Our new research leaves little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session. The impact of viewing biased rankings repeatedly over a period of weeks or months would undoubtedly be larger.
The article touches both on search engine optimization techniques but also Google’s potential ability to manipulate results under the guise of giving the best results but how that is always subject to interpretation and if Google happens to favour a candidate seen as better for powerful tech companies so much the better.
This is one of my all-time favourite pics of my mom (and a cropped version remains as her Facebook profile picture since I first helped her set-up an account on that site!)
The photo was taken during a Long Term Service Awards dessert banquet for Regina-Qu’Appelle Health Region Employees.
Although I wish I could take credit, I think the photo was taken by either the official photographer for the event or possibly the spouse of someone we were sitting with.
The Federal Election was called nearly three weeks ago and I haven’t written about it nearly as much as I thought I would.
I mean, if you’ve read this blog for more than a couple days, I think my politics are pretty clear. Beyond that, there are tons of others who are covering every aspect of the election in great detail and although I’m reading these sites voraciously, I haven’t been adding my own voice.
But this is also the longest election campaign in modern Canadian history so I suspect I’ll be doing more blogging about things over the next couple months.
The Copper Kettle is a local institution and I’m proud that one of the times I called over to order pizza for a meeting at the library, I ended up having Mr. Gardikiotis take my order personally.
When he heard I was with the library, he replied “Oh, the library! I love the library! You did so much for me to help learn English when I first came to Canada.”
Amazing how many stories like that there are in our (and any) community about the role the library plays in helping change people’s lives.
And of course, in this day and age, somebody appears to have uploaded the entire concert, from start to finish, to YouTube! (If I’d know that, I could’ve saved 250 clams on my ticket!) 😉
