Here’s a statistic, 75% of on-line shoppers abandon their shopping carts before completing the purchase. The source I read blamed everything from number of steps involved to the inability to easily back out of a sale. Myself, I think it is the fact that sellers refuse to quote the prices clearly and people enact the shopping cart just to see how much things truly cost. Then bail.Taking a cold look at music, the bottleneck has become the obstacle of remembering lyrics. I’ve been looking for easy ways out and “that won’t do”. Whether or not I lack talent isn’t the issue here. There is something I have that most musicians don’t—a working brain. I’ve decided my challenge is to use that to in some way commit all the lyrics infallibly to memory with a complete accuracy. Hey, am I not the kid who once memorized the first hundred lines of “How Horatius Kept The Bridge” in a single day?
More and more studies are concluding the human brain begins to shut down as early as age thirty. Twenty, if you work for the school board. I say they are blaming the wrong cause. Anything will deteriorate if you don’t use it. The shared characteristic of people who lose cerebral capacity is that they stopped learning as their brains degenerated into the gossip “chew the fat” mode. I suspect the research is stilted by not weighting [the numbers against] the rareness of those who keep learning throughout life. So, by learning, I mean academic topics. You know what I’m talking about. Cable channels by the hundred are not academic, much as Ken likes to think so.
I had an infrequent callout today concerning a client on Wikipedia. Recently that outfit has been stung over fake credentials, meaning a group of people collaborated to post false information. Now other well-meaning contributors have to go through hoops. Every search containing “Wiki” went right back to Wiki, whose instructions totally suck. That’s why the client had to phone for help.
My task was to discover, at minimum cost, the posts which will pass muster. This should be easy, but it is not. You see, every search that even includes the term “Wikipedia” overpowers the results. Lately, Wiki results have been showing up in Google searches, a powerful lure to on-line advertisers. Put another way, Wiki is finally experiencing the same phenomena as this blog.
Worse for Google, Wiki results are contextually categorized. That means Wiki can zero in better on which version you want. Who recalls my first complaint about Google many years back, where I entered “rocket” and got back songs by Elton John? To this day, Google has never fixed that defect and probably never will. Never do a Google on “beaver” if there are kids in the room.
The utter dominance of the [paid and non-contextual] search results is not a measure of quality, rather a parameter in the search engine algorithms. (That's hard to understand, but it stays.) Search engines don’t evaluate worth or relevance. And now, Wikipedia has just encouraged another stranger to defeat their system. It took me two hours to locate and post two references today because I could not successfully find a working third-party tutorial on Wiki tags.
I posted the preliminary documents, thereafterward I pirated pages that resembled my client’s concept and altered the code. I would not have done this if Wikipedia had decent instructions. It is fine for them to make a rule that requires cites and refs, but another to assume everybody out here knows exactly computer lingo they require to do so. If they get burned, they were asking for it.
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