Internet

For those in the Bay Area, I thought I’d mention that I’ll be giving a talk at Wiki Wednesday this evening at 6pm. The topic is digital media use by youth. Feel free to come by. Also, feel free to join the group at other times in the future, these meetings are held every month.

Maybe not a resume, as such; but uncannily familiar even so.

via Chris Hayes

The term “phishing” refers to the malicious practice of trying to extract sensitive information (such as passwords) from users. Compared to numerous other Internet-related terms, “phishing” is one of the least understood ones among users. I have found this in my work as have others in theirs. Of course, it may be that people understand the concept of phishing without knowing it is called as such. It is difficult to do large-scale data collection using more elaborate methods, but I implemented some related questions on a survey recently taken by over one hundred students who were randomly sampled from a diverse group. (See the end of this post for details about the data set.)

In the context of a larger study, I showed participants three hypothetical emails and offered several options for how they might proceed (respondents could check off several actions such as “delete it”, “ignore it”, “forward to tech support with a question”, etc.). When shown an email that looked very much like the one that comes from the IT department of the university (one that would not be hard to replicate by someone with malicious intent) over half of respondents said they would “follow the instructions outlined in the email”, which included going to a Web site and entering their username and password. Even more students said that they would “click on the links in the message and follow the instructions on those pages”. Less than 15 percent checked off the option of contacting tech support with a question or reporting the email as abuse. And in the open-ended field where respondents could explain what else they might do, only one student described actions that suggested the potential problem with the email. This among the generation that is supposedly savvy about digital media. See my forthcoming paper on The Role of Expertise in Navigating Links of Influence for more on this (especially pp. 12-19.).

When I talk to my students (at a different school than where the above study was conducted) about online privacy and security issues, and ask them about the potential implications, the usual response is about financial concerns: credit card numbers stolen, money lost. However, as I try to remind them several times throughout the course, financial issues are not the only ones at stake when managing one’s identity and actions online. For example, in the realm of health and politics one can easily come up with examples of cases where third parties should not have access to our information.

And then there is reputation. I have noticed some troubling incidents on Flickr recently and wanted to write a post about these experiences to remind people about the importance of being vigilant. Don’t stop reading just because you are not a Flickr user, by the way. These same issues could occur on lots of other sites as well.

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I’ve just “linked a paper”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/polsci/2007/07/middleton_and_green_on_whether.html at my political science papers weblog that seems potentially pretty interesting to CT readers and others. Joel Middleton and Donald Green have written a “piece”:http://www.yale.edu/csap/seminars/middleton.pdf that tries to gauge the effects of MoveOn’s canvassers on voting turn-out. They estimate this by looking at situations where (a) the boundary of two voting precincts bisects a street so that people on one side of the street are in one precinct, and those on the other side are in the other precinct, and (b) where one of these districts had MoveOn organizers canvassing prospective voters, and the other didn’t. They then look at the voters on each side of the relevant street – this should eliminate potential bias (there’s pretty good reason to think that voters on different sides of the same street aren’t going to be measurably different from each other). When they do this, they find that people contacted by MoveOn canvasers seems to be 7% more likely to vote than the control population, which is a pretty significant difference. As Gerber and Green say, this is a nice result for the election turnout literature. But it has wider implications, as they note in an aside. There’s a lot of talk from Robert Putnam and others about how people are losing ‘social capital’ as the Internet becomes ever more important. Regardless of the underlying merits of the social capital thesis (personally, I’m pretty skeptical of it, at least in Putnam’s formulation), this provides smoking gun evidence that the Internet can enable greater participation than would otherwise have been possible, through allowing decentralized movements such as MoveOn to get the vote out more effectively.

Soon there will be a Web site just for this – if there isn’t one already -, but until then, let’s see what we can collect here.

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature of its Maps service: Street View for select urban areas in the U.S. plus Google’s backyard. We’ve seen this before on services like A9 (which discontinued the feature), and Microsoft’s Live Maps, but this seems more user-friendly.

Boing Boing has a thread with links to some interesting finds. Oh, the temptation to go hunting for more! Spot any embarrassing situations or funny captures? There is potential here for hours of amusement!

I’m off to Trader Joe’s.

For your weekend reading pleasure: the special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication I edited on The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines is out. The Introduction gives you the motivation for this collection and a summary of the pieces. From the Abstract:

Search engines are some of the most popular destinations on the Web—understandably so, given the vast amounts of information available to users and the need for help in sifting through online content. While the results of significant technical achievements, search engines are also embedded in social processes and institutions that influence how they function and how they are used. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication explores these non-technical aspects of search engines and their uses.

Enjoy!

Cory Doctorow coins a phrase about Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

At BookTruck.org (a group blog for librarians), Mimi notes that with the nightmare at Virginia Tech, mass-media coverage has been almost entirely conditioned by the new-media “surround”:
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Following up on the “Twitter Curve”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/13/twitter-curve/ from last week, here is Twittervision, a mashup of Twitter and Google Maps.

The recent “profusion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/12/skin/ “of”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/14/gift-exchange/ “posts”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/15/how-about-my-gift/ on beard shaving has attracted a slightly more sophisticated class of comment-spammer to CT than the usual midget-porn purveyors we hose out of the moderation queue every morning.

I’ve been hiding under my facial hair for so long because of life circumstances it was no point in getting involved. Now life is starting to look better and I’m not under such stress and crap. I might just have to get back in the game… How do I attract women? I suppose I need to do more than just shave or use the ever-popular [name of pheromone product deleted]. I’m gonna have to ditch my caveman culture and transform myself a little I guess. The secret is that i use pheromones [url deleted] for attracting women. They are like magic.

It’s unclear whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Via “Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ come “Lore Sjöberg’s views on Wikipedia.”:http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70670-0.html He says in part:

Wikipedia is a new paradigm in human discourse. It’s a place where anyone with a browser can go, pick a subject that interests them, and without even logging in, start an argument. … The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: “Experts are scum.” For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War — and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge — get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.

This reminds me of my friend “Dave Chalmers”:http://consc.net/ and his abortive efforts to suggest some clean up of the Wikipedia entry on “consciousness”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness, especially the bits relating to his own well-known book _The Conscious Mind_. He registered a username and — politely — made a suggestion. “The results”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Consciousness/Archive01 were not encouraging:

As can be seen above, most of your criticisms are not supported. Please demonstrate your familiarity with the field by supporting your critique with reasoned arguments rather than pejorative comments. *loxley* 08:50, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Marshall McLuhan here. *Philos* is right about each of the points above. The philosophy section would be much improved if it reverted to the “philosopher’s” edit of a few days ago. *DavidChalmers* 23:51, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

How is he right about the points above? The points are clearly detailed and you could easily explain your criticism. Please could you also explain how cutting the historical, empirical descriptions of conscious experience and supervenience would improve the article. Why do you have the ID “DavidChalmers” yet use the name Marshall McLuhan? The only famous philosopher called Marshall McLuhan died in 1980. Are you taking the piss or are you philos with a duplicate ID? *loxley* 11:13, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

The user with ID DavidChalmers who claims to be the deceased and famous Canadian philosopher Marshal McLuhan should note that using the name of a living, prominent person as a USERID is against Wikipedia guidelines. *loxley* 11:19, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

My userID is my own name (I presume that’s allowed). “Marshall McLuhan” was an _Annie Hall_ reference. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to get into a long argument involving an entry where I am discussed. But since you’ve invoked my name twice (here and on the history page) in support of your claims, I thought I should register my judgment here. I appreciate all that you and others have done to build up this entry. But your discussion in the article and above shows fairly basic misunderstandings of supervenience (the Derrida quote has no bearing on supervenience), direct realism (it’s not true that direct realists see the explanatory gap in terms of access consciousness), functionalism (it’s not true that “experience of” is a functionalist or eliminativist locution), and so on. I’m sorry! And I’ll bow out now. *DavidChalmers* 23:36, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Dear Prof. Chalmers, Thank you for your comments. I respect your willingness to bow out of decisions where conflicts of interest emerge, but I would like to stress that your informed opinion and guidance is most valuable here. This page has great potential to teach many curious readers about our current understanding of consciousness in an accurate and approachable way. I believe that all here would agree that this subject is a difficult one to get right and teach well, and thus your contributions here are most certainly a welcome public service. Many thanks for your past (and hopefully future) contributions. Cheers, *sallison* 01:47, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Sallison: yuk. Chalmers, if that is your name, your criticisms are not in the spirit of Wikipedia. Don’t wave your hand with a pompous air of authority, get them dirty by actually contributing. I have given details of the assertions in the philosophy section that you can rebut in the section below. *loxley* 10:56, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

I’m not sure how things stand these days with that entry. Hopefully it improved.

Answers.com has got to be one of my most visited sites. (Yahoo! Answers is another, but I’ll save that for later.) It is the site that Google uses for definitions and I use it often for spell checks.* I guess I find it easier to type a word in the search bar, press return and then click on the “definition” link in the upper right corner of the search results page than to designate Answers as my search engine of choice and type in the word there. This may be, because subsequent use of the search bar would then require another click to switch back to another engine.

In any case, today after I finished reading an article (this one) on the NYTimes site, I noticed the following below the piece:

Tips
To find reference information about the words used in this article, hold down the ALT key and click on any word, phrase or name. A new window will open with a dictionary definition or encyclopedia entry.

So I placed my cursor on a word, pressed the ALT key and clicked with my mouse. Voila. A window popped up with information from Answers about the word. (I have a pop-up blocker and this still came up so it’s of a different variety. You are also given the option of having it come up in a separate tab or window in the browser.) Cool feature.

Alternatively, of course there is always the option of using the ConQuery extension on Firefox and adding the relevant Answers plugin from MyCroft. ConQuery is certainly my preferred way for locating addresses on Google Maps without having to retype them. But I like these little pop-up windows since they’re smaller, come up quickly and are easy to close.

[*] I have found that simply relying on the number of search results for a term is not a good indicator of correct spelling given the number of misspelled words out there.

Wow. These images are amazing. Viewing these may benefit considerably from a high-speed connection and definitely from a large screen.

In case you can’t get to it, it may be that the site is being blocked by your school/workplace, because years ago it was an “adult site” and it got banned by a bunch of filters. That raises an interesting point about buying domain names. It’s worth looking into their past. In this case, a quick check on the Wayback Machine would’ve helped.

In any case, the images are wonderful, enjoy if you can get to them.

Last night I mentioned to my wife — a reference librarian at the Library of Congress whose areas of concentration include e-commerce and information technology — that the BBC website had just run a story headlined “Blogging ‘set to peak next year.”” Here it is.

Her response to this was a sound (one I cannot quite transcribe) conveying a subtle blend of disbelief, disgust, and world-weariness. It was not at all a matter of pro-blog parti pris; rather, it reflected a deeply informed disdain for the methods and presumptions usually involved in making such predictions. As usual, I payed close attention to her opinion in the matter. (Reference librarians have amazing powers.)
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