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Search Engines Are Not Biased
Their study, "Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias," appears in the Aug. 7-11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and challenges the "Googlearchy" theory -- the perception that search engines push Web traffic toward popular sites, thus creating a monopoly over lesser-known sites. As the Web becomes larger and more complex, search engines have taken on an increased role in guiding Internet users to their destinations. Yet, some are concerned that search engines, by means of their ranking algorithms, create a vicious cycle where popular sites receive more and more hits. "Empirical data do not support the idea of a vicious cycle amplifying the rich-get-richer dynamic of the Web," said Filippo Mencer, associate professor of informatics and computer science. "Our study demonstrates that popular sites receive on average far less traffic than predicted by the Googlearchy theory and that the playing field is more even". Menczer was joined in the study by IU post-doctoral fellow Santo Fortunato; Alessandro Flammini, assistant professor of informatics; and Alessandro Vespignani, professor of informatics......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source External Link
Giving all of your links this helpful feature is easy, too. Just copy one extra line into your html head and you don't even need to add classes to your links. Plus, the script is smart enough to avoid adding the icon to links that don't go to external sites......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source 55 Ways To Have Fun With Google
Buy, download, share. The book contains over 220 pages and is available to buy at Lulu.com for $16.50 or Amazon for $19.66. You can also download the full book as PDF (or Word). it's free to share & remix & do fun stuff with......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Electronic Capacitors from seaweed
Francois Beguin of the CNRS Research Centre on Divided Matter in Orleans, France, and his co-workers say that seaweed, when burned to a charcoal-like form, is just the right stuff for making the electrodes in state-of-the-art supercapacitors. It performs as well as the carbon-based substances currently used in commercial devices, the scientists say. "People working on carbons are always looking for improved properties," says Mildred Dresselhaus, a specialist in carbon materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She points out that coconut shells are already used as a source of porous carbon for water filtration and other applications. "Low-tech routes are commonly used when they do the job," Dresselhaus says......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source How To Get Out Of A Boring Meeting
Have you ever been in a situation where you wished your cell phone would ring? Maybe you wanted to look extra important or popular on that hot date. Or maybe you just needed an excuse to escape from an unpleasant meeting. With "The Popularity Dialer", you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times). At the elected time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that's one half of a conversation. Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you. Click on the options below to listen to the call you will receive when you use the dialer:........ Posted by: Ashley Permalink Source Split The Network Upside Down
Split the network. I'm starting here by splitting the network into two parts, the trusted half and the untrusted half. The trusted half has one netblock, the untrusted a different netblock. We use the DHCP server to identify mac addresses to give out the relevant addresses......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source All Our N-gram are Belong to You
We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That's why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Eye-tracker Quake controls!
Hmm. The problem with this guy is he assumes everyone's seen eye-trackers before and that we won't think he's just controlling the game from under the table. Where's his other hand? Ahahh! OK: I jest. I am prepared to think that eye-trackers exist, and I suppose now that this sort of computer voodoo will probably be mainstream by, like, tomorrow, and that I've just not been keeping up with the latest in awesome hardware developments. Sigh. Question though: how the hell do you aim?........ Posted by: Ryan Permalink Source Greater Bandwidth From Alternative Semiconductors
In recent years demand for greater bandwidth capacity in telecommunications, particularly for fast-growing metro networks, has been answered by using multi-wavelength transmission techniques over single fibres. Now this approach is running up against its own technological limits - an inability to use the total potential fibre bandwidth due to the lack of suitable semiconductor technology. These were the problems the IST project BigBand attempted to solve. BigBand participants aimed to develop new types of semiconductor devices and systems that could exploit the total bandwidth capability of the latest optical fibres. They focused their efforts around ultra-wideband InP 'quantum dot' technology, which has the potential to overcome the bandwidth restrictions, particularly at the longer wavelengths of 1.4-1.65 µm, of the present 'quantum well' based semiconductor materials (where particles, which were originally free to move in three dimensions, are confined to two)......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source One Atom At A Time
"This came as a huge shock," said J.C. Seamus Davis, Cornell professor of physics, who with colleagues reports the findings in the Aug. 3 issue of the journal Nature. Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with virtually no resistance. The new research may shed light on how superconductivity works in modified copper oxides known as cuprates, which superconduct at the relatively "high" temperature of liquid nitrogen. "The main expectation has been that electron pairing in cuprates is due to magnetic interactions. The objective of our experiment was to find the magnetic glue," Davis said. Instead, the researchers found that the distribution of paired electrons in a common high-temperature superconductor was "disorderly," but that the distribution of phonons -- vibrating atoms in the crystal lattice -- was disorderly in just the same way. The theory of low-temperature superconductivity says that electrons interacting with phonons join into pairs that are able to travel through the conductor without being scattered by atoms. These results suggest that a similar mechanism may be at least partly responsible for high-temperature superconductivity......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source |
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