Okay, so excuse the melodramatic title. I've been using the Google Desktop Sidebar for some time now, and I'm becoming increasingly certain that it's reading my mind.
In the bottom left-hand corner of my screen, the sidebar displays a random picture, drawn from the digital photographs on my computer, and from the web (quiet there, in the back). Occasionally, a bad photograph comes up, and I can remove it, safe in the knowledge that it will never again be selected. However, sometimes a photo will appear and I will want to view it full-screen, which is made possible by double-clicking on the thumbnail.
The thing is, I've noticed that some photos appear more often than others, namely the ones which I've chosen to view full-screen. The net effect? I'm more-regularly confronted with the images that I've chosen to view, which, you'd think, would have a positive effect on my state of mind. Maybe that's taking it a bit far.
However, I would be interested in contributions from other Sidebar users on this question. Is what I'm seeing:
- selection bias, due to me only noticing images that I have noticed in the past anyway, or
- a nifty, unobtrusive use of artifical intelligence and probabilistic methods to make my life better?
Cheers,
Derek.
|