Week 4 tute

ok, first up we'll start with ye olde scavenger hunt

1. The nation's largest pumpkin weighed in this weekend. It was all part of the 13th annual Giant Pumpkin Growers Championship in Rhode Island. Ron Wallace broke the record for the world's largest pumpkin, weighing in at 1,502 lbs. 1.
   http://www.49abcnews.com/news/2006/oct/09/worlds_heaviest_pumpkin_weighed/
2. Miami Olympic heated pool, 80 pacific ave, Miami, qld, 4220 http://www.geocities/collesseum/court/5449/from_Creator.htm
3. A giraffe’s tongue is 18-20inches long. http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-giraffe.html
4. The area of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ontology
5. David Cronenberg's first film was Transfer made in 19661. http://www.empirezine.com/spotlight/cronenberg/cronenberg1.htm
6. the hackers manifesto was written in 19861. http://www.technozen.com/manifesto.htm
7. 555 is used as a prefix to avoid actual phone numbers being phoned after people watch a certain film.. http://www.omegarobot.com/article/555.html
8. take a flight from crete to rhodes which is only a short distance away, once greek island to another. http://www.anemos.net/tour13.htm/
9. Rock and roll music by the beatles http://www.onmc.iinet.net.au/
10. Brisbane punk band, the Black Assassins 10. http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/staff/stockwell.htm

Now, what is a search engine? a search engine is a yellow pages in essence. its comprised of a coordinated set of programs that includes:

• a SPIDER that goes to every page or representative pages on every Web site that wants to be searchable and reads it, using hypertext links on each page to discover and read a site's other pages
• A program that creates a huge index
• A program that receives your search request, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results to you

each search engine ranks differently, some exclude links if they detect spam etc etc, but most major search engines analyse how pages link to each other,they determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be "important" and thus deserving of a ranking boost. My favorite has to be altavista.com, i've been using it for the last 10 years, i like the results i get, and the layout of the page.

Mailing lists.

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk is a great site, which is linked to thousands of mailing lists, 2 of which are related to this subject are :

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/EBAY-STUDIES.html: this is the discussion of a variety of eBay themes including identity, community, social capital, collecting in an e-society, consumption, consumer lifestyles, employment effects, website design, usability, the 'real' economy, the 'perfect market' and representations of eBay.

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/EVOLUTIONARY-COMPUTING.html : EC covers all approaches to computing based on analogues of natural selection: eg genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolutionary strategies and artificial life. Related fields include complex systems theory, chaos and cellular automata

as far as my essay topic goes, im leaning towards hackers, and hacker ethics....need to choose a more direct issue still.