Week 2 at RIT has kicked off with a slight update to the blog. I’m trying out “Ads by Google” and man, is it paying off! My understanding is that the google ad system dynamically chooses which ads to run by parsing the existing content of a web page. Because of this dynamic nature, I’m not sure if the same ad will be running by the time that you load this page, gentle reader. Therefore, I want to share what I got when I loaded this page for the first time:

It left me wondering exactly what it was in the previous postings that triggered a “homosexual dating” advert (not that there is anything wrong with that). How and why this happened is interesting to me for both the linguistic and dynamic publishing question it raises. So thats getting added to the list of research subjects to dive into.

Today is MLK day, and that brings up memories of my Social Psychology class at the U of C. The culmination of that class was a group research project I undertook with three other MAPers. The project tested how appearance can affect persuasion. In the experiement, volunteers were asked to read an article and respond to it. There were a number of article permiutations, each tweaked to test a part of our hypothesis. What connects this experiment to MLK day, and to my present surroundings, is that the articles were presented as editorials from the RIT’s Reporter Magazine. The mock editorials addressed whether or not classes should be held on MLK day. We chose the Reporter because like U of C, RIT is a quarter based institution and holds classes on MLK day. There’s more about the experiment, including pictures from the study, in this entry from last year.