Bonnie:

Good work. Your blog post is very clean and clear. I enjoyed reading your objections to the Reda essay. I'd never thought of self-analysis working in this way. Thanks for making me think.  

I hope that by the end of the course, you find that you wrestle with writing less (though I think even for the most professional/expert writers, writing involves a bit of wrestling).

A few small errors:

Picky point: "quotes" is the verb; "quotations" is the noun. Though people do use the abbreviated "quotes" all the time to refer to "quotations" the noun (in the same way they use "invites" when they should say "invitations"), it's a colloquial usage and I would prefer the formal "quotations" for academic writing. I'm sometimes old-fashioned and picky. :-) 

Put essay titles in quotation marks rather than in italics (and put book titles in italics). Review these formatting details before submitting the first big assignment. 

Overall - great job.

Angie

Daryl, I agree that it's a bit unfair to compete the Athabasca library with general internet, especially for academic research. Much of the searches I did that led to academic research in Google and whatnot were ultimately help behind a pay wall. With Athabasca U's journal licensing, we have access to the IEEE, ACM articles and so on whereas I found if I wasn't signed into the library and just searched for things of this technical nature on the 'Net I would ultimately get many of the same articles, with a paywall.

-bp

Nice article Daryl, i never thought of it before (that search engine speech is actually protected by free speech).  My point of view is that search engines can have their own decision on what to return in their results. I think its better that way in terms of censoring contents that they think are not appropriate or sites that are reported as malicious. If they dont do that, i dont think we will have results that actually contain good contents. Bots and robots will just consume the top rankings so to me some kind of doctoring is needed. Besides, it does not stop me to go directly to the site I wanted or just try out a different search engine.

Hi Daryl, 

Check this series of videos out. It gives a basic foundation on a free data mining tool with lots of examples. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqQn6YfyGs0&list=PLm4W7_iX_v4OMSgc8xowC2h70s-unJKCp&index=1

Hi Louie,

Professor Witten's videos series is very helpful in introducing and explaining the core topics in data mining. I believe he developed the Weka data mining software and his explanations in the videos in explaining how to use Weka for specific tasks is very helpful.

Thanks for the list Daryl. I will look into the tools on the list and add feedback.

https://www.springboard.com/blog/9-best-free-data-mining-tools/Contains most of the tools in the link above with some newer tools.

Good start, Mariam.  A clear and thorough post. I'm happy to report you have no dangling/misplaced modifiers and no wordiness.

In the second sentence, delete the comma after "Although," - with although clauses, only put a comma at the end of the whole clause (i.e. the comma you have later in the sentence).

Here you have a vague pronoun (it) - " I plan to improve upon this by taking the time to read my work out loud and ensuring that the modifiers are as close that they can be to the word and also that it clearly applies to that word or group of words." 

Above you start with plural (modifiers, they) and then switch to singular it part way through the sentence. (also "as close that" should be "as close as").

Here you have switched word order - "In academic writing, is it important" is it should be it is.

Good start.

Angie

Thank you for the feedback! Much appreciated!

Hi Kyle,

Don't remember that Google craze specifically. The question that probably interests us all is what all can Google figure out from our browsing habits and what analytics are they using. i.e. that is to what degree are they uniquely identifying traits about me. Does Google and other social network offerings have an obligation to come clean about how they are handling/managing our identities?

The second more disturbing question is, "who are they sharing this with?"

My question about public good was meant to explore when would society demand that our search engine not be managed/controlled by private interests. Here I'm assuming that a state run service would have to have several audit controls to avoid an equally bad scenario of the state controlling the filter bubble.

-dc-

I'm not sure about the first question.  For the second, likely they aren't sharing but brokering access to you as a consumer.  Marketers will pay for advertising.

It is a very interesting question about when search engines would become public interest.  They are very close to a utility now.

Cheers,
Kyle

Sometimes I wonder about Google...not so much who they are sharing their data with, but how easy it would be for them to filter search results. For example, in China, when you search for Tiananmen Square, the search results are filtered. When you search for June 4th, you get info on birthdays and anniversaries, with no mention of the government crackdown. This is China we are talking about, but Google is complicent. 

Of course this wouldn't happen in North America, right?