OK, so PSH's post has me exploring my "stats" feature a bit. One thing I found is that the above phrase, which I think translates as "How do I find a crack pipe?" led someone to my blog.
A highly-ranked site (which I'm sure it is safe to assume this is!) having a higher "relevance" or ranking will lead inevitably to it being pushed ahead in a search engine results for topics it only tangentially refers to, and perhaps only piecemeal. People looking for tools to break into protected software or for tools to break into a really large cocaine crystal therefore have some chance of aligning their universe with yours. Fun, eh?
I remember one time reading somebody's screed against the really awkward and ugly topic (of a salacious nature) that had become linked to their blog. Ironically, by explicitly mentioning the phrase that their blog had been linked to, they only reinforced the association, as well as gave onlookers something to point and hoot at. On the plus side, they had recognized the issue and could have taken steps to eliminate its skewing effect on their statistics.
Look up "Google Bomb" if you want to see the dynamics of it. It seems oddly suitable for an economics blog to be subject to an economic force of phrases (something like labor competitiveness, maybe, if you take level of "relevance" to a search engine algorithm as the key factor driving excellence to the fore of even rather sub-standard markets, like cracked objets d'art used in the consumption of cocaine).
Part of me wonders if sending out strange search queries in hopes of prompting the blog owners to treat a topic explicitly is the latest tactic used by the same folks who carpet-bomb old blog comments with nonsensical quasi-stories laced with brand-name pharmas.
This is why many people prefer not to click directly on a website link from Google - to maintain the element of surprise.
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
A highly-ranked site (which I'm sure it is safe to assume this is!) having a higher "relevance" or ranking will lead inevitably to it being pushed ahead in a search engine results for topics it only tangentially refers to, and perhaps only piecemeal. People looking for tools to break into protected software or for tools to break into a really large cocaine crystal therefore have some chance of aligning their universe with yours. Fun, eh?
ReplyDeleteI remember one time reading somebody's screed against the really awkward and ugly topic (of a salacious nature) that had become linked to their blog. Ironically, by explicitly mentioning the phrase that their blog had been linked to, they only reinforced the association, as well as gave onlookers something to point and hoot at. On the plus side, they had recognized the issue and could have taken steps to eliminate its skewing effect on their statistics.
Look up "Google Bomb" if you want to see the dynamics of it. It seems oddly suitable for an economics blog to be subject to an economic force of phrases (something like labor competitiveness, maybe, if you take level of "relevance" to a search engine algorithm as the key factor driving excellence to the fore of even rather sub-standard markets, like cracked objets d'art used in the consumption of cocaine).
Part of me wonders if sending out strange search queries in hopes of prompting the blog owners to treat a topic explicitly is the latest tactic used by the same folks who carpet-bomb old blog comments with nonsensical quasi-stories laced with brand-name pharmas.
This is why many people prefer not to click directly on a website link from Google - to maintain the element of surprise.
I hope that's of some use.
Oddly enough, I've noticed that Google Analytics and Blogger disagree on a lot of things. I think both have to be taken with a grain of salt.
ReplyDeleteInteresting, Edwin: I hadn't thought of the "Cracked" in my title!
ReplyDelete