Google’s Site Ranking Secret is Out

Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret’s Out is an article on how Google ranks sites based on a reading of their US patent application which describes their approach to ranking and how they deal with spam. The article was suggested to me by Matt Patey and is worth reading. Darren Yates, the author, concludes with “Overall keep it ethical and you can’t go far wrong.” (Yates, 6/11/2005, in Buzzle.com)

Levenshtein Distance: Fundamental Algorithms in Text Analysis

What are the fundamental algorithms of text analysis? One candidate from computational lignuistics and (CS) might be Levenshtein Distance. This is used in spell checking, speech recognition, and could be used in text analysis in comparison.

But, are there fundamental procedures for literary text analysis? Could the concordance be represented as such a procedure? Or, is the idea of a fundamental algorithm alien to humanities computing?

See also the talk by John Nerbonne who mentions the Levenshtein distance – Nerbonne: Data Deluge.

Buckets of Grewal

An interesting Canadian example of a political and timely blog is Buckets of Grewal which looks closely at the Grewal controversy and the tapes. Buckets has been systematically tracking the changing transcripts and politics around the tapes. He/She has a very nice use of Flikr to show slides of the trascripts with the differences (between old and new transcripts) hightlighted. See buckets’ Grewal’s meeting w. Dosajnh & Murphy slideshow on Flickr.

CTV.ca | Rookie political blogger tackles the Grewal tapes is a good article about the Buckets of Grewal blog and its reception.

Ethics of Blogging

Today I participated in a meeting of the Bioethics Interest Group in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University on the subject of ethics and blogging where we had a lively conversation around the use of blogs for medical research. For that I created (with Lisa Schwartz who organized the meeting) a fictional case to problematize the issues. See the extended entry for the case. BIG is a monthly informal discussion of topics related to ethics in health care and biomedical sciences. Some interesting questions that came up:

  1. What can we assume about a blogger? Can we guess at how they assumed their blog would be used?
  2. Is quoting a blog comparable to quoting an online article? or should we try to get consent? More generally, what can we compare blogs to was we try to work out the ethics?
  3. Would getting consent change what was being written?
  4. Would podcasting conversations like the one we had help develop community awareness around the issues?

Continue reading Ethics of Blogging

fondation Daniel Langlois

The Fondation Daniel Langlois has a very cool Flash web site. Everything launches little windows that let you switch from French to English, resize the window, and get a unique URL if you are trying to reference a specific item. This is useful given that the interface is in Flash.

In particular check out Eisensteins Early Drawings (go to the parent block and open the interactive sketchbook). They have an interactive interface for the pages of the sketchbook which is compelling.

Escape Route

Escape Route is a “photographic travelogue” which shows a 3D itinerary or 2D itinerary of locations for which there are photos. The itineraryies are mapped onto 3d or 2d globes space. There are neat animations for when you collapse from 3d to 2d. I’m so intrigued by the navigation interface I haven’t really looked at the snaps. Thanks to Drew Paulin for this.