Harpers.org. The redesigned site (for one of my favourite print magazines) appears to have a lot more content on it than the old one. Unfortunately:

1) All (or nearly all) of the content seems to be historical (the magazine started 150 years ago)
2) The sites’s design and navigation is more than a little ideosyncratic (though I first read about it via its designer who seems “pleased with his result”:http://www.ftrain.com/AWebSiteForHarpers.html It seems to be designed like a sort of weblog but while weblogs are easy to put material into they can be hard to navigate around if you have a rich variety of material available.

Still, it’s worth having a look at.

The BBC reports a boom in Fake universities on the web. Of course there are lots of fakes which are only meant to deceive employers, but these seems to be designed to try to rip off hapless punters who don’t realise that they aren’t properly academically accredited. Check out Greater Manchester University from the Internet archive – “April 2003”:http://web.archive.org/web/20030404133454/www.gm-edu.co.uk/index.htm – and compare with the “current site”:http://www.gm-edu.co.uk/ for example… Here’s a hint for the University-seeker – if it doesn’t have .ac.uk at the end (in the UK) or .edu at the end (in the US) it isn’t a proper university!

It has been noted before that search engines’s algorithms don’t magically provide the ‘best’ results for any query – they only provide the best matches using a given algorithm, and that algorithm can be biased. The latest issue of “First Monday”:http://firstmonday.org/ – an excellent e-journal – includes a detailed examination of one key aspect. Dr “Susan L Gerhart”:http://pr.erau.edu/~gerharts/ has attempted to determine whether the problems with such algorithms tend to conceal controversies and while her results (done on a small scale) don’t seem to show consistent failures she nonetheless suggests that search engines may indeed suppress controversy and adduces some interesting arguments why this might be the case alongside recommendations for search engine programmers of how to produce more representative results.

A fascinating news clip from October 1993 that gives what seems now a utopian view of the Internet.

The playwright cum Internet thinker John Allen who was interviewed (where is he now?) suggested that while you’d think people would be really badly behaved thanks to the Internet’s anonymity they are actually very polite because they feel they are part of a global community. Given the relatively small number of usenet users at the time and their high level of education (mostly scientists at that time I would imagine) it isn’t that surprising. Then they let AOLers in! And as for anonymity it was pretty illusory then and is even more so now…

And to think I had been “online for nine years”:http://www.davidbrake.org/nethist.htm when that programme was broadcast… Come to think of it I’m in my twentieth year online – that’s a pretty scary figure!

Thanks to “Boing Boing”:http://boingboing.net/2004_01_01_archive.html#107332806643610998 for the link.

“Legal Affairs”:http://www.legalaffairs.org – an American magazine ‘at the intersection of law and life’ has produced an interesting piece about “mail order brides”:http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2004/story_labi_janfeb04.html which follows a few around – concentrating on Russian ones coming to America. According to the article there are at least 200 matchmaking agencies in the United States that broker marriages between American men and foreign women, arranging up to 6,000 unions a year (actually I am surprised the number isn’t larger). It’s broadly positive though it mentions a couple of disastrous unions and briefly discusses some of the legal protections that have been proposed to help protect the women. An interview (broadcast on “Thinking Allowed”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed_20030910.shtml) with “Nicole Constable”:http://www.pitt.edu/~pittanth/fac.html – a sociologist who studied the phenomenon in “Romance on a Global Stage”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9922.html – is also surprisingly up-beat (she covers Chinese and Filipina women’s experiences).

A U of Berkeley study – How Much Information?– has attempted once again to estimate how much data of all kinds is generated across the world annually. It was done in 1999 and again in 2002 so we can see how things have changed. A couple of interesting facts culled from the executive summary:

• The United States produces about 40% of the world’s new stored information, including 33% of the world’s new printed information, 30% of the world’s new film titles, 40% of the world’s information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.
• Email generates 400,000 Terabytes of “information” each year – it would be interesting to calculate how much of this is signatures and quoted text…
• The searchable Web by contrast is only 170 Terabytes and if you count Internet-accessible databases you get a further 66-91,000 Terabytes (very rough estimate)
• North America generates lots more paper than Europe – “each of the inhabitants of North America consumes 11,916 sheets of paper (24 reams), and inhabitants of the European Union consume 7,280 sheets of paper (15 reams). At least half of this paper is used in printers and copiers to produce office documents”. So much for the paperless office!

More evidence (if more were needed) that search engines like Google have a certain amount of unaccountable power. A satirical site that (among many other things) passed on instructions on how to make a search for ‘miserable failure’ come back with a George Bush page found that “it had been banned from using Google to advertise”:http://www.blather.net/shitegeist/000169.htm. It turns out you can’t place ads using Google for a site criticising an individual unless the site is clearly labelled “satire”. Of course the site still turns up in Google searches…

It’s possible that it wasn’t so much the anti-Bush sentiment that annoyed Google’s ad staff as the encitement to ‘game’ Google.

A ‘display’ that projects images in thin air? That you can actually manipulate by hand?

It exists, apparently. No word yet from its creators at “IO2 Technology”:http://www.io2technology.com/ about when we might be able to buy this…

At least according to an article in The Economist which discusses how it still turns up in some surprising places today. I spent three years studying Latin in school and have found it surprisingly useful.

In the highly thought-provoking The Death of Horatio Alger economist and scourge of the Bush administration “Paul Krugman”:http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/ has found unlikely support for his concern about the increasing stratification of US society in Business Week. The original “Business Week article”:http://www.everyvoice.net/blogs/kevin/archives/000046.html has been copied into someone else’s weblog since BW only provides the current week’s issue online for free.

A recent survey cited in the BW article found sons from the bottom three-quarters of the socioeconomic scale were significantly less likely to move up in the 1990s than in the 1970s – for example among those whose fathers were in the bottom income quartile, only 10 percent were in the top quarter in 1998 compared to 23 percent in 1973.

There’s (a lot) more discussion about equality of opportunity and equality of outcome at “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001040.html (which is where I found this link originally).