Infomania, the FOMO Struggles of Millennials
January 9, 2017
The article titled Drowning In a Sea of Information on Clayton d’Arnaut’s online magazine Digital Culturist questions the effect of unlimited information on the audience that can’t seem to stop looking for more. Like bears preparing for hibernation, we seek out connections, news, memes, ideas, and opinions. Perhaps we believe that if we “know” enough, we can never die. But what does it mean if all the information we search on Google, we take in, but then almost immediately discard? Decreased attention spans, concentration, chronic distraction, creativity, these are just a few of the symptoms of our maniacal dependence on information. The article concludes,
A few months ago I took part in Infomagical, an experiment hosted by the WNYC podcast Note to Self. The purpose of this experiment is “to turn all of your information portals into overload-fighting machines.” It worked. After a full week of information consumption challenges and monitoring my progression, I felt clear, focused, organized, and more creative. I felt like someone took my brain and wrung it out like a wet sponge?—?refreshed and ready to tackle the next thing.
This sort of cleanse might be difficult, but it might be necessary to prevent us from losing our minds, literally and figuratively, if d’Arnault is to be believed. I have, on occasion, closed a tab open to Facebook only to be confronted with another tab open to Facebook. Did I close that one immediately or check the second tab? An Infomanic never consumes and tells.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 9, 2017
Need a Job at Palantir?
January 8, 2017
Short honk: In the run up to the inauguration, Palantir is adding staff in DC. You can apply to be the people partner at this link.
Beyond Search suggests that candidates not wear a Hillary for President button or express confidence that the DCGS Army system is the cat’s pajamas.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2017
Gartner Wants to Change Its Tint: From Azure to Blue
January 7, 2017
Is it possible for a mid tier consulting firm to change into a blue chip firm with a splurge of money, stock, and PR?
The idea is that there is a hierarchy of consulting firms. At the top are outfits like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, SRI, and a handful of others are blue chip outfits. These outfits deliver the blue ribbon winning bacon to their clients. Then at the bottom of the hierarchy are the drab gray chips held by former middle school teachers and unemployed journalists who embrace freelance consulting. You can find some of these folks at search engine optimization conferences or via gig Web sites. In the middle are consulting firms which are generating revenue and have some clients. These outfits either try to move up to the blue chip sector and compete head to head with the blue chip folks. or they are drifting down to Fiverr.com territory where “services” begin at $5 per job. In the middle are the azure chip outfits. Many of these firms purveying expertise embrace LinkedIn and do their best to become the talk of the town. The talking heads on many TV news programs come from the azure chip brigade.
Why are the color thing and the consulting hierarchy relevant?
Gartner Group, if the information in “IT Research Firm Gartner Is Buying CEB for $2.6 Billion” is on the money, is making a beeline to the paint store. From azure to blue chip with a bit of cash and Moxie.
The write up points out that Gartner is paying $2.6 billion for a services firm. I learned:
Gartner is offering $54 in cash and 0.2284 of its shares for each CEB share. The deal represents a premium of about 25 percent to CEB’s Wednesday close. CEB’s shares were up 16.4 percent at $72.05 in premarket trading, below the implied offer price of $77.25 per share. Gartner’s shares, which closed at $101.79 on Wednesday, were untraded.
Well, that’s a bit underwhelming for shareholders. “Untraded.” Hmmm.
The Washington Post reported that one CEB executive was “excited” by the deal. The CEB top dog is heading for the kennel. The Post noted:
CEB has grown more slowly than Gartner recently, making some investors worry whether the combined company can maintain the double-digit revenue growth rates Gartner has boasted in recent years.
What happens if more of the CEB professionals check out?
Will the respray deliver the growth and revenue Gartner desires? I have no crystal ball, but if there are some show dogs at CEB, why not see if the McKinsey- or Booz Allen-type outfits are hiring. More money and maybe more prestige?
The big question for me is the new blue chip paint going to hold up in the tough business climate?
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2017
Quote to Note: Professional Publishers Wonder What Is Going On
January 6, 2017
Ah, professional publishers, the show dogs of the information world. Show dogs are expensive. Grooming, brushing, vet bills, gourmet dog food. What happens when the folks who love dogs don’t go to the show? Even worse what happens when no one buys expensive puppies? Crisis? Yep.
I read “Scientists in Germany, Peru and Taiwan to Lose Access to Elsevier Journals.” The passage I highlighted in greed green was:
Universities regularly complain about the rising costs of academic journals, and sometimes threaten to cancel their subscriptions. But negotiators usually strike a deal to avoid cutting researchers off.
And the quote to note:
“Publishers must understand that the route to open-access publishing at an affordable price is irreversible.”
Professional publishers will not understand. Libraries pay to get the Elsevier journals. Keep in mind that universities pay faculty who write these articles. Then there may be more fees for the lucky authors.
Researchers then recycle the information contained in for fee versions of the academics’ work. When the money is not there, tenure goes to the dogs.
The researchers will get their scholarly canines from the pound. RIFed publisher staff can work at Uber.
Woof.
Stephen E Arnold, January 6, 2017
BAE Lands US Air Force Info Fusion Job
January 6, 2017
I read “BAE Systems Awarded $49 Million Air Force Research Lab Contract to Enhance Intelligence Sharing.” The main point is that the US Air Force has a pressing need for integrating, analyzing, and sharing text, audio, images, and data. The write up states:
The U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) has awarded BAE Systems a five-year contract worth up to $49 million to develop, deploy, and maintain cross domain solutions for safeguarding the sharing of sensitive information between government networks.
The $49 million contract will enhance virtualization, boost data processing, and support the integration of machine learning solutions.
I recall reading that the Distributed Common Ground System performs some, if not most, of these “fusion” type functions. The $49 million seems a pittance when compared to the multi-billion dollar investments in DCGS.
My hunch is that Palantir Technologies may point to this new project as an example of the US government’s penchant for inventing, not using commercial off the shelf software.
Tough problem it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, January 6, 2016
Google Looks to Curb Hate Speech with Jigsaw
January 6, 2017
No matter how advanced technology becomes, certain questions continue to vex us. For example, where is the line between silencing expression and prohibiting abuse? Wired examines Google’s efforts to walk that line in its article, “Google’s Digital Justice League: How Its Jigsaw Projects are Hunting Down Online Trolls.” Reporter Merjin Hos begins by sketching the growing problem of online harassment and the real-world turmoil it creates, arguing that rampant trolling serves as a sort of censorship — silencing many voices through fear. Jigsaw, a project from Google, aims to automatically filter out online hate speech and harassment. As Jared Cohen, Jigsaw founder and president, put it, “I want to use the best technology we have at our disposal to begin to take on trolling and other nefarious tactics that give hostile voices disproportionate weight, to do everything we can to level the playing field.”
The extensive article also delves into Cohen’s history, the genesis of Jigsaw, how the team is teaching its AI to identify harassment, and problems they have encountered thus far. It is an informative read for anyone interested in the topic.
Hos describes how the Jigsaw team has gone about instructing their algorithm:
The group partnered with The New York Times (NYT), which gave Jigsaw’s engineers 17 million comments from NYT stories, along with data about which of those comments were flagged as inappropriate by moderators.
Jigsaw also worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to parse 130,000 snippets of discussion around Wikipedia pages. It showed those text strings to panels of ten people recruited randomly from the CrowdFlower crowdsourcing service and asked whether they found each snippet to represent a ‘personal attack’ or ‘harassment’. Jigsaw then fed the massive corpus of online conversation and human evaluations into Google’s open source machine learning software, TensorFlow. …
By some measures Jigsaw has now trained Conversation AI to spot toxic language with impressive accuracy. Feed a string of text into its Wikipedia harassment-detection engine and it can, with what Google describes as more than 92 per cent certainty and a ten per cent false-positive rate, come up with a judgment that matches a human test panel as to whether that line represents an attack.
There is still much to be done, but soon Wikipedia and the New York Times will be implementing Jigsaw, at least on a limited basis. At first, the AI’s judgments will be checked by humans. This is important, partially because the software still returns some false positives—an inadvertent but highly problematic overstep. Though a perfect solution may be impossible, it is encouraging to know Jigsaw’s leader understands how tough it will be to balance protection with freedom of expression. “We don’t claim to have all the answers,” Cohen emphasizes.
Cynthia Murrell, January 6, 2017
Improve Your B2B Search with Klevu
January 6, 2017
Ecommerce sites rely on a strong search tool to bring potential customers to their online stores and to find specific products without a hassle. B2B based companies have the same goal, but they need an entire different approach although they still rely on search. If you run a B2B company, you might want to take a gander at Klevu and their solutions: “Search Requirements For A B2B Retailer.”
In the blog post, Klevu explains that B2B companies have multiple customer groups that allow different pricing, products, discounts, etc. The customers see prices based on allocation from the store, but they cannot use a single price for every item. Search is also affected by this outcome. Klevu came out with the Klevu Magneto plugin to:
With the help of our partners and our in-house expertise, we came up with a solution that allows such group prices to automatically work with Klevu. The Klevu Magneto plugin fetches the group prices and, at the time of showing the search results, Klevu’s JavaScript determines the relevant price for rendering. We’ve also ensure that this works in Ajax / quick search as well, as this was an important requirement.
The Klevu Magneto plugin also has an SKU search option, maintaining the same landing page within search results, and instant faceted search. Klevu researched the issues that its B2B customers had the most problems with and created solutions. They are actively pursuing ways to resolve bothersome issues that pop up and this is just the start for them.
Whitney Grace, January 6, 2017
Textkernel: Narrowing Search to an HR Utility
January 5, 2017
Remember the good old days of search? Autonomy, Convera, Endeca, Fast Search, and others from the go go 2000s identified search as a solution to enterprise information access. Well, those assertions proved to be difficult to substantiate. Marketing is one thing; finding information is another.
How does a vendor of Google style searching with some pre-sell Clearwell Systems-type business process tweaking avoid the problems which other enterprise search vendors have encountered?
The answer is, “Market search as a solution for hiring.” Just as Clearwell Systems and its imitators did in the legal sector, Textkernel, founded in 2001 and sold to CareerBuilder in 2015, , is doing résumé indexing and search focused on finding people to hire. Search becomes “recruitment technology,” which is reasonably clever buzzworking.
The company explains its indexing of CVs (curricula vitae) this way:
CV parsing, also called resume parsing or CV extraction, is the process of converting an unstructured (so-called free-form) CV/resume or social media profile into a structured format that can be integrated into any software system and made searchable. CV parsing eliminates manual data entry, allows candidates to apply via any (mobile) device and enables better search results.
The Textkernel Web site provides more details about the company’s use of tried and true enterprise search functions like metadata generation and report generation (called a “candidate profile”).
In 2015 the company had about 70 employees. Using the Overflight revenue estimation tool, Beyond Search pegs the 2015 revenue in the $5 million range.
The good news is that the company avoided the catastrophic thrashing which other European enterprise search vendors experienced. The link to the video on the Textkernel page is broken, which does not bode well for Web coding expertise. However, you can bite into some text kernels at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2016
Alphabet Google: The Confusion for 2017
January 5, 2017
I read two write ups. Both of these were branded “Business Insider.” Am I confused? No, just skeptical. I read “One Year Later, Nobody Knows What Alphabet Is — and That’s a Godsend for Google’s Public-Image Problems.” The basic idea seems to be:
Last August, Google announced it would change its name to Alphabet, which would effectively be a holding company for Google and its various businesses — YouTube, Android, etc. — as well as Google’s more outlandish experiments, like its moon shots factory, “X”; its investment arms; and more.
This seems clear enough to me. Google’s new clothes are those of a holding company. Think about the similarities between the “new” Google and LingTemcoVought. Oh, you don’t recall Jimmy Ling and the LTV thing. Well, let’s move on.
I noted this passage in “One Year Later…” write up:
The number of people Googling “Alphabet” is basically negligible.
Well, that is a downer. Google is used by about two thirds of those looking for information via a desktop computer and by more than 95 percent of those using mobile devices. Perhaps the name Google is a bit more familiar. Alphabet is a holding company. Think about LTV and my comment about some folks not knowing what that was. Forgettable.
The write up reminds people that Google had “creepy” connotations. Alphabet, since no one knows what it is, is not so creepy. That makes sense to the handful of people who know about Alphabet.
My view of Alphabet is different. I think that the founders wanted to get out of the line of fire. With the Alphabet thing, other executives can talk to the regulators grousing about a Google monopoly. The lack of visibility for the holding company is little more than a way of saying, “Hey, we are a bit tired of this search thing. Regulators have finally caught on. Let’s do science projects.”
The second write up is remarkable because it states the obvious: “Danny Sullivan: The ‘State of Google Search Remains Strong.” Well, since there are antitrust legal matters associated with Google, that’s a bit of friction. On the other hand, the GOOG’s share of the Web search market, the Android thing, and the various allegations of the Foundem variety suggest that the Google is able to make money with ads.
These two facets of Alphabet Google are examples of the wonder some folks feel when thinking about the great success Backrub has become. As Beyond Search ponders 2017, several thoughts flew through the addled goose’s very small brain:
- Alphabet is more like a corporate two step. If Hewlett Packard can split into two, sell off Autonomy, and announce an improved Autonomy IDOL product, the Google folks can do some fancy dancing as well. Who wants to sit in court and explain that Google is not a monopoly? Answer: Lawyers and the people running the ad business.,
- Google is an online advertising business and a very big one. In 2017, Google will become more aggressive. One reason is that the mobile ad revenue behaves differently from the 20 year old desktop search ad business. The other reason is that Google is going to do what unfettered publicly traded companies do; that is, do what is necessary to make more money.
- People think search and research equate to use of Google. That’s just wonderful for some.
- The Alphabet Google thing is locked in a series of processes which give it significant control over social, political, and technical issues. That’s okay because Amazon, Facebook, and a handful of other outfits are in the same game. Oligarchies are a big new thing.
What’s the contraction for 2017? My view is that Google is not search. People think Google is search. There you go. Look it up online and try to verify what you find. Are there disturbances in Denmark? Is the US Department of Defense hiding documents? Are Google executive biographies findable? The Google answer to these questions may be different from what a professional research finds.
That’s the contradiction. Search without finding objective information. No matter how one spells it, the result is an assumption of accuracy and objectivity. Can cheerleaders spell well?
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2016
More Poll Excitement: Information Overload
January 5, 2017
I read “Really? Most Americans Don’t Suffer Information Overload.” The main idea is that folks in the know, in the swim, and in the top one percent suffer from too much information. The rest of the ignorance-is-bliss crowd has a different perception.
The write up explains, reports, states:
A new report from the Pew Research Center says that most Americans do not suffer from information overload—even though many of us frequently say otherwise.
What’s up with that?
The write up points out:
Many people complain about the volume of information coming at us. But we want it. Adweek reported earlier this year that the average person consumes almost 11 hours of media per day. That’s everything from text messages to TV programs to reading a newspaper.
Well, the Pew outfit interviewed 1,520 people which is sample approved by those who look in the back of statistics 101 textbooks rely upon. I have no details about the demographics of the sample, geographic location, and reason these folks took time out from watching Netflix to answer the Pew questions, however.
The answer that lots of people don’t suffer from information overload seems wrong when viewed from the perspective of a millennial struggling to buy a house while working as a customer support rep until the automated system is installed.
But wait. The write up informs me:
the recent national election showed that “in a lot of ways people live in small information bubbles. They get information on social media that has been filtered for them. It is filtered by the network they belong to. In a lot of ways, there’s less information and much of it is less diverse than it was in an earlier era.” The public’s hunger for that information is reflected in a study conducted by Bank of America. The bank found that 71 percent of the people they surveyed sleep within arm’s reach of their smartphone. And 3 percent of those people hold their smartphone while they’re in dreamland.
Too much information for me.
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2017
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