31–40 of 99 posts
Loved this. Amusing reminder of the fact that most people do not speak our language. :)
This is what happens when the world is ruled by a robot
I take it OP hasn't had the delightful pleasure of dealing with old-fashioned human bureaucracy. My uncle tells some great stories about his time in East Berlin, before the Wall fell.
A great example is the post office that did some renovations, and so delivered the old copper and other materials for reutilization. From then on, the System cleverly decided the yearly productivity goals should include delivering the same amount of copper, each year.
The post office master had to figure out how to deliver the copper for a couple of years, in order to avoid failure in meeting the obviously correct goals, until he finally managed to change them.
So, yeah, at least Google's algorithms have the excuse of not being sentient.
This post was really well written. Just a pleasure on the eyes.
"I’m reading Kafka’s Castle right now — which itself may kill me"
Kafka is one of my favorite authors and The Castle is one of my favorite novels :( But a well-written essay nonetheless ;)
That's our real world object relation databases status, unfortunately.
What a bad article... The author talks about something (google indexing) she admits she doesn't understand. She doesn't understand that by editing her Wikipedia article, the google crawler would update her infobox data pretty quickly. Her birth data was added to the wikipedia entry today and the google infobox is fixed. It took less than 2 hours. Not something worth whining about.
Yes, the fact that a reasonably well-respected writer and English professor doesn't understand the inner workings of Google's infobox means that her blog post is terrible. This arrogant and dismissive response highlights the problem even better than her mild and humorous complaint (which, for the record, I didn't see as whining). Perhaps she did understand that editing her Wikipedia page would correct the problem but…
I don't see how the error detracted her in any way, and, as I highlighted it, it was a quick 2-minute fix.
I also don't think the Google algorithm is to blame. If her Wikipedia entry had followed the style guidelines ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biogr... ), her birth date would have been parsed correctly.
For the record, I didn't find her post funny or even particularly well-written.
I guess if there's something that can be taken from this article it's "Program or be Programmed". The author didn't understand the inner workings of the Google Factbox data, so she assumed computers control her identity and her online information. However, with a little more computer knowledge, you can figure out how to control this data yourself.
Humans control the computers; it's not the other way around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is interesting that google almost seems to take Wikipedia bio boxes as gospel FTA, I don't believe the data was taken from a bio box: > So it’s not too surprising that my original Wikipedia entry, as conceived by Joel, was — let’s be honest — more about my father (a famous New Jersey judge) than about me. Joel began the entry with my connection to my father, and immediately mentioned my father’s birthdate and th…
Don't know what is so scary about that. I am willing to bet less than 0.01% of "name[s] on Wikipedia..followed by a birth and death date" aren't the actual birth and death date. Seems like just an oddmatch caused by an overzealous relative that happened due to the incredibly large amount of data Google processes.
Since it is not opt-in (nor is it opt-out), YOU have no control of it. As the author stated, she requested many times, over several months, to have it reviewed and it wasn't until she clamored about it publicly that it was addressed. What if Google never did correct it?
Is she not aware that anyone can edit Wikipedia?
I suspect there might be some liability issues about incorrect information online, perhaps as a result of other cases with more dire consequences than simply not getting a job.
Great article, really well written! This is what happens when the world is ruled by a robot I take it OP hasn't had the delightful pleasure of dealing with old-fashioned human bureaucracy. My uncle tells some great stories about his time in East Berlin, before the Wall fell. A great example is the post office that did some renovations, and so delivered the old copper and other materials for reutilization. From then o…