und kindlicher Vorfreude … Hadschis zum Gernhaben. 😀
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14vnpj55QXI
Eine andere Frage: wenn man aus China kommt, sind Hadsch-Geschenke (außer Zamzam) irgendwie sinnlos, oder? 😛
Schizophrenics Were Right, Probably, Maybe, Hopefully Not …
An interesting article on how schizophrenics’ thoughts that they are controlled by an outside power or living in a world crafted for them has become a matter of possibility for all of us – or “how reality caught up with paranoid delusions.” Exploring advances in technology, its ubiquity and the way we consume it, we assume we perceive an altered *cough* enriched and augmented version of the world around us. We silently ignore that this allows us to be easily toyed with and manipulated without us necessarily noticing it.
This is an interesting phenomenon that is not widely known and mostly ignored. But the matter of the fact is that if you have two computers, side-by-side, open up your browser and search for the exact same thing, you won’t get the same list of results. The same happens on social networks: try looking for a non-person and compare the results and their order.
Search gurus will tell you this is the magic of “personalized results” and finding things “most interesting to you” … but what they don’t tell you is that this comes at the price of having the possibility of doing a global and unbiased search.
Any search you do is biased, by the region you are accessing the internet from (continent, country, city), your internet history, your search history, your language preferences, time of day … basically anything quantifiably different will alter your search results. You can’t (even if you try) do a unfiltered, repeatable and global search on the internet. And anything you click in those already tailored results will only reinforce your perceived “interest.”
Eli Pariser also talks about this in his “Beware online filter bubbles” Ted Talk where he quotes Google’s Eric Schmidt:
It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.
— Eric Schmidt, Google
So, what would prevent any of those search providers from manipulating results deliberately? Actually, pretty much nothing. The amount of manipulation they would have to do e.g. to influence voter preferences in an already close election would probably be too little to be noticed and it wouldn’t even be illegal. So that’s why people like Bruce Schneier demand regulation for secret algorithms that have become part of our infrastructure.
One thing is clear: it can’t stay the way it is now.
OK … enough dystopic thoughts for today. 😛
Update 2013-12-08:
Seems like reality caught up already. Case in point: South Korea.
ADN: Python Development Has Nothing To Do With Zoology
https://alpha.app.net/riyad/post/12202500