Search Engines

Many of the students I meet these days were born after 1992 or so (that is, after I began teaching). A lot of them seem to think that Google is a 'search engine', or that the various other 'key something in and get something back' websites are 'search engines'.

Actually, they're not. Or at least, not what I would call 'search engines'.

They're the front end of a group of search algorithms that link back to a carefully-cultivated database of information about the Internet. They're like the cutting edge of a knife, or the point of a screw — definitely the business end, but unable to exist usefully unless the rest of the machine is wielded correctly.

A true search engine is one that generates searches, just as an internal combustion engine is one that generates internal combustion, and a calculating engine is one that generates calculations. Similarly, those searches can be used to power other tasks through clever linkages and channels. This is true of internal combustion and calculation as well.

An engine, therefore, is a producer of power that is the result of processing basic material. It is still useless unless the output is connected to something that can make use of the output.

So what is Google then, if not a search engine?

You, dear reader, are the search engine. Or at least, the meat casing around the search engine that is your brain and nervous system. You generate the searches. You sift the findings. You use the search results by interfacing with the real world. Google is only the carburettor, the feed that you control as you search.

The consequences of not knowing this are dire. I have many students who don't know how to use Google and its huge Swiss-Army-Knife-style adjunct collection of tools. They think you just key something in, without taking time to think about what makes the best query, and get results.

Well, yes, you do. But not often the most useful or the best in quality. You get advertisements and awkward pieces of irrelevant stuff, unless you know how to refine your search. If you can do a search that yields fewer than 400 hits, this is extremely useful, since you won't have to trawl through so much junk.

Doing a properly designed query is like filtering the fuel and air input before combustion. It makes for smoother performance. So too does using the right mixture of fuel and air, in the right doses.

This is what I have to teach the students of today. I suspect that the majority of students these days are extremely test-savvy and terribly information-dumb. Information, to them, is connected to 'technology', but not to 'brain' or 'cognition'. How sad.

Google™ as a Source for Due Diligence

Recently, I learnt that a certain national-level corporate regulatory body had named its watering-hole 'Auschwitz'. I did wonder briefly if the decor matched the name, and I shuddered to think of why these accountants would do such a thing.

I saw a post on someone else's blog, though, which chastised them for this — as well as for naming their food courts 'S21', which this other person pointed out was the name of some prison where torture was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. I found that a bit silly, although I suppose the two differ by degree and not by kind.

However, they also differ in other ways.

You can hardly Google 'Auschwitz' without coming upon what the vast majority of the world associates with the name — Nazi concentration camp, 'Arbeit Macht Frei', and at least half a million deaths (calculations go higher, but this is the most stable minimum) under horrible conditions and poison gas. There are about 20,000,000 search results all pointing the same way.

For 'S21', there are about 13,500,000 search results — and from the first page onwards, you already know that you might be looking at a code that can represent a Canon camcorder, an airport in Oregon, and a penicillin pill. You might miss by a bit and end up here, even.

The difference is clear. 'S21' is far more likely to be a tag which people don't necessarily associate with a nasty prison in Cambodia. That group of three characters doesn't carry enough significant information. But 'Auschwitz' is clearly enough for an association with the worst part of a terrible episode in human history.

Now that we can all Google™ these terms and examine the results, it's inexcusable to name your in-house pub 'Auschwitz'. 'S21' can be excused, although after you've read this, you might want to change it.

Research Engines, Morality and Ethics

What pains me, a child of the 1960s, is that this age of humanity provides so many more resources than the age of my birth — but people don't seem to use them as much as they should. Take for example this choice paragraph that an acquaintance of mine (to my thinly disguised horror) produced in the course of a discussion:

You say there is 'medical ethics' and 'legal ethics' but no 'medical morality' and 'legal morality' but I say we use 'medically moral' and 'legally moral'. I raise the possibility that this may be that due to Zipfian distributions in English, leading to the words being used interchangeably in when sentences are constructed differently.

The discussion was about the distinction between morality and ethics. I asserted that there were clear empirical distinctions; that is, humans in general have a sense that the terms are not completely interchangeable. Behind my assertion is my belief, on empirical grounds, that the two terms have nuances that are sufficiently different that they overlap somewhat but far from completely.

Now, anyone can check our claims using Google as a measure of modern usage. If the terms used receive roughly the same order of magnitude of hits, you can assume that they are roughly as frequently used. Furthermore, Zipf's law is an empirical finding that the frequency rank of popularity is inversely proportionate to the number of hits in a sample. With this information, anyone can carry out a crude test of his own or someone else's assertion very easily.

Obviously, my interlocutor didn't think of doing this. Here is what I found with Google alone:

• medical ethics (1.84 m hits)
• legal ethics (1.44 m hits)
• medically moral (103 hits)
• medical morality (27.4 k hits)
• legally moral (575 hits)
• legal morality (11.3 k hits)

Clearly, ethics and morality are not interchangeable in terms of frequency of use. But what about Zipfian distribution? Perhaps what he was trying to say was that 'morality' was the 2nd or 3rd ranked term (in order of preference) after 'ethics' in this context. That is, it should appear with 1/2 the frequency or 1/3 the frequency.

Well, a quick look at the data shows that the relative frequency is 1/100 or so, which is clearly a) of a different order of magnitude, and b) would rank the terms as somewhere roughly between 64 and 128 positions apart. In other words, his assertion is probably false at a high level of confidence — morality cannot be substituted for ethics in such cases.

So why do people conflate morality and ethics? It boils down to a lack of historical context. The Romans translated the Greek ethikos as Latin mores without realising that to the Greeks, ethikos implied the customary conduct of a person within a polis as imposed by a city-state's sociocultural milieu. That is where the confusion came from, because to a Roman, mores/moralis was more about individual character and self-moderated behaviour towards society.

That is why 'morality' should refer to attitudes and behaviours towards society, arising from the basis of personal choice — the term is aesthetic or 1st person in nature, whereas 'ethics' should refer to the behaviours and conduct that a group of people consider normally acceptable (whether or not individuals might have reservations). It is as easy as that, and while etymologists and philosophers still have some hairs to split, the point remains that these distinctions are validated by extremely widespread usage.

Strange Searching

Looking at the statistics for this blog, I am amazed by the most common keywords which return a hit here. They have obvious connections, some of them; but some of them are just peculiar.

Excluding words like 'are', 'the', 'and' and so on, the highest ranking search keyword is 'knowledge'. That's probably inflated by people looking for something that will help them with TOK essays or something.

But the next highest ranking search keyword is 'Frankenstein', which must be linked to 'Victor' at #6. I don't know what I've said about Victor Frankenstein which is unique and makes so many people from around the world visit my blog. The relevant article, victim of many hits, is this one.

#3, 4 and 5 are 'different', 'areas' and 'extent'. #7, 8 and 9 are 'truth', 'meeting' and 'strange'. #10, 11 and 12 are 'ethics', 'arts' and 'mathematics'. #13, 14 and 15 are 'God', 'discovered' and 'invented'. #16 and 17 are 'claim' and 'discuss'. #18, 19 and 20 are 'order', 'glimpsed' and 'chaos'.

It's like some sort of peculiar message from the back of beyond, a strange message in half-seen, half-heard poetry. It probably reads something like this:

Knowledge.
Victor Frankenstein,
Different areas extend truth;
Meeting strange ethics,
Arts, mathematics.
God discovered, invented
Claim, discuss
Order glimpsed chaos.

Sometimes I think there is something to be said for emergent meaning in the midst of apparent randomness. It is the holy grail of qualitative research; it is also a limitation of human cognition, making us see meaning where there may be none at all.

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Note: Hmm, I suspect that 'strange' and 'meeting' come from my citation of Wilfred Owen's poem here and also here. The latter is probably more useful to literature students.

Amusements

I am so amused. I think it is a testament to the eclectic nature of my upbringing and education that this humble blog has been a top search result for a whole bunch of almost totally unconnected topics. To whit:

• 20 Apr, Sun, 18:34:53 Google: Trebuchet findings
  
• 20 Apr, Sun, 21:12:13 Yahoo: three ladies
  
• 21 Apr, Mon, 12:09:22 Google: **Principles of negotiation**
  
• 21 Apr, Mon, 21:49:04 Google: economics-dismal science
  
• 21 Apr, Mon, 21:52:09 Google: cold iron rudyard kipling
  
• 22 Apr, Tue, 02:02:02 Google: Prometheus and Icarus Paradise Lost
  
• 22 Apr, Tue, 03:14:45 Google: strange meeting owen and shelley
  
• 22 Apr, Tue, 04:12:11 Google: strange meeting link shelley
  
• 22 Apr, Tue, 06:33:13 Google: Four Emus Shiraz 2004
  
• 22 Apr, Tue, 06:56:59 Google: "portable curmudgeon"
  
• 22 Apr, Tue, 07:30:19 Google: fifty six laws of good teaching
  
• 22 Apr, Tue, 10:03:37 Google: "Richardson's Rules"

No kidding.