sent2null space

Over two years ago I mentioned how the social interaction on FB enables what I called the fostering of an illusion of grand audience . The idea is that the pseudo public nature of discourse on an FB wall leads people to place more importance on personal appearance than they would on a less socially constructed web site. It's all part of the interesting psychology that people manifest while participating in this pseudo-public space called a Facebook profile. It is the digital equivalent of a podium on a stage that has flood lights obscuring your view of the audience. You know that people are there because you hear them but you can't exactly see them all (analog of not knowing who sees what you post or reads it) this does an interesting thing to people. First, when challenged while on their "stage" they are far more likely to react with a defensive posture on many subjects that in reality they would be for more reasonable discussing. I've been perplexed by the harsh...

A recent conversation I had with a friend concerning the existence of deities prompted me to think a bit more deeply about how man has used logic to help describe or extract truths in the world and then use use to our advantage. In the process we have been able to describe thousands of real natural systems and exploit them, from our understanding of the biology of corn and other plants and then using that knowledge to modify them to suit our purposes...to the realizations of the patterns of truth that govern the behavior of planes in the sky or missiles on a launch trajectory. All these things are enabled by the slow acquisition of knowledge concerning the invariant truths and relationships of the real world. However, we often fail to realize that the certainty of control that we appear to have over the world is mostly an illusion. As a scientist I was trained to prize empirical data above all else, data informs hypothesis and sets of hypothesis inform theories...these theories are the...

because google apparently thinks that I shouldn't be able to unpublish a published post. (If there is such a function...please elucidate me.)

Many words have been written on the ad revenue that could be generated from Facebooks knowledge of the deep set of factors we provide to them when we sign up for the service. The knowledge of our interests and disinterests as explicitly shared in our information pages and as indirectly shared through our interactions on the site is a major unique boon for Facebook's ability to target algorithms that will have a unique ability to present relevant ad's to users when they are most likely to find the ad content interesting or useful. This however is only the beginning of ways that Facebook can target the data we are providing them. One potential ad targeting gold mine lies in how we "tag" individuals in our galleries. Facebook could conceivably observe over time the tagging patterns to determine real world associations between people tagged who often share the same photos. It could for example determine if two people are in a relationship over time by watching the tag pat...

I recently purchased my first smart phone, an Android based Samsung Captivate. I've been having a blast exploring the new paradigm of touch enabled UI and the many orthogonal dimensions of sensation (eyes..via cameras, ears via microphones, location via GPS, accelerometers and attitude sensors) that the mobile device presents for application development that doesn't exist on a desktop. One cool app. I downloaded today is called File Share. The reason requires a bit of back story: So last week I downloaded an app called "Sketcher" to doodle on my Captivate using the touch screen, I quickly created a few bits of art that I want to share on Facebook. I could plug in the phone via micro usb and set it as usb storage but that doesn't always work as seamlessly as it should...thankfully Samsung packed removable ram via the tiny mmd flash slot, I could take that out and pop it in my adapter and into a USB stick ..instant files ready to upload to Facebook...that works rel...

Facebook has been quietly but consistently creating tools that enable the service to know normally difficult to capture metrics about what people are doing, who they know, what they know and now with comment ratings, how well their knowledge is valued by their peers. Prior to this upgrade Facebook was able to provide excellent data for their ad targeting algorithms to enable highly coupled ad placements to the desires of those users shown them. The use of user submitted information regarding their geographic location, their likes in movies, music and other interests enabled Facebook to target large swathes of users to show relevant ads that target to those particular topics...this in itself was a pretty big deal as no one before Facebook had as large an audience to mine for this data and ad targeting and no one had as many points of information from the users base. Google has a much larger user base arguably but their ability to infer the interests from those users is much less focused...

An exerpt from this article on the social consequences of social networks and the increasing amount of time that people are spending on them follows: "but would you want a potential employer to see pictures of you off your head in Ibiza from back in the day? With the latest figures showing that one in 13 of us are using Facebook, this redefinition of public and private is already happening." This statement assumes that such an incident as some one partying a bit beyond their normal mode in some exotic land would be taken alone as a representation of their character. However this is not at all assured. I see the many data points that people provide on social networks as ways to gain statistical shaping of their average behavior over algorithmic judgments of their behavior over time. It is over time that the invariant nature of personality truly shows up, not in a single picture viewed out of context. That said, the question remains will such a statistical analysis be possible...