Month: July 2018

Filter bubble at google?

The personalization of search engine results and the networking of social networks has advantages and disadvantages. If I am interested in golf as a sport and do not click hits related to the car or the Gulf Stream, the algorithms will show me similar hits and related advertisements in the future. The more I click on certain pages, the more often they will be displayed. In extreme cases, my own website is displayed in one of the first places of the search results, because it is constantly controlled and accessed, while it is almost invisible to all other users. The device, PC, tablet, mobile phone with operating system and browser are also read out. With the same search query you get different results with different devices and sometimes different prices in Internet shops and when booking trips.
Whether this results in a filter bubble is controversial. See, e.g. Sebastian Meinek: Deshalb ist „Filterblase“ die blödeste Metapher des Internets, motherboard 9.3.2018 
In any case, I can actively counteract this as a user by regularly deleting search history and cookies, protecting the browser with complementary tools such as Ghostery, or even better, from the outset in a virtual environment. In addition, I am actively required as a user and not the willless object of the search engine: Fuck the Bubble: So bringst du deine Filterblase zum Platzen
Concrete studies on the effects of personalization are unfortunately not convincing. The Research project „#Datenspende: Google und die Bundestagswahl 2017“  has now devoted itself to this problem. The investigation is based on the search for 9 politicians and parties in Germany, which were repeated at regular intervals. As a result, it turned out that the search results differ only marginally.
The problem with this study lies in the nature of the search queries. They limit themselves to what is referred to in retrieval known item search, the search for facts that you already know. The meaningfulness is therefore very limited. The consequences of personalization under which circumstances on the supply of information can not be clarified.

Data as Menetekel 3: 500000 immigrants

How to turn a spring report from the economic institutes into Menetekel- Fake-News

“We need a pension with 70 – or 500,000 immigrants per year” is the title of the WELT https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article175616647/Wir-brauchen-Rente-mit-70-oder-500-000-Zuwanderer-im-Jahr.html 19.04.2018 and continues in the article:
“In view of the government’s latest promises, researchers see only two options for keeping contribution rates stable: Either the Germans will work until they are over 70, or they will attract young, employed immigrants. In that case, it is calculated that more than 500,000 people would have to enter the country every year.”
With the corresponding tenor, this report went through the other media.
In the spring report of the economic institutes p. 61 the exact opposite is stated:
“An increase in the statutory pension insurance contribution rate could in principle be prevented by raising the retirement age beyond 67 years or by increasing immigration of younger workers, but both seem unrealistic in view of the necessary dimensions: the contribution rate to the statutory old-age pension insurance following the introduction of the planned pension scheme In the long-term, to cap performance increases to 20 percent, the retirement age would theoretically have to exceed 70 years, or the inflow of younger workers would exceed 500,000 every year. “
So they demand neither the one nor the other, but criticize the pension increase of the Federal Government.

The Web: Does it suck us dry – or does it soak us up?

Maurizio Ferrari’s Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin approaches the questions “What is the Web” and “What is our task on the Web? Neue Zürcher Zeitung of July 1, 2018, “Das Web: Saugt es uns aus – oder saugt es uns auf?” Neue Zürcher Zeitung vom 1.7.2018 outlining six dilemmas. Dilemma “means a situation that offers two possibilities of decision, both of which lead to an undesirable result”.
1. virtual or real?
The web as virtualization of the world simultaneously creates social reality as a productive medium and thus real: “There is nothing more real than the web, and that is precisely where its power comes from.
2. communication or recording?
“The web is not a passive means of communication, but an active recording tool, an archive and a system capable of constructing social reality and mobilising individual and collective intentionality.”
3.construction or emergence?
The web is not intentionally constructed, nor is it a collective intelligence, but rather a result of the interplay of the most diverse elements, “obscure and unpredictable”.
4. knowledge or mobilization?
The web is not a collective intelligence, but a “mobilization medium” that constantly invites us to act. “It has nothing to do with any kind of freedom. On the contrary, it nourishes voluntary submission and generates a microphysics of power whose limits are not yet known.” The web shows that “we are mobilized and subservient animals, ready to act on command without understanding the reason for our actions”.
5 Alienation or Revelation?
The web does not alienate man, but shows his true nature: “Man reveals himself as animals in need of technology and always ready to exchange imagined freedom for real security and real consolation.
6) Submission or emancipation?
The web reveals our helplessness, but it can also be an instrument of practical reason, with which technology can be used for a new beginning of culture, for practical reason: “It describes what becomes possible through freedom – freedom, which in turn is a technique, the most difficult of all techniques”.

An interesting analysis especially regarding recording and submission problems. However, in the conclusion itself there is a dilemma: the new beginning is to arise from submission, the instrument of practical reason from helplessness.

Can trust be generated digitally?

The blockchain hype relies on processes and data management to run safely and more effectively. Does this also make the content more credible? Can trust be generated digitally? Kai Stinchcombe, head of a financial services company, says no:

“Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic. A corrupt government can create a blockchain system to count the votes and just allocate an extra million addresses to their cronies. An investment fund whose charter is written in software can still misallocate funds.”

The real problem is still the prerequisites and the trustworthiness of the data at the beginning of the process chain.

 

Kai Stinchcombe: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future, Medium 05.04.2018

Sieht so das Internet der Zukunft aus? Die Blockchain soll das Geschäftsleben revolutionieren und eine neue Ära der Demokratie einläuten. Nun gibt es erste Dienste, die erahnen lassen, wohin die Reise geht. Tagesanzeiger 10.07.2018 

Data as Menetekel 2: 100,000 fawns

In the article in the German newspaper FAZ by  Erik HechtTausende tote Rehe erfunden. Die Spur führt nach Hamburg vom 14.07.2018 “is proven that the number of 100,000 deer kids that die in Germany from mowing machines on meadows was invented by the German Wildlife Foundation. The real number can only be estimated and is probably half. As sad as the death of every single fawn is, it is normal in almost all areas to influence public opinion with purely invented data.

Data as Menetekel 1: 6000 dead

According to the German Umweltbundesamt, 6000 people in Germany die prematurely each year from nitrogen oxide. This number has been criticized in several articles, e.g. Jan Fleischhauer, Kampf gegen den Diesel. The fictitious dead, in: Spiegel Online 15.03.2018 Epidemiological studies can only show correlations, but cannot prove causalities.
The President of the Umweltbundesamt (UBA), Maria Krautzberger: “In office we discuss again and again how we can talk about complicated data that we collect. When do we have to simplify in order to be understood? Governments need such figures and their comparability to know the sum of health risks to people and where they need to do something”.
In short: the data has been invented. This handling of data shows a specific relationship to the citizen. It is not intended to give them an insight into the risks and then use political discourse to determine which risks could be reduced at what cost. He remains an object of propaganda and must not experience one thing: Cows may be more dangerous than cars when it comes to nitric oxide.

The construction of a fictitious reality with correlating data

Fictitious reality is constructed not least with the help of data. A popular method is to reinterpret correlations of statistical data into causal relationships. A very good article by Christian Stöcker: Bestseller author about “Einsamkeit Die Methode Spitzer”, in: Spiegel Online 11.03.2018 analyses the method, how bestseller authors set opinion trends without a factual or scientific basis. It’s about Manfred Spitzer’s book: Manfred Spitzer: Einsamkeit. Die unerkannte Krankheit. Droemer Verlag 2018 ISBN: 978-3-426-27676-1..

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Millionshort

The search engine with filter

Million Short is a search engine developed in Canada since 2012 that aims to provide users with access to websites that are not displayed most frequently or are prepared with search engine optimization.
The “Mission Statement”: “Million Short’s mission is to guide people on the road less traveled by providing alternate methods of organizing, accessing, and discovering the vast web of information that is the Internet.”
Million Short uses Bing’s API and uses its own crawlers to determine the pages to be excluded. Filters can also be set by e-commerce, live chat, date and country.

Qwant: Interview on the business model

An interview with Eric Léandri, head of the European search engine Qwant, has appeared in the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau (14.04.2018). He presents his business model. It is especially emphasized that Qwant does not do user tracking and displays results neutrally.
It remains unclear on which database Qwant works: “We are currently working hard to build our own complete index with all pages that are searched during searches in order to offer a real search engine of our own for Europe. “It is likely, however, that data is mainly taken from the Bing interface, although it is officially claimed that there is no formal cooperation between Qwant and Bing: “The general “network” column in Germany is instead a colourful mixture of various publicly accessible network sources, as the meta search engine Duckduckgo does. “(Qwant shows Google the teeth, DW 12.04.2014)
The search results are displayed with their own weighting: “We don’t want to be Google, and we don’t want to copy Google. We’ve been working with our own algorithm for a long time now to list the search results, which has been tested for several years.”
However, the decisive – and therefore also secret – criterion is whether content can be searched promptly and a comprehensive index built up. We remember a search engine Cuil, which was founded by former Google employees. She claimed to have an index three times larger than Google and also not to track user data. Cuil was shut down after two years after the risk capital was used up.

Quaero: The myth of the European search engine

Quaero (Latin: “I am searching”) was a Franco-German consortium project in which more than 30 organisations were involved and several hundred million euros were distributed as a subsidy. It would be an important scientific work to work through this. We have to deal with three Wikipedia entries
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
and with two small questions and two oral questions from the German Bundestag.
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/024/1602492.pdf#page=7
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/035/1603565.pdf “German-French innovation project of a European search engine Quaero”, http://dipbt.bundestag.de/doc/btd/16/041/1604102.pdf#page=12
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/16/046/1604671.pdf Current developments of the search engine project Theseus – formerly Quaero
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus_(Research Program)

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