Filter bubble

Ryan Chen

3/13/17

Filter bubble

Filter bubble is a way for websites to customise your search or your experience when you’re surfing the web. The website uses algorithms to guess what information the user would like to see based on user's search history, locations, and passed clicks(Wikipedia). For example if you search on youtube Justin Bieber music a lot you will most likely see stuff like Justin Bieber albums or other Justin Bieber stuff because the website uses algorithms to guess what you want to see based on your search history. People with different interest will more likely to have different things come up when they shop on amazon or search videos on youtube. Filter bubble has been a good way to help people find the things they want to find based on the things they search and not look at the things they don’t search. This can be bad for people because you will never see what other people see from their perspective.

Netflix has used filter bubbles for a while now. Me and my cousin who’s like 11 years old share the same netflix account with me and sometimes the TV shows and movies he watches can effect my filter bubble. So he made his own profile on the netflix account a while ago which doesn’t interfere with my filter bubble anymore. I looked through my netflix profile and I can see the trending now and the popular on netflix videos are completely different between me and my cousin. I have more of sports movies and documentaries while he has more of cartoons like kids show on his profile. Netflix also has an obvious filter bubble where they pull up videos on your screen and says “because you watched …”. I think this is good because if you watched a movie and you didn’t like it you can ignore it or if you watched a movie you really like you can look through that.

I also did some search on amazon on my roommate's computer who is currently a business student. Amazon has the same item on the top of the banner which is an echo speaker starting at $180 for both me and my roommate's computer. When I scrolled down I see the stuff that says inspired by your trends list. I usually don’t use amazon to shop unless I need to buy a textbook so I see that in my amazon there’s math, chemistry, and engineering textbooks. For my roommates amazon I see stuff like business calculus textbooks, proteins, or other workout utilities because he searches those things a lot and I can see that because he workouts everyday.

I did a search on youtube and they have recommended channels, watch it again, and recommended videos for us. I have recommended channels for music channels because I use youtube for music and the watch it again videos I have is how to solve this equation because use youtube to help on my homework if I’m stuck. My roommates youtube filter bubble was cartoon shows like family guy and workout videos because those are the things he watches. As I looked through it I can see I wouldn’t be interested in looking at the things my roommate has on his filter bubble and I rather look at my filter bubble. I personally like filter bubbles now because it doesn’t really bring up the things you aren’t interested and tries to bring up the things you would be interested in looking at.

On pattern on the stones the chapter computers that learn and adapt is kind of like filter bubbles. Computers can learn from their mistakes and correct their own errors (P.121). Filter bubbles correct themselves on what to put on the website depending on your interest from search history. It also takes memory to save your search history so the website knows what you searched in the past. On chapter 6 about memory of how computers can compress something to save memory space. For example if there was a letter that gets overused you would compress it to save data on your computer(p.93).

"Filter Bubble." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 07 Mar. 2017. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.

Daniel Hellis “Pattern on the stones”

POTS

Ryan Chen

2/22/17

POTS

The book pattern on the stones I think was an interesting book. You learn a lot of stuff you didn’t know much about computers. There are a lot of difficult words and information they throw at you in the book which when you read it sometimes it doesn’t make sense. You would have to google some words to know the definition before you can understand what they’re talking about. It was easy to understand when they tell us how they program a computer to make the best move possible every move you make so it’s like the computer is programmed to win. When they talk about Invert, And, and or blocks that was when it got confusing. The algorithm chapter was kind of confusing but when the professor explained it in class I had a better understanding.

The most interesting thing I learned from the book is probably some of the problems you think a computer can solve can’t actually solve it. Like the traveling salesman problem trying to find the shortest route possible. It was also interesting when the book talked about how a computer uses 1s and 0s to created other numbers or letters. I liked how the books gives a story of an example at the beginning of every chapter like pairing up socks in (Chapter 5) because those were the things I understand in the book the most. It was also interesting when the book talked about storing memory and how they try to compress the most common word or letter to take up less memory in (P.93-94).

The parts I don’t like about the book is in almost every reading we do there’s always information we read that’s confusing or words that we know nothing about like the hierarchy. There’s a lot of information as you read the book and you really have to slow down and process the information or look up words and try to understand it throughout the reading. It’s not a book where you can read the entire book then write a lot about because it’s a lot of information to how a computer works and you might have to go back through the book to jog some memory.

There were many things I looked up on google because I didn’t understand the concepts. One for example I googled what pseudorandom is when they used it on (P.71) when they were explaining quantum computing. According to (Google) pseudorandom is (of a number, a sequence of numbers, or any digital data) satisfying one or more statistical tests for randomness but produced by a definite mathematical procedure. So basically it’s a number that appears to be random but it’s not. The numbers are generated by a sequence so they appear statistically.

The book gave me a good understanding about computers. I didn’t really have any questions going into this book except just reading it to see what it’s about. It explain about how data gets stored and how expensive it was back then for memory on a computer when today we might use a bunch of memory on our phone and not think about any of this since iphone changed it’s lowest gigs to 32gb.

For me since this is the first book about computers I’ve read I would recommend it to a friend. But it takes a while for you to process the bunch of information they give you as you read the book and there might be multiple things you need to look up in order for you to understand the reading.

This book is significant because it’s the basics and the history of how computers work and they break everything down. I think the book was chosen in this class was because the lectures in class had to do with the book. Every chapter I read before class the next day I go to lecture the teacher basically explains what we read. I didn’t understand the reading much sometimes then the next day I see the professor go through it in class it kind of made sense because I read about it before class. It’s good this book was chosen as the textbook so you’re not clueless during lectures as the professor is going through slides.

Algorithm

Ryan Chen

2/13/17

Bitap Algorithm

There are lots of algorithms out there but the algorithm I’ve decide to choose is Bitap Algorithm because it talked about strings at the beginning and it looks interesting. This algorithm is also known as shift-or, shift-and or Baeza-Yates-Gonnet. The algorithm was written by  Udi Manber, Sun Wu, and Burra Gopal. It was first invented by Balint Domolki in 1964 and extended by R. K. Shyamasundar in 1977 then Manber and Wu reinvented in the context of fuzzy string searching in 1991. In 1996 Baeza-Yates and Navarro improve the algorithm.

The way this algorithm work is they are string searchings that tells you weather if the text has a substring that is approximately equal to the pattern. There are two types of searching called fuzzy or exact searching. Exacting string searching uses zeros and ones. If a bit indicates a zero that means there is a match. If it indicates a one that means there are no matches. The algorithm can be written with the intuitive semantics for 0 and 1, but we must introduce another instruction into the inner loop to set R=1. In this implementation, left-shifting a value shifts in zeros on the right, which is precisely the behavior we need.

Fuzzy searching is a little different than exact searching. To use fuzzy string searching for the bitap algorithm, you need to extend the bit array R into a second dimension. Rather than of having one array R that changes over the length of the text, we now have k distinct arrays R1k. Array Ri holds a representation of the prefixes of pattern that match any suffix of the current string with i or fewer errors.An error may be an insertion, deletion, or substitution using this context.

I think what makes these algorithms special and unique is that it's a string matching and there are two different ways to do this algorithm by exact searching or fuzzy searching. I personally like exact searching because it made more sense to me when I read it. It uses ones and zeros and we talked about that kind of stuff in class so it makes more sense.

I found that Jaro-Winkler distance that was created by Winkler in 1990 is similar to the Bitap Algorithm because it measures a similarity between two strings. But, it is only best suited for short strings such as someone's name. It uses ones and zeros just like exact string matching one indicating an exact match and zero indicating no similarity.

There are some algorithms that can be done manually for example like sorting out a deck of cards. For the Bitap algorithm I didn’t see any sources saying you can do it manually but I assume you will be able to sort out words similarity to have it match but it will take a very long time. The reading in the textbook relate to this algorithm in (Chapter 5) where it talks about matching socks, traveling salesman problem, and the possibilities of a certain move. The textbook reading did give me a better understanding of how algorithms work by giving examples like the shortest time possible to match your socks(P.77-78) because before the reading I had no idea what algorithms were. I also learned computers can’t solve every problem using algorithms like the traveling salesman problem(P.87-89).

Bitap Algorithm helps you match a text that is approximately equal(Wikipedia). You can use it in a real world situation for example if you want to find how many students in a school has the same name or a most common name you would use Bitap algorithm. Another example you can use this algorithm in a real world is to find out what is the letter that is being used the most to name a word so you can encode it to save data.

"Bitap Algorithm." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 13 Feb. 2017.

Personal Bio

Ryan Chen

Professor Russell Feldhausen

CIS 115

1/22/17

Personal Biography

I was born in New York City in 1997 and I’ve lived there until I was twelve. Then my mom got a job working for my uncle in Kansas so me and my parents moved to Lenexa, Kansas. I started 7th grade and attended westridge middle school. I noticed people in Kansas are a lot nicer and more friendlier than most people in New York.

During my senior year of highschool I had no clue what school I wanted to go to and what major I wanted to study. I attended JCCC for a year then decided to go to K-State. My two options for me at the time when I decided to transfer out of JCCC was either KU or K-State because it was instate tuition and I wouldn’t want to go out of state and pay double the cost. The reason why I attended K-State was because of the atmosphere and it wasn’t as close to home as KU was.

At first I was a civil engineering major because I was kind of into legos and building structures. After my first semester at K-State I felt kind of lost of what I wanted to study again because I didn’t felt civil engineering was that interesting anymore. One day I was browsing the web and I came across a video on youtube with a title “Is computer programming hard”. I didn’t know much of what a computer science major does until that video. I thought it was cool so at the beginning of this first semester I decided to switch my major to computer science. One big thing in the video that made me switch my major is when they said there will be 1.4million jobs available for computer science and only 400,000 grads qualify for those jobs.

My favorite hobbies are to play basketball, go to any entertainment places, and go travel. I also like to hang out with my friends and family. My family are all chinese and from China except for some of my cousins that were born here. We cook chinese food every night and use chopsticks for every meal. My family members are all cool and they live all over the places. I have family members in America, China, and Canada. I’m the only child so all my cousins are like brothers and sisters to me. My mom does a lot of traveling and shopping while my dad is the exact opposite. He’s more of a person that comes home from work and just watches TV while my mom likes to do a lot of things.

My first job I had was working for my uncle when I was 16 installing cabinets to homes are are still being built. It was during the summer time and they didn’t have the AC installed in the homes so it was usually a pretty sweating and tiring job for me. During the school year I wouldn’t work. The summer before I went to JCCC I worked at sprouts farmers market as a cashier checking out items and bagging groceries and I would work there when school started too and stop working there after the first semester of college because I wanted to make my grades better.

After I graduate I hope to become a software developer out of the state. Or get a masters degree at a different college. Other than that I’m not so sure what state I want to work or where I want to work.

As I was skimming through the contents of the textbooks I feel like Programming in The Pattern Of Stones textbook looks interesting because the whole reason I’m in computer science is trying to learn how to program. Also in the book 9 algorithms that changed the future tittled “what is computable?” seems interesting because it’s a question and I didn’t know some things are not computable.

I’m usually on twitter and snapchat a lot so if I want to find news on technology and computers I go to the moments tab on twitter where there’s all the news. For snapchat I go on the discover tab and it has lots of news channels like CNN. Sometimes I can go on google and type in news on technology and computers and the latest news comes up.

Cereal box

Coach Carter

glogster