PageRank is a popularity contest, not sure why you’d put so much trust into it as a reliable proxy for content quality. Lots of crap can be popular. Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results (debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of PageRank.
> Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results (debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of PageRank.
Is this actually the case? We don't have a good way to test it, but I believe that you wouldn't see the crappy articles I referred in the first N results even with vanilla PageRank (and for a very large N at that).
Keep in mind that my definition of fake news is pretty narrow here: it's "Pope Francis endorses Trump" rather than "Fox dismisses COVID-19 threat" or spin of that sort, which is probably what you meant by crap.
There will certainly be blind spots like the ones above, but my goal is to eliminate the most egregious miscreants and the method outlined will achieve that (well, we'll test it and see how it goes).
Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method.
I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic publications. It's the nature of the field.
You don't have to put trust in a field to do an overview of the existing literature and show how and where it is wrong. Neither philosophy or mathematics, for example, don't follow the "scientific method" (let's assume the Anglophone conception as opposed to Wissenschaft for the sake of arument), yet I would hope that people would rightly call out a post on utilitarianism that doesn't take into account arguments from the last twenty years, or an argument against metaphysics that stops at Hume, and they'd be skeptical of a proof of the Riemann hypothesis expressed in all but the terms of mathematicians.
If you're more convinced by my mathematics example than my philosophy one, it just shows that this isn't about the scientific method at all, but standards of rigor in argumentation, which soft sciences are perfectly capable of, at least internally within frameworks. In that case, all it would take is for the author to mention which framework they believe has the most explanatory power, and why.
Lastly, I fail to see why this would be such an issue in the first place; as an example, take a claim like "viewing pornography is associated with misogynistic attitudes", or even more strongly, that pornograhy causes such attitudes. The fact that it is a broad claim, that relies on population samples and indirect measurement, does not make the research into the topic (both in support and in denial of the claim) any less valid to be ignorant about, if you're writing an essay on whether porn should be censored or not.
Different epistemic standards are not an excuse for ignorance. "Not as authoritive" is not the same as "no authority at all", and it's especially not the same when the essay in question itself is engaging in that topic.
The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was merely stating my observation that while many seem to consider it worthwhile to pay some level of respect to physics or mathematics, fewer appear to do so with regards to sociology or media studies. Are such attitudes justified? Perhaps so, perhaps not - but either way I find nothing perplexing that the public does not respect all fields of inquiry equally.
We're not talking about "the public" generally, we're talking about someone who has thought about a topic and possesses enough interest to write about it. One would think that in the interest of intellecutal honesty they would investigate previous work. If they haven't, it's a valid point of criticism of the work, and I have criticized the work on that basis, just as I would criticize someone writing on space-time who hasn't bothered to look into Einstein, or someone writing on electronics as if they're discovering Kirchoff's law for the first time.
If there really is a Newton of social robots the credit should go to Sony’s aibo — the vaguely Japanese-sounding names of Jibo, Kuri, etc. are dead giveaways of who’s the real OG here.
Anyways aibo came out around 2000 I think, if social robots really are viable as a product category we should be way past the Newton stage by now.
Yes interesting idea for a study but only 10 participants, presumably all around the same age.
Too bad this is what passes off as scholarship in Human-Computer Interaction nowadays. I remember seeing a paper from CHI (the top conference in the field, where OP was also published) lamenting the field's far lower standard of scholarship compared to psychology — the poster child of replication crisis!
The author makes a rather arbitrary distinction between "dumb" and "smart" technologies - trains are now considered "dumb" technology? I live in Tokyo and that was never my impression, they're as smart as it gets and the infrastructure is constantly being updated with new tech as we speak. (My brother works for Japan Railways btw.)
It's as if the author (with a background in civil engineering not CS) deems everything that she has a good understanding of as "dumb", and everything she's relatively unfamiliar with as "smart", i.e., useless. While I'm no fan of projects like Google Quayside and wary of increasing corporate influence on urban policy, you can't point fingers at fringe ideas like smart garbage cans and use that to outright dismiss the role of IT in urbanism; we don't browse through weputachipinit [1] and conclude that all IoT is worthless do we. If she can look into things like Japan's earthquake notification system [2] and still claim that "smart" solutions don't add value to cities, then we can talk.
Perhaps I'm biased by my own experience here in Tokyo, but I feel that a lot of criticism against smart cities - while not at all without merit - smack of civil engineers, urban planners, architects and the like claiming territorial rights, attempting to keep "outsiders" like IT people stepping onto what has traditionally been their turf. We need less of such feudal mentality, and more interdisciplinary collaboration; more urbanists need to start speaking the language of IT and vice versa.
Despite the financial collapse in the early 90s, throughout the decade Japanese youths still had one of the highest levels of disposable income in the world so that probably had an effect. You could be making the most obscure music, film, or fashion and you still had an audience willing to pay for it.
Also I remember people's attitudes shifting in some inexplicable ways, suddenly cultural capital seemed to carry much more weight than other forms of capital. For a while it felt like everyone in Tokyo was trying to one-up one another, not financially but through cultural connoisseurship. Strange times but I do miss the general atmosphere, Japan feels like a completely different country now...
Brings back memories of tangible interface research around the year 2000, these ideas seemed to have so much potential back then. Unfortunately nobody has come up with a convincing argument as to exactly why we need tangibles, aside from some philosophical musings that fetishize the supposed "richness" of real-world interaction.
The value proposition of tangibles took an especially hard blow when smartphones hit the market — multi-touch direct input achieves much of what tangibles promise to offer (e.g., intuitiveness) while retaining all of the benefits of digital computation (e.g., portability of data, negligible marginal cost of production) that are sacrificed in systems like Dynamicland.
> Unfortunately nobody has come up with a convincing argument as to exactly why we need tangibles, aside from some philosophical musings that fetishize the supposed "richness" of real-world interaction.
i am not sure i understand how appealing to human experience is a fetishization.
> multi-touch direct input achieves much of what tangibles promise to offer (e.g., intuitiveness)
i fully disagree about the intuitiveness of multi-touch inputs which tend to have a hidden gesture language. simply trying every possible permutation of touches and gestures, which is what most people do when presented with a new touch interface, does not represent intuitiveness. buttons, sliders, switches, etc. always yield much more efficient and intuitive interfaces.
also, humans are not digital computers, and we struggle to think like them. humans really like the physical world we're born into, and our senses respond positively to things that trigger them. our senses are dulled when interacting with digital computers. look at the synthesizer world. it's a common fact that software synthesizers are extremely flexible and convenient (in some ways, not so in others) but are monotonous to interact with. people often (almost always?) augment them with tangible external interfaces such as knobs, buttons, and keyboards. people tend to much prefer hardware synths (digital or analog based) that they can touch, feel, smell, see, etc. it creates a tangible environment that is much more enjoyable.
> The true problem with surveillance is the asymmetry of it all.
This argument reminds me of those pro-gun arguments: we can't prevent guns from falling into the hands of wrongdoers, so let's allow everyone to arm themselves – soon we'll reach an equilibrium where the fear of retaliation acts as deterrence.
I don't agree with this kind of thinking at all, the way to deal with destructive technologies is not further proliferation.
I don't think the comparison is entirely fair.
The gun argument directly turns towards violence. This is an entirely peaceful approach to an inevitable societal end-state.
Eventually, everyone at all times will be under constant surveillance, even in Western nations. Just look at the UK. Walking around London there is an undeniable asymmetry of constant, pervasive surveillance.
Unless you are suggesting the violent approach (people walking around smashing CCTV), I don't see why you would oppose this.
And if voters are opposed to having more information at their disposal they'll regret that decision. Politicians will see the opportunity fate has dropped into their lap and realize they have one of the following two choices:
Option 1: Oblige voters and pass a prohibition that regular people are not allowed to surface the data through Grassland. This would maintain the status quo for that particular polity but ONLY if NO OTHER polity in the world, to whom CAPITAL can flow chooses to act in their own self interest and takes Option 2 i.e. 'defect' in the Prisoner's Dilemma[1]
Option 2: Realize that having constituents incentivised to surface this data themselves means denser node coverage and less friction; Level 5 self driving cars (with better than human situational awareness); more efficient stock markets because of information decreasing risk and the opening of new markets and industries never before thought possible; less ignorance, violence, fear, unaccountably and resources needed between law enforcement and their communities; and a guaranteed (as long as the node's running) source of income for their voters. And not to mention the fact that they won't be forfeiting AI dominance and capital to those political bodies that have chosen Option 2 themselves.
All misunderstandings and fears of Grassland stem from an ignorance or misunderstanding of Game Theory. And until now this was little cause for concern. But now it's very dangerous to the public interest. And will become even more so when Deep Schizophrenia gets released.
Surprised to hear this about Barabasi, I'm no physicist but enjoyed reading his books on network science as a layperson.
Is there any published criticism against his work? His papers get cited everywhere, I know citations are more metric of popularity than scientific quality but I find it puzzling that his work continues to get attention if the results don't hold up.
You could start with Pachter's sendup (https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-network-non...), and the Wikipedia article on Barabasi has a short section on criticisms. I read his work, figured out it was nonsense, and put him on the list of authors whose papers I automatically threw in the garbage. Kim Lewis is another one of those.
