Will Social Search Impact Expert Content & How It Ranks? There is an outstanding thread developing at WebmasterWorld on the topic of social search ranking factors versus content ranking factors. The discussion is fairly thought provoking, which is why forums still rock. One webmaster is on the verge of complaining that Google and Bing are trumping their social search ranking features and downplaying the importance of quality and authoritative content. He said out of frustration: As social factors increase in importance, the point of creating original, thought leading, anything OTHER than simple mass content is removed.
I'm seriously stunned here. Some pretty strong words but is this really Google or Bing's goal? There is no doubt in my mind that Google and Bing want the most authoritative content to rank the highest but when there are two pages that are close on the same level of expert content, which should they rank higher? Also, think about social factors and what Google and Bing use to determine what is authoritative. Response to “Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources” RDTN.org: Radiation Detection Hardware Network in Japan by Marcelino Alvarez. Help us get to $40,000! We have four days to go and we want to get to $40k. We are using our fourth update to promote this new goal. In honor of the number four, we're adding a prize at $400 - a limited-edition Safecast t-shirt. Thank you, everyone, for helping us reach our goal!
Any additional funds raised will help us purchase more Geiger counters to send to Japan. We also wanted to clarify for our top donors. Our thank you cards will come in the shape of Field Notes books. Field Notes book as a Thank You card We've rebranded RDTN as Safecast. And for some information about how the funding will be applied, see this post: About: Safecast.org (formerly RDTN.org) is a website whose purpose is to provide an aggregate feed of nuclear radiation data from governmental, non-governmental and citizen-scientist sources. Open-Source Underpinnings: Phase 1 and Phase 2: Where will they be deployed? The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science.
How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link. Illustration: Jonathon Rosen "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Festinger and several of his colleagues had infiltrated the Seekers, a small Chicago-area cult whose members thought they were communicating with aliens—including one, "Sananda," who they believed was the astral incarnation of Jesus Christ. Through her, the aliens had given the precise date of an Earth-rending cataclysm: December 21, 1954.
Festinger and his team were with the cult when the prophecy failed. Read also: the truth about Climategate.At first, the group struggled for an explanation. From that day forward, the Seekers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize. In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. Which leads us to the media. Open science: a future shaped by shared experience | Education | The Observer. On the surface, it looked as if there was nothing in mathematics that Timothy Gowers couldn't achieve. He held a prestigious professorship at Cambridge. He had been a recipient of the Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics. He had even acted as a scientific consultant on Hollywood movies.
Yet there were a few complex mathematical problems that he had struggled to solve. "In most cases, I just ran out of steam," he explains. So one day he took one of these – finding a mathematical proof about the properties of multidimensional objects – and put his thoughts on his blog. He called it the Polymath Project and it rapidly took on a life of its own. "If you set out to solve a problem, there's no guarantee you will succeed," says Gowers. This ability to collaborate quickly and transparently online is just one facet of a growing movement in research known as open science. There are many interpretations of what open science means, with different motivations across different disciplines.