Finding Out About (FOA)
The book I’m reading now, Finding Out About: A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW, is really quite interesting. Included in the book is a CD with source code and the entire book, along with another information retrieval classic textbook, in hypertext format. I’m finding that it’s rather easy going, compared to the other technical books that I’ve been trying to read; plus, the hypertext version has pop-up links with interesting, albeit slightly irrelevant trivia. For instance, on the issue of the difficulty of automated information retrieval from images, the author tossed in this wonderful piece of trivia:
Signature of human culture?! Takeo Kanada of the Carnegie Mellon Vision Laboratory asserts that a very simple predicate can be used to distinguish purely natural scenes from those containing human artifacts: Natural scenes never contain more than a single horizontal line!
and again, he wandered off the beaten path to start talking about cultural evolution and the Monica meme:
MONICA the meme. This phenomenal news event, and the enormous amount of electronic ink spent covering it did produce an interesting data set. M. Best [Best, 2000] has used it to provide some of the first empirical testing of interesting hypotheses concerning cultural change often attributed to Richard Dawkins [Dawkins, 1976]; just as biological evolution sifts through the gene pool to find fit individuals, cultural evolution sifts through available memes (paradigms, theories, hypotheses, ideas, words, and so on) to find the most fit. But theories of biological evolution are notoriously subtle, and the data concerning them are much better! Although it is only a beginning, Best’s statistical analysis of phenomena like the rise and fall of the token MONICA within newspapers and UseNet newsgroups provides some of the first concrete data on some very interesting questions.
I really like this book. Hopefully I’ll finish it, unlike so many others.
Possibly relevant posts:
- The Childe Cycle (12/21/2008)
- Institute for Creation Research (10/1/2005)
- Quote of the day (11/16/2008)