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I understand what you think you are predicting, I just can’t work out why you think you predicted it…

Going to any of the web related conferences it is impossible to not notice how much of these end up being about predictive modelling. Anyone familiar with this modelling will know the literature is dominated by various forms of linear statistics. Here, you take two or more variables and map them onto each other using some probability distribution and a function representative of a straight line. Continue reading →

The Web and Challenges to Gender

It’s tempting to believe that communicating on the Web is faceless, bodiless, and genderless. Indeed, this notion formed part of the basis of cyberfeminism, which envisioned a post-body, post-gender future inhabited by cyborgs. Without physical cues, an Internet user could be free to be anyone or anything without consequence.  While this may have been true 20 years ago (when this comic was published), it sadly is no longer. Continue reading →

What is Web Science and its Study

Web Science - beyond the Web as an everyday tool Web Science is an emerging interdisciplinary field or subject. Quite a few of us use the web on a daily basis and take many of its features for granted. Thinking critically about it as a piece of technology that shapes and is shaped by social forces allows us to understand what differentiates the web from other communication technologies. Doing this however is not easy. Continue reading →

Artificial Intelligence and the Web

Creating artificial intelligence or an artificial mind has been a preoccupation of computer science (and science fiction) for decades, since the concept was introduced by scientists such as Alan Turing and John McCarthy. The original idea was built on the assumption that the human brain functioned like a machine - a body made up of small working components which individually were not conscious but together make a mind. Continue reading →

What’s to Like About Likes?

Last summer (2012), the BBC investigated the value of 'likes' on Facebook (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18813237). It found that companies were spending money to obtain likes, when these might often not actually be real people’s accounts – or from people who actually have an interest in that company. They demonstrated this by creating a completely fake page and received over 3,000 likes in a week. Continue reading →