Searching algorithm is not only bias,but also misleading.
Compared to Google’s search engine, Baidu, the “Google of China”,is much more revenue-oriented when present the searching results. Its algorithm is pretty straightforward for make money. They rely on ads and ranking of your search result is basically influenced by ads. The higher you pay for each word click, the higher you’ll appear in the search results. In 2016,there was a case of deceased student looking for ill treatment on Baidu. Misled by the firstly ranked advertisement in Baidu, not only the young student delayed treatment of his ill, but also he used up all of his savings on the artificial treatment recommended by Baidu’s search engine. It is incredible that Baidu’s algorithm is so simple: ranking by price. The higher price paid, the advertisement stay ahead, without considering the correlation between the page and key words of searching.

Also in order to attracting user, Baidu could even “misunderstand” very innocent key words. In 2016, there is a post which compares the totally different result when searching words “tender and smooth”. In Baidu, the result were porn images, whereas in Google, the result were very delicious breakfast with fried egg and pudding. The post also went viral on internet and Baidu modified their algorithm over night.

It is true that big data and artificial intelligence have been used by service providers to protect their customers, for example, banks tracking customers’ transaction habit and detecting anomaly transactions to prevent fraud, email platforms analyzing the content of the email contents to category spams and non-spams, and e-commerce firms profiling buyers by tracking their purchasing history and clicking on goods to push goods recommendations. These kinds of automate algorithm generally provides much help and convenience to customers and users, at least no harm to them, although sometimes the result of the algorithm is not accurate or unexplainable.

However, it is unacceptable that some corporate increase the service price to the customers in the name the result automate algorithm. Car insurance could finds any excuse to add on insurance rate when car owner make any changes. It is a real case that my car insurance rate was raised without any incident happened. I was told by the online representative of the insurance firm: the system tells that the new residence area is an accident prone area. The higher rate is the result of the system algorithm of evaluating insurance. In fact it is a better maintained community. The insurance purportedly lift the insurance price in the name of automate and algorithm.

Network latency, is an expression of how much time it takes for a packet of data to get from one designated point to another. It exists and varies by distance, media of data traffic runs by and on. The media includes optical fiber, copper cable, wireless electronic ware, etc. Generally, the longer distance, the more latency. That means it use more time to deliver a package of data and to receiver the response. We can try the demand of ping to test the latency between your pc and the pinged serve.

For example:
It takes 45/71 milleseconds and 274/337 milleseconds to finish the sending package and receive a response to/from amazon.com hosted at US and amazon.cn hosted at China.

C:\Users\pcadmin>ping amazon.com
Pinging amazon.com [176.32.103.205] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 176.32.103.205: bytes=32 time=45ms TTL=232
Reply from 176.32.103.205: bytes=32 time=71ms TTL=232
Reply from 176.32.103.205: bytes=32 time=70ms TTL=232
Reply from 176.32.103.205: bytes=32 time=62ms TTL=232

C:\Users\pcadmin>ping amazon.cn
Pinging amazon.cn [54.222.60.218] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 54.222.60.218: bytes=32 time=286ms TTL=225
Reply from 54.222.60.218: bytes=32 time=274ms TTL=225
Reply from 54.222.60.218: bytes=32 time=303ms TTL=225
Reply from 54.222.60.218: bytes=32 time=337ms TTL=225

Although the latency is at the level of decades of milleseconds within one country or continent, and at the level of hundreds of milleseconds between continents. It affects much the user’s experience of network-based application. Foe example, I can login the Chase APP within 2 seconds in USA. In contrast, it takes me 10 seconds to get into my Chase account when I travel to China. The difference of login speed lies in the variance of network latency between my cell phone located in USA and China and Chase APP server in USA. I can tolerate the 10 seconds of waiting for login my bank app, after all I do not use it too much every day.
However, In business area. Network latency bring much influences to business model, competitive force, especially to the operation with high reliance on time-efficient. In the book, Flash Boy, introduced the story of re-constructing a fiber between New York and Chicago. The new fiber is more straight and shorter, less nodes, decrease the network latency from 17 milleseconds to 13 milleseconds. This latency of 4 less milleseconds means faster communication between the two trade center in Chicago and New York.It creates much advantages for those high-frequency-trades who use this high-speed fiber over others.

http://5b0988e595225.cdn.sohucs.com/images/20171011/09988639262a4773835a9f62791b32ee.jpeg

https://gizmodo.com/getting-lost-down-the-rabbit-hole-of-private-infrastruc-1562782580

In wireless areas ,there is also much difference among different protocols, technologies. The standard of 5G was just formed and come to agreement and accepted by all the related associations. Just like what Nole Starosielski described in “Fixed Flow – Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure”, the construction,investing, and maintenance of undersea cables were mixed with much impurely technical factors, such as political interference, inequality, inception, business competitiveness and chaotic, etc. These factors were also entangled inside process of forming the 5G standard. Anyway, 5G era is coming and let’s google, facebook, wechat more and faster…

I have been in a tangled feeling along with reading the book, Weapon of Math Destruction.
We get much convenience from the abundant services of all kinds of information feeding, such news notifications ,shopping recommendations,music suggestions, even ads sometimes. We can get to know the basic information for daily life during in the subway to office in the morning without needing to subscribe news papers and journals magazines, to pay much attentions to look for sales events. The world seems going towards perfect with the coming of Information Age and AI.
However the book lists many cases of WMD, revealing its negative results from the perspective of downsize. I got to wary of the horrible consequence of savagery developing, evolving and applications of WMD in various areas, including educations, finances,policing, etc.
This reminds me of a word, “melon-eating masses”, which is newly produced by Chinese netizens and went viral in the recent 2 two years in China . There are many versions about the origin of the new word. The major one is from an elderly who was interviewed by a reporter. In the interview, the elderly said “I know nothing about it, I was just eating watermelon on the roadside”. From then on, the Chinese internet users, often use it to describe a massive group of passive onlookers at a major incident or event. In my opinion, the fired teacher, a victim of the WMD, is a member of “melon-eating masses” for she couldn’t figure out why he got such a low score as to be fired. The single mother, who can’t arrange well his child care any more after the introduction of precise algorithm to calculate the job time, could be also a member of “melon-eating masses”, who might be only able to accept the “truth” that the technology advance is improving the efficiency of work, without doubting of the fairness of the algorithm. The designer and developers of the computing models, the privileged politicians, could also be members of the “melon-eating masses”, with scale expanding of data collection, he complexity deepening of algorithm and the neural network getting more and more entangled, and getting out of control on the plans plotted by themselves. The new word created in China internet reflects a society phenomenon of that the mass are a little desperate with the current situation of pool access to the real information and are looking for forward to the governors to regulate and rule the data usage, business modeling, information feeding.

Good to see that yesterday it is reported: Facebook takes down hundreds of pages and accounts that were spreading false or misleading political content ahead of the midterm elections.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-takes-down-hundreds-of-u-s-pages-it-said-spread-misinformation-1539289601?emailToken=29411f823c22631890df9e943e3debb2tap1voHRTPW1NnbNXyll2f7csI8gu6r5CyDg1SDgG+zu+U0/hkpCZLlehT6zKf+os3K+dKzJW+7fYrW+6AaXXTHt/+/2ime5T1IxtCG81gOONqzYtKaaiyRGQB5rlwC6l80n331F/lpAFoP6iPP4HA%3D%3D&reflink=article_email_share

It took me two days to finish reading the two chapters of Everybody Lies,not only because of my poor reading of English,but also becasue of much of my consideration on the interesting idea expressed in the book.
It attracts me much by its copious samples of Google search, ranging from politics of presidential voting and viewpoint of right\left wing to invidual curiosity in terms of sex. I can’t image what might happen in China if these samples of talking about sensitive topics be used in the college courses. From the interesing reading materials, I experienced much difference between America and China in terms of environment of culture,politics,economics, as well as technology.
I don’t want to talk much about politics and economic. But I am interested in the technology. I’d like to express my thought on the data technology by discussing a deadly accident which happened in the past week in China. A young lady who called car-pooling service of DiDi was raped and killed by the car driver. This accident rouse explosive outrages of all the Chinese people, including me. The outrage was not only on the criminal driver, but major the company,DiDi, of providing platform of car-pooling service because it didn’t timely and correctly responded to the help seeking  from the victim before she was done by the driver. From my viewpoint of technology, DiDi should use more technology of data analysis to enhance the security of its platform. DiDi,similary UBER,a China’s car hailing giant,provides transportation services for 550 million users across over 400 cities,including taxi hailing, priviate car hailing,and social ride-sharing. The accident happent to the ride-sharing service platform which is to make a match between car driver who is not dedicated to providing hailing service and the customer. If both the driver and the customer have the same tour direction,the platform will notice them to make the deal if both accept. Here is the issue potentially leading the accident. Based the running mechnisam of the car-pooling platform service, the driver and the customer don’t know each other at all. The customer has no way to evaluate the driver and totally rely on the platform before he/she accept the deal.So did the platform provider do the basic due dilligence on the verification of the driver? How is it implemented and is it enough just by checking the identification and criminal history ? Now It is an era of big data and artifical intelligence. All kind of invidual’s data of social network, financial condition report might be used to anylize each invidual driver. For example, could the platform use the feedback and comments from the passagers,joint with the driver’s previous and current financial conditions, to make the sentiment analysis on the driver and judge if the driver lies or behaves always abnormally ,then judge if he/she is qualified for acting as car-pooling driver?

This is my thought during my reading Everybody Lies. Looking forward to communicating and deeping into the Data,Place,and Society with all of you.