I följande uppsats kommer följderna av Googles anpassning av sökresultaten efter användarnas förväntade intressen att undersökas. Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka ett urval Google-användares inställning och medvetenhet kring den personifiering som sker i samband med deras sökningar, och vad konsekvenserna blir av ett sådant tillvägagångssätt. Både för den enskilde användaren och för samhället. De frågor som ligger till grund för undersökningen kretsar därför främst kring användarnas egen uppfattning av, och medvetenhet kring, de personifierade sökresultaten, Googles kartläggning av användarnas aktiviteter online och vilka konsekvenser det kan medföra för individen och för samhället i stort.   I studien används en kombination av kvantitativ och kvalitativ metod. Den kvantitativa delen består av en enkätundersökning som syftar till att samla in statistik om hur Google-användarnas medvetenhet och attityder kring sökmotorn och informationsinsamlingen ser ut. Den kvalitativa studien består av semi-strukturerade intervjuer med ett urval av respondenter för att få en djupare förståelse för dessa attityder. Den teoretiska ramen inleds med teorier om filterbubblan (Pariser 2011) och följs därefter av politisk ekonomi (bla McChesney 2013, Fuchs 2012), teori om kunskapsklyftor (Segev 2010) och avslutas med Schröders (2001, 2003) tolkning av receptionsanalysen. Resultatet av studien visar att respondenterna har en relativt hög medvetenhet kring den personifiering som sker och känner ett högt förtroende för att Google presenterar relevanta sökresultat. Det finns en tudelad uppfattning hos respondenterna kring personifieringen av sökresultaten och kartläggningen av användarna, men engagemanget i frågan är lågt och likaså motivationen till att förändra sökbeteendet. Det låga engagemanget i kombination med Googles dominerande ställning kan leda till smalare informationsutbud och kunskapsklyftor mellan individer och länder. Okritiska användare i kombination med ett företag med monopol på information, skulle på sikt kunna innebära ett hot mot demokratin.

The web is getting more and more characterized by personalization. Big socialnetworks like Facebook as well as the leading search engine Google increasingly usepersonalization algorithms to tailor the information that they present to users. All inorder to make the information more relevant and engaging for the end consumer. Howdoes this personalization affect journalists who increasingly search the web as a partof their journalistic research? In this essay we have looked at the effects thatpersonalization has on the journalists of tomorrow by conducting a survey amongstudents of journalism. We have also done a study of literature and theories to try anddetermine what consequences personalization will have on the internet in the future.We make an in depth study of the search engine Google as this is one of the mainsources of information for journalists and we have tried to tie this to theories of filter-bubbles and gatekeeping. We find that the question is in need of further studies toreally determine the threat that we face but conclude that information onpersonalization should be far more evident when it occurs.

Syftet med denna undersökning var att ge en överskådlig syn på hur elever tänker kring användandet av internet. Undersökningen belyser även skillnader för informationssökning privat och i skolan, samt skillnader mellan teoretiska och praktiska program. Detta gjordes med hjälp av en kvantitativ metod där respondenterna fick fylla i en enkät. Resultatet har visat på att elever generellt sett använder både Wikipedia och Google i sitt sökande efter information. Det förekommer även en del elever som tror att censur gäller på internet. Eleverna är även ytterst målmedvetna när de söker information och prioriterar högt att informationen skall vara pedagogiskt utformad. Slutsatserna som har dragits utifrån denna undersökning är att eleverna uppvisar typiska beteenden som stämmer överens med vad som kännetecknar Google generationen. Samt att det finns skillnader mellan programmen som är av vikt.

“Mashups” are web-based maps that intermix user-created data with information gathered from multiple online sources. As part of the wave of “Web 2.0” technologies, mashups represent a shift toward distributed authoring and sharing of Internet content, complicating traditional modes of knowledge production. Mashups originated in the open source “hacker” movement and are now associated with the term “neogeography,” used to describe the practice of amateur mapmaking online. In this thesis I ask whether mashups facilitate a cartography that is more accessible and democratic, studying the ways in which mashup authors create alternative community or personal cartographies while remaining dependent on existing power structures for data and resources. I illuminate these issues through a series of examples, such as: mashups that render personal memories about places, maps created by activist groups to counter dominant representations of geography by governments or corporations, and websites that facilitate the collaborative creation and sharing of spatial knowledge within community groups. Contrasting these case studies with traditional paper cartography and GIS, as well as the professional online mapping technologies of the Geospatial Web (or GeoWeb), I explore how mashups attempt to represent personal, subjective, overlapping and contradictory perceptions of space and place. While enthusiastic claims about the ability of mashups to wrest mapmaking from state and corporate hands are currently overstated, I conclude that mashups do in fact provide new ways of collaboratively representing space whose implications are still to be determined.

This thesis aims to contribute to the improvement of online machine translation software. We identify errors in the process of translation between English and French and make recommendations. The systems evaluated are Promt, Babylon, Google Translate and Bing and the reference corpus is taken from BankGloss. Promt made the most errors, followed by Babylon, Bing and Google. The systems together produced a total of 147 grammatical errors, 74 semantic errors, 17 lexical errors, and 6 stylistic errors. To improve Promt, we suggest expanding its dictionary. For Babylon, we advise adding more grammar rules. In order to reduce the number of semantic errors in Bing and Google, the software should learn to identify words according to context. Machine translation is not an end in itself, but a good aid in accomplishing translation tasks.

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In light of the civil unrest surrounding the tech industry’s corporate shuttle buses, this paper examines factors that determine the percentage of commuters from Greater San Francisco to Silicon Valley. By using aggregate characteristics of two departing cities (San Francisco and Oakland) and 34 receiving cities in Silicon Valley in 2006 and 2011, the study shows that distance alone is statistically significant across various specifications. Relative median housing values and relative unemployment rates mattered at times. These findings can help businesses and governments in the area make educated decisions regarding employment and residential locations.

We now live in an information society where increasingly large volumes of data are exchanged between networked nodes in distributed systems. Recent years have seen a multitude of dierent serialization frameworks released to efficiently handle all this information while minimizing developer effort. One such format is Google Protocol Buers, which has gained additional code generation support for a wide variety of programming languages from third-party developers. Ada is a widely used programming language in safety-critical systems today. However, it lacks support for Protocol Buffers. This limits the use of Protocol Buffers at companies like Saab, where Ada is the language of choice for many systems. To amend this situation Ada code generation support for Protocol Buffers has been developed. The developed solution supports a majority of Protocol Buffers' language constructs, extensions being a notable exception. To evaluate the developed solution, an artificial benchmark was constructed and a comparison was made with GNATColl.JSON. Although the benchmark was artificial, data used by the benchmark followed the same format as an existing radar system. The benchmark showed that if serialization performance is a limiting factor for the radar system, it could potentially receive a significant speed boost from a substitution of serialization framework. Results from the benchmark reveal that Protocol Buffers is about 6 to 8 times faster in a combined serialization/deserialization performance comparison. In addition, the change of serialization format has the added benefit of reducing size of serialized objects by approximately 45%.

“Mashups” are web-based maps that intermix user-created data with information gathered from multiple online sources. As part of the wave of “Web 2.0” technologies, mashups represent a shift toward distributed authoring and sharing of Internet content, complicating traditional modes of knowledge production. Mashups originated in the open source “hacker” movement and are now associated with the term “neogeography,” used to describe the practice of amateur mapmaking online. In this thesis I ask whether mashups facilitate a cartography that is more accessible and democratic, studying the ways in which mashup authors create alternative community or personal cartographies while remaining dependent on existing power structures for data and resources. I illuminate these issues through a series of examples, such as: mashups that render personal memories about places, maps created by activist groups to counter dominant representations of geography by governments or corporations, and websites that facilitate the collaborative creation and sharing of spatial knowledge within community groups. Contrasting these case studies with traditional paper cartography and GIS, as well as the professional online mapping technologies of the Geospatial Web (or GeoWeb), I explore how mashups attempt to represent personal, subjective, overlapping and contradictory perceptions of space and place. While enthusiastic claims about the ability of mashups to wrest mapmaking from state and corporate hands are currently overstated, I conclude that mashups do in fact provide new ways of collaboratively representing space whose implications are still to be determined.

Bachelor-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2007.