Posts tagged "Internet"
  1. Hot puppy love rock Arkansas

    Kottke quotes from Steven Levy’s Wired magazine article on the syntax and evolving language of search queries:

    Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context.

    Being reasonably acquainted with Wittgenstein, I found myself wondering which of his ideas came so integrally into play in solving this problem. The Wired article only links to Wittgenstein’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, which includes a survey of all his major concepts and works. Was it his distinction between sense and nonsense? His arguments against a private language? His work on the connection between seeing and saying and his example of the “duckrabbit”? Or perhaps it was something he didn’t discover but simply weighed in on, like ostensive definitions or contextualism?

    The strongest candidate, though, might be his concepts of language games and family resemblance. Wittgenstein’s best-known example of a language game is the “builder’s language.” Here’s how he describes it:

    The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar” “slab”, “beam”. A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.

    This is a very small kit of parts; a lexicon of just four elements, combined in a certain way. But by uttering these words in the right context, a building gets built. The meaning these words have comes from their ability to activate the builder’s assistant to do what the master builder is asking. And their family resemblance has to do with this limited language, in which these words’ meaning is defined by their context and shared by the two builders. After the workday is through, the builder might look forward to how his children “beam” at him when he arrives home, and the context is entirely different.

    The Wired article continues,

    As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant.

    A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around.

    Oh, and on the headline above — just my humble attempt to confuse the hell out of Google.

    Notes 4  
  2. 111

    The now online-only Premiere magazine offers a list of the 25 Best Movie Posters Ever. Saul Bass dominates this list, and justifiedly so, but for something a little different, check out Erik Nitsche’s great poster for All About Eve, Steve Frankfurt’s fantastic (though uncredited) poster for Rosemary’s Baby, or Frankfurt’s restrained black-and-white poster for Downhill Racer.

     
  3. 93

    “As-Found is our creative response to the trillions of images available on the Internet.” Start here. Or maybe here.

     
  4. 86

    UbuWeb is billing itself as “The YouTube of the Avant-Garde,” having converted all of its rare and out-of-print film and video holdings to on-demand streaming formats: “We offer over 300 films & videos from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Vito Acconci, Pipilotti Rist, Jean Genet, The Cinema of Transgression, Richard Foreman, Terayama Shuji, Paul McCarthy Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, John Lennon and hundreds more—of course all free of charge.” You could start with some Peter Greenaway films of “Four American Composers,” or—better yet—with Robert Smithson’s excellent Hotel Palenque.

     
  5. 81

    The weird, wonderful, and somewhat creepy world of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), which may or may not be practiced (and mastered) by foxy bloggerina Arianna Huffington, to wit: “I have a handful of best friends, girls and boys, men and women. Some you would know, like Larry David’s wife, Laurie, and Bill Maher, and some you would not know. I call them my tribe. And when you are in the tribe, you are not judged. You are just loved.”

     
  6. 54

    PublicRadioFan.com features schedule listings for thousands of public radio stations and programs around the world.

     
  7. Friendster Film Noir

    friendstergrid.jpg

    A mix of photographs culled from Friendster’s 21,000,000+ users and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, Strangers on a Train.

     
  8. 36

    Phishing, a form of spamming, is the forging of “official” e-mails in order to gain access to confidential information and enable identity theft. An interesting excercize in design for deception, you can see a breakdown of a sample e-mail here. More here. And, as an aside, how to spot a liar through Graphology, the possibly dubious “science” of handwriting anaylsis.

     
  9. 30

    “Census” is a project by designer Wayne Daly to round-up a list of aliases used by “spammers” who routinely fill his Junk Mail folder. Wonderful. This project by Lucy Harrison (via VVork) is similar to Daly’s.

     
  10. 10

    The seven “deadly” blog entry types.

     
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