Who cares about privacy?

Just a suggestion about privacy on the internet. Many people I know, have some sort of objection against a Google or national government storing personal information and mining data about you. I do not. At least, I think you still have to be able to use that data yourself as well, which in many cases is not possible. But on the other hand, I really do not care that they know things about me, anything.

Some people refer to the second world war as an example of information that can be misused. And that is true. Prior to WO II, in Holland we were very very meticulous about storing information about religion etc. Which made it possible that the Germans, when they occupied the country, knew exactly who was Jewish and who was not. Because of our meticulous information storage, and the large number of collaborators, they could send hunderds of thousands Jewish persons to death camps.

So that is bad, and these situations should clearly be prevented. But should we therefore silence ourselves, and confine our views and ideas about the world and about stuff to ourselves, and not share this information with others?

Datamining and personal information storage and analyzing someone's behavior online can certainly result in determining someone's sexual or political preferences, but then again, what's the problem with that? It starts when people start misusing this information. And now I am coming to the actual point I want to bring in: who will be ready to fight hardest against this injustice being done? Exactly, the ones being offended, the ones being hurt, the ones being wronged, plus their networks of course.

If all of us were sharing personal information with different providers, and these providers are treating this information in a bad way, what will happen? Will we sit back and allow this? Or will we object? I think the latter. And will the providers listen? Will changes occur? New policies created? That, clearly, depends on the number of people objecting. Hence, in order to fight future injustice we should all share our information, our lives, our secrets. In addition, this will also break taboos, and we will be more open to our own and other people's problems and passions..

Mechanisms to adjust taste/profile

I do not use StumbleUpon very often, but when I do, I always like the results. I have not really put any effort in creating a profile or something, so the results are not really relevant to me, but most of them are very funny, interesting, or draws my attention otherwise.

I suppose a relatively simple algorithm is needed to show me these results (lots of people like this website >> you must like it as well). Still, it is interesting how you can influence the search results, and today, with a new upgrade, I noticed 2 interesting additions to do this.

The first one regards "Not-for-me", which is when something does not appeal to you in any sense. There are similar mechanisms in for example Last.fm (this program picks music for you, I love it), where you can "Ban a song", "Love a song", or just "Skip a song". The other one, which I really like, is one that solves a common problem with intelligent algorithms that try to predict your taste or likes/dislikes: slowly being guided into a profile or taste that you cannot escape anymore without radical changes in taste. I do have that with Last.fm, which plays too much indie-rock, and too much of "Tricky", which I do not like, but still, the algorithm has decided that I do, so I have to listen to it once in a while. I solve this problem by listening to playlists by "Neighbours" (similar, but somewhat different music taste), or "Friends" (possibly no shared taste at all).

For this problem, StumbleUpon has implemented the "Too much of this lately" option, which in some way must be translated to the personalized algorithm you have and delivers Interesting/Funny/Relevant websites to you.

Since I am also involved in developing software that tries to determine the relevance of content-objects within social networking environments, based on interaction with the users, I find these types of simple (on the interface level) mechanisms very interesting.

clipped from www.stumbleupon.com

You have successfully upgraded to 3.28!

Adds the following thumbdown types:

1. Not-for me - This doesn't suit me.


2. Stumbled this before - This content was in a previous stumble.


3. Too much like this lately - Baby animals are nice, but that's enough for now.

mind changing

This website shows the thoughts of leading thinkers about things that changed their minds. I read a few of the articles, and they really are very very very interesting.. Highly interesting discoveries and thoughts explained by the world's smartest and thoughtful persons... great.

clipped from edge.org The Edge Annual Question — 2008 When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science. WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY? Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?" 165 contributors; 112,600 words "They are the intellectual elite, the brains the rest of us rely on to make sense of the universe and answer the big questions. But in a refreshing show of new year humility, the world's best thinkers have admitted that from time to time even they are forced to change their minds." — James Randerson, The Guardian "A remarkable feast of the intellect... an amazing group of reflections on science, culture, and the evolution of ideas. Reading the Edge question is like being invited to dinner with some of the most interesting people on the planet." — Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar

Why people will soon be marrying and having sex - with robots

The digitization of humanity...

clipped from www.mailonsunday.co.uk David Levy, originally from London, has made the controversial forecasts about the future of human-robot relationships in his Ph.D thesis. In "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners", he argues that current trends in robotics and artificial intelligence mean the leap to humans and robots forming relationships is not far away. Once robots become more like humans, David Levy believes romance between the two, and even sex and marriage, will be possible "Are not love and sex and reproduction at the very core of being human, even to the extent that they are immune to computerisation? "Yes, they are at the very core. No, they are not immune to computerisation." He continues: "An emotionless robot would be a mere machine so a logical step in the development of humanoid robots is to endow them with emotions and enable them to detect emotions in humans. "Robots can then respond to a person's emotions in ways that help the robot to interact as humans do.