Weekly Meeting July 2 2014 "Real Life Contagion"

You may have seen the movie 'Contagion' (2011) with Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Jude Law, where a group of mind specialists control other people's feelings and life changing decisions while in an induced dream state. I enjoyed it!

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg did too, read on....



ABC News: Backlash over Facebook's 'unethical' secret study

Facebook secretly manipulated the feelings of 700,000 users to understand "emotional contagion" in a study that prompted anger and forced the social network giant on the defensive.

For one week in 2012 - and without the explicit consent or knowledge of users - Facebook tampered with the algorithm used to place posts into their news feeds to study how this affected their mood.

The researchers wanted to see if the number of positive or negative words in messages they read affected whether users then posted positive or negative content in their status updates.

Researchers influence people using a study.

Emotions are Contagious: See Study

Weekly Meeting June 25

Weekly Meeting June 25

Topic: Internet Browsers

Speaker: Andy

A browser is a Program for viewing Internet pages such as:

IE - internet explorer
Most hacked, keep security up to date
Check version by clicking on the cog at the top right
Set updates to automatic

FIrefox by Mozilla is another browser

Chrome by Google is a good browser
Tabs are like sandboxes which keeps it safe from bad pages
ActiveX does not use it, much safer
Menu in top right is 3 bars
Incognito window but you aren't invisible
Bookmarks
Recent tabs if you accidentally close one
Also remembers things from your phone or tablet

So it seems that Chrome is a better Browser than IE. Firefox is also OK

MalWareBytes works well with Bad web pages

Your search engine can be hijacked by naughty websites.
Go to settings in Chrome
Look for Default Search settings and change it if it is something other than Google or an acceptable search engine.

Weekly Meeting June 18, 2014

Weekly Meeting June 18, 2014

Speaker: Andy

Topic: GMail and Google

Click on 9 dots for a menu
Calendar, maps, etc

Calendar
Can be linked to your phone or tablet
Can share the calendar with others

Google Keep
Note taking application for things like shopping lists
App for phone

Weekly Meeting June 4 2014

Search Injuns
(Aka Search Engines or SEs)

A huge range including: Google, Yahoo, Ask, Answers, Bing, Duckduckgo, Excite, LiveSearch, Exalead, Startpage, ixquick

Your browser is set to use one search engine. You can change this in the settings.

Pros and Cons
Google is easy and fast, but it can be biased and not display all relevant results
Yahoo! will often give better results.
Meta-search tools like yippy.com and dogpile.com are not very comprehensive and to be "used at your own risk".

Google uses PageRank to order search results. This emphasizes pages most heavily linked from other pages.

Is it a bad thing to record all of your searches?

On the plus side, you receive personalized ads and information relevant to your interests. Google calls it "personalizing your search"

BUT, researchers at the Uni of Bangalore have been able to track back from your searches to retrieve personal information about you.

See Google's privacy policy: "how we use information we collect".

Two SEs that don't save your searches or personal information:

Startpage.com powered by ixquick which is really ixSlow
Duckduckgo.com/privacy

Exercise: try searching for tony abbott with 4 different SEs