How the new Facebook Graph Search promotes network thinking but keeps you within the filter bubble of your immediate surrounding.
Recommender systems are the basic building blocks of most online businesses today. They influence the news we read, the posts we see, the things we buy, the music we listen to. Based on the dataset of what is known about us, recommender system finds something we might be interested in. Technically recommender system is a combination of learning algorithms, statistical tools, and recognition algorithms – the areas commonly ascribed to the study of artificial intelligence.
We decided to study this emergent form of consciousness and conduct an attempt to communicate with a recommender system through the interview format. The results are presented in this report.
The new paper Eroding the Boundaries of Cognition: Implications of Embodiment published in the latest issue of Topics in Cognitive Science provides an interesting overview of the current state of embodied cognition science (ECS). The main tenet of ECS is that cognition extends beyond the brain into the body and further into the environment. ECS also shifted away from viewing the brain as having a modular structure where each region is responsible for a certain activity.
Bernhard Rieder’s talk on the ways relational (vs network) database structure affects the ways we do things (and evaluate the results) in his Politics of Systems blog.