News Report #3

The Internet knows what movie you want to see
Casey Johnston
9/27/10
<http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/09/internet-search-numbers-fair-predictors-of-consumer-behavior.ars>

A group of Yahoo researchers looked at the internet search queries for products to determine what would be a good seller and what consumers would want to get.  They would look at CD's, movies, and even games and look at how many searches were done for each item and compare them.  They would use this information as a predictor to see what item would do better.  In many cases the searches for different items was a success for determining how popular something would be.  The even took it one step further and used it for cold and flu symptoms.  By seeing how many searches were done for each it could help determine the spread of the flu and cold, after comparing the predictions of the spread of the flu with one and two week old data from the Center of Disease Control and Prevention.  All in all the search data performed by the Yahoo researchers was often better than other indicators at predicting how popular an item would be.  But still, the searchers were regularly outperformed by more traditional formulas.

I think that this was an interesting way to go about seeing how well an item would perform.  While it couldn't be totally accurate, it would still give people a general idea of how well a product would do, or not do.  It is definitely a different means of going about trying to figure something like that out.  But when you think about it, it makes since.  It is only natural that when someone wants a product or wants to know more about it they will research it.  When people research it they may tell others to look at it, which spreads the word and increases searchers.

Reading Asssignment #2

According to Wikipedia's story on itself, it is the biggest collection of general knowledge ever compiled. It has even surpassed the 600 year old Chinese Yongle Encyclopedia. Ever since Wikipedia came into existence in 2001 its popularity exponentially grew, it was estimated that there was about 2,200 articles added to this world wide encyclopedia every day. But up until about 2 years ago, this rapid growth suddenly declined, articles weren't being published, people became reluctant to fix errors or add their own 2 cents worth of wisdom. Its biggest peak was in March 2007 with 820,000 contributors but hasn't seen anything close to those numbers since then. Volunteers have been trying to fix this problem by means of expanding their fan base, since women make up only 13% of contributors, and also by making the site more trustworthy. They have been working on putting in a layer of control regarding actually living people. The way it is now people can say what they want freely about anything. But this plan will only go into action once the Wikipedia administrator passes it. But this is just the problem, it has been reported that Wikipedia's fuel for striving is the chaos that came along with it and the freedom to say and post what you wanted. But with freedom to post and edit what you wanted too, it came to the point where everyone posted storied about everything and people just lost interest in continuing it once the main articles became published. There is also research to suggest that Wikipedia will not make it for another 10 years or so. With Wikipedia's troubles it suggests that the internet has limits too, which is when a community gets too big, it becomes chaotic and dysfunctional.






I personally like Wikipedia, while it is true that the sources cant not be truly reliable due to the fact that anyone can edit any article at any time. However, it is very helpful when you need to look up information about a certain topic and need a quick summary of what it is or how something works. I was also very surprised to see that Wikipedia is expected to cease existence within another decade or so because I for one thought that Wikipedia would be around for a substantial amount of time. It has easy access for anyone with internet and it is easy to search topics and it also contains information on just about any subject you could think of.

Reading Assignment #1

There is a lot of information out there on the internet that one could easily take in as factual and reliable when in reality it is nothing but misleading. There are different forms of misleading websites out there such as: counterfeit, malicious, product, fictitious, parodies/spoofs/entertainment, hacks, and disinformation. Each one of these categories has its own special way of misleading someone. Counterfeit, for example, is a web site that is pretending to be the real thing when it is actually not. That may be the most common type of misleading information on the internet. But even so, each of these categories are not perfect, sometimes it is hard to differentiate what type of false information would be in which category.






This is something that I think is wrong, there should be something done to prevent this but since everyone has access to the internet, as well as freedom of speech, it seems that everyone can input whatever kind of information they would like too. The best thing we can do is try to stop the actual crime on the internet and let the citizens be prepared on knowing ways to find out if something is false. This is really important to do especially for all of the scammers that are out there. A way to stop yourself from being scammed is to go to the main page of the website and look at the contact information and if you do not recognize or even trust the website, then do not respond in any way. Other tips are as follows: if you come across a .com and expected a .org, then stay on your toes. Second be aware of the language that is being said and the layout of the information for comic situations. Visit websites that regularly post hoaxes sites. you must also know that misleading information, such as really opinionated information, can give you information about another individual and be used to your advantaged. Lastly, search smart, use advances searches and trusted engine sites and limit the number of domains that pop and be aware of the information that is around you.