Daily Archives: October 7, 2006

Random thoughts

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Lovely piece by Steven Levy about the randomness of the iPod shuffle algorithm.

My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did. By 2003, among the 3,000 or so songs in my iTunes library, I had about 50 Steely Dan tracks. Yet every time I shuffled my music collection “randomly” to mix the tunes, it seemed that the Dan was weirdly over-represented. Only two or three songs after Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, I’d hear Kid Charlemagne. Then, 20 minutes later, there would be Pretzel Logic. Where was the logic in this? I didn’t keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes, but after a while I would keep a sharp ear out for what I came to call the LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor. The LTBSD Factor was always perplexingly short…

This is one of those maddening articles in which someone writes about a topic that one had thought of covering, but didn’t. I use the shuffle facility on my iPod a lot, and often wondered if it was giving truly random results. But I didn’t take the logical next step and do some digging. Levy did, which is what makes him such a good journalist.

It turns out that this is an excerpt from his forthcoming book about the iPod phenomenon (Ebury Press, November 2, according to the Guardian). If it’s anything like as good as his book on the history of the Apple Mac, it’ll be worth queueing for.

Algorithmic ‘integrity’

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From Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog…

Last week, CNET’s Elinor Mills reported on how a web search for “Martin Luther King” returns, as its first result on Google and as its second result on Windows Live Search, a web site (martinlutherking.org) operated by a white supremacist organization named Stormfront. The site, titled “Martin Luther King Jr.: A True Historical Examination,” refers to King as “The Beast” and says he was “just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.” The site also features an essay on “Jews & Civil Rights” by former Ku Klux Klan official David Duke.

What’s remarkable, though, is not that a search algorithm might be gamed by extremists but that the owners of the algorithm might themselves defend the offensive result – and reject any attempt to override it as an assault on the “integrity” of their system….

Carr goes on to quote Google’s response to the CNET story:

At Google, a Web site’s ranking is determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to any given query, a company representative said. The company can’t tweak the results because of that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results, she said. “In this particular example, the page is relevant to the query and many people have linked to it, giving it more PageRank than some of the other pages. These two factors contribute to its ranking.”

Microsoft’s response was even more robust:

The results on Microsoft’s search engine are “not an endorsement, in any way, of the viewpoints held by the owners of that content,” said Justin Osmer, senior product manager for Windows Live Search. “The ranking of our results is done in an automated manner through our algorithm which can sometimes lead to unexpected results,” he said. “We always work to maintain the integrity of our results to ensure that they are not editorialized.”

To which Carr tartly responds:

By “editorialized” he seems to mean “subjected to the exercise of human judgment.” And human judgment, it seems, is an unfit substitute for the mindless, automated calculations of an algorithm. We are not worthy to question the machine we have made. It is so pure that even its corruption is a sign of its integrity.