Making Meaning: Tubes

Our second book that we had to read for our class is a book called "Tubes" by Andrew Blum. Overall the book was not very engaging and it took me a lot of concentration to pick it up and read it. It just seemed dry to me or something, or maybe I just didn't like to read it because it was a textbook. Although it was interesting for someone to talk about what the internet is like outside of your home. Andrew asks the question:" When your internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go?" And Andrew goes around the world to find out this question. I found it very interesting that he went and saw some of the tech at Google. When I was little I always thought the internet was this magical thing that my dad brought into our home and it would always be there. Then I got older and learned what a router was, and I still just thought of it as a box with the internet just stored in it. I never really thought it had a location or storage like a computer does, and I'm not really sure why. When Andrew actually sees parts of the internet and just gazes upon blinking machinery, it's kind of like pulling the curtain to look at the wizard of oz. 
One part I did enjoy was on page 158 where he talks about how the routers he saw in Austin were like the building blocks of the internet. He did paint a good picture of that the hardware looked like.I think the fact that the book was so much like a novel made me not really treat it like a textbook.
One thing that I liked about Pattern on the Stone and not Tubes is that POTS felt more like a textbook for beginners in computers and less like a novel. It explained a lot of good concepts to know and had great examples to learn from. It had a good pace and did not leave a lot to question. Tubes felt a lot like a quest, and I'm not saying I don't enjoy a good quest, I am just not one to enjoy textbooks. I'm not saying the book is all bad though. The quest for the internet is very interesting, and again it seemed odd to me at first because of the strange idea that the internet had a location.

To see someone else's opinion on this book I looked to the internet for a review on Tubes and came upon Science Blogs and an article entitled "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet."

The author, Claire Evans, really enjoyed the book and Blum's quest to find out just exactly where the internet lives. She said in her article "Tubes might have well been called “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About the Internet But Were Afraid to Ask.” " which I can agree with. Evans comments that this book should be required reading for anyone, just so we can have a basic understanding of the Internet and how it works. I may not say that it should be required reading but I could see a lot of people learning from this and being really interested in it. I would recommend this book to anyone who has time to just sit down and read about the internet.

The Filter Bubble

According to Wikipedia, a filter bubble is an algorithm made by websites to predict what information you want to see based on the users past internet history, and as a result the user only gets certain kinds of information and ads. In previous blog posts I've talked about algorithms and how W. Daniel Hillis describes them in his book "Pattern on the Stone". If you haven't read my last algorithm posts, Hillis describes an algorithm as a "fail-safe procedure guaranteed to achieve a specific goal"(78). A short example would be on page(77-78) where Hillis describes his roommates algorithm for matching socks(lining them up in a row until a pair is found and continue until all socks are paired). So in the internet companies case they would use their algorithm to predict what you would want to buy by using their algorithm. Using myself as an example, I recently starting shopping on Amazon quite a lot and now a lot of my ads on Facebook and other social media sites are for Amazon products.

I did an experiment with a good friend of mine to briefly see if our internet history would be different if we searched the same things. We are not completely different but she is about two years younger than I and we differ on some world views, and also just personal views like TV shows and humor. I first googled some just basic words and phrases in google and then briefly browsed her Facebook and her Youtube. Then I googled the exact same things on my laptop.

Knowing that guns and gun rights are always in the news and social media I decided to just google the word "gun" because why not? On (name changed for privacy) "Kjirsten's" laptop I got pretty generic links for just the word "gun". It was the Wikipedia definition for the word gun and the closest gun shop in our city. Then lower just some generic websites selling guns.
I googled "gun" on my laptop and got the exact same results, same local gun shop and everything.

Getting a little more "adventurous", I googled "gun article" seeing if we'd get the same news stories about guns. This is where things started to differ. Kjirsten's first article was "stop gun violence" and then a couple pretty neutral sites. I asked her about it and she doesn't really have a view pro or against (although when pushed she said she was more against than pro). When I googled the same phrase I got a few sites that were against gun control (I am more pro gun).

I googled the word "gem" as well but didn't get any good results.

I then looked at her Facebook at it was mostly clothing ads or those companies who send you clothing and jewelry every month. Pretty typical of someone her age. My Facebook had a lot of makeup ads and an ad for fragrant beads that I just bought recently. It made sense because my friend does not like makeup while I do, so this ad placement makes a lot of sense based on our personalities and interests.

I looked then at the recommended videos on Youtube and most of Kjirsten's videos were humorous as she likes good clean humor on videos, so it makes sense for her. My Youtube was a lot of art videos, as well as humorous and a few video games. This is just a difference of personality.

The filter bubble in most of these circumstances are not all that bad, it is just recommending stuff that those companies think we would like. With the gun articles comes the problem, the filter bubble would only show stuff that we think of so we wouldn't get much different opinions to challenge our views. If we had an opinion for a reason that wasn't true, the filter bubble would just be cementing that false view.

I got my information on the filter bubble here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

The Pattern On The Stone

In my class we have just finished reading "The Pattern on the Stone" by W. Daniels Hillis and it was a pretty interesting read. I happen to be one of those people who dislike reading when it's for a class but this book was pretty thought provoking at some points. Hillis describes a lot of what he is talking about in an easy to read way for people who are just getting into computers, or don't know much about them at all. Such as in chapter 5 "Algorithms and Heuristics", he describes algorithms using socks. His roommate devised an algorithm for organizing his socks in a much faster way than he was doing it before. He would take two socks and if they didn't match he would throw them back; Instead now he found a sock and put it in a line. Once he found two matching socks in a line, he would take them out of the line and fold them.(78) I actually really enjoyed this chapter because it was fairly easy to read and it gave the examples in a way I could quickly understand.

 Being still somewhat new to computers and the terminology, the book in its entirety was much easier to read than some other course textbooks I've looked at. There was not much I didn't like about this book, again it was hard to pick up because it was required reading, but it was more enjoyable than other course books. A nice thing about this book is that whenever Hillis talked about a term or concept that was new, he very nicely explained it. I didn't have to look anything up on google to understand what he was saying. Honestly this book did help me understand computers a bit better, at least some terminology. Before reading this book I did not know much about algorithms, heuristics, or Turing Machines. I just had a small understanding of them. Such as a Turing Machine is described in his words as a "mathematician performing calculations on a scroll of paper" with an infinitely long scroll. The Turing Machine shows that although this mathematician can do all of these long problems with ease, a "stupid" but meticulous clerk could do all of the same mathematics by following a simple set of rules for reading and writing the problems on the scroll. The Turing Machine is that clerk.(63)

I do recommend this book to any new Computer Science or Computer Engineer students who need a simple way of explaining these concepts. With the real life metaphors that are easy to imagine, such as socks for algorithms or a mathematician, it is not a hard read. A lot of computer textbooks are very dry and are a pain to get through and read. This one is not written like a textbook but more of a guide to these ideas of computers. Hillis told the story of how he made a computer out of tinker toys with a few friends of his. The tinker toy computer worked like a switch and light computer but with string and sticks. The computer was "programmed" to play tic-tac-toe and it never lost.(17)
Stories like this make for a much more interesting read than being fed definitions and terms like a normal textbook.
I think this book was chosen as a textbook because of the simple and fun way programming and computers are described. I think even to someone interested in the subject but brand new to it would be able to understand the concepts. It is also pretty short and cheap unlike most college textbooks(with only 9 chapters in the whole book). For an intro class into computers this is a great book to read to get the basics.