Professional Publishing Under Pressure: WWED?
May 18, 2018
Professional publishers have been chugging along as other types of publishing companies have struggled. Sure, pumping up the revenue line has been hard work. Just ask a former senior manager at Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, or Wolters Kluwer, among others.
But the job is now getting increasingly difficult.
Let’s assume that the information in “Sweden Ends Contract with Science Publisher Elsevier, Moving for Open Access for Scientific Articles” is accurate. I learned:
Sweden, like many other European countries, is aiming for full scientific “open access” (free article reading) by 2026. In 2017, Swedish universities paid Elsevier €1.3M ($1.5M) for article publications and €12M ($14.1M) for access to articles. Now Sweden is demanding that Elsevier make Swedish research content fully available to the public and make its 1,900 journals fully available to Swedish researchers, all at a reasonable price to Swedish universities.
What will Elsevier do? What will other professional publishing companies do? Reduce prices? Cut Ebsco type deals?
I suppose one fund raising option could be a Lance Armstrong type plastic bracelet that says, “WWED”, shorthand for “What Would Elsevier Do?” Maybe a Patreon play is warranted?
The reality is that if one is expecting law firms, accountants, and universities to pay like it was 1999, that seems unlikely to me. What can be dropped for lower cost or “good enough” free online services? Here’s a short list:
- Peer reviewed journals
- Publications which charge authors to include their “scientific studies”
- Exploiters of the tenure chasing PhDs
- Recycled public documents related to law and tax regulations
- Collections of essays submitted to an organization no one knows much about which offers expensive journals and odd duck conferences featuring the published experts
- Compilations of US and Canadian government information.
Of course, this Swedish resistance could be a mere blip, a negotiating ploy.
On the other hand, maybe the world of professional publishing has already changed?
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2018
Google and Demos
May 18, 2018
Over the years, I have experienced some great demos. Bill Gates made crazy Microsoft software worked despite all odds. There were magic dance steps executed by Steve Jobs. I even watched as one gifted presenter made Fast Search & Transfer import disparate content, leaving the exceptions folder as empty as the pockets of gig economy workers who were not paid.
I read “What Google Isn’t Telling Us about Its AI Demo.” My initial reaction was, “Hello, that was a demo.” I did not say to myself, “Wow, that’s a real product.”
Nor did I say, “Google has finally cracked the chatbot problems which make the systems almost useless for real world issues customers often have and need help resolving.”
Nope. Demo.
However, it appears that some people believed their eyes and ears. The write up states:
Google may well have created a lifelike voice assistant that we’ll all eventually use to complete mundane tasks like appointment scheduling. It also might be close to creating such a thing, but not quite there yet. Or it was partially staged. Or something else entirely. We just don’t know, because Google w7on’t answer the questions.
The questions which Google did not answer, of course, are about the mechanics of the demo.
Net net: Demos are not exact representations of what some smart systems can actually do. Case in point: Driver assist autos which crash into big things.
Surprised? I’m not.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2018
The Challenge of Filtering: One Reason to Hire Human Editors
May 17, 2018
In an effort to keep innocent bystanders and children safe from all the nastiness of the net a decade ago, British officials created the greatest firewall this side of China. The results are finally starting to be seen with clear hindsight and they are not a glowing view of the project. We discovered more of this botched attempt at government oversight from a recent BoingBoing piece, “Britain’s Great Firewall Blocks Access to Official Disney Sites, Internet Safety Guides, VPNs and Coding Sites for Kids.”
According to the story the wall is intended to create a:
“[H]armful content blocklist that UK ISPs are using to keep UK children safe.
“Unsurprisingly, the list is full of embarrassing false positives, including disney.co.uk (the official UK site of the Walt Disney Company), as well as Disney’s disneymoviesanywhere.com. More awkward: the UK’s largest ISPs are blocking internetsafetyday.org, a website that teaches kids to use the internet safely; also blocked is kidsandcode.org, which teaches children to write software.”
Despite this kind of gaffe, other nations are not being scared off by firewalls. Perhaps that’s a sign of each government’s views on civil liberties, because the UK is trying to fix its problem while Russia is considering adopting a similar firewall. This is a developing front worth following because the way we interact with other nations is at stake.
Patrick Roland, May 17, 2018
Apple and Google: Beacons Beckon and Inform
May 17, 2018
I read “Apple News Officially Lets Publishers Use Google’s DoubleClick to Serve Ads.” The main idea is that a couple of large companies are teaming up in a way that matters: Advertising or at least keeping some folks happy. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but the news, if accurate, reminded me that making money is a goal which makes bad experiences like appointing some individuals to a company’s Board of Directors go away.
The write up asserts:
The ad-targeting options break down into two categories: context-based targeting and audience-based targeting. Contextual ads can be aimed based on the article’s publisher, its content category within Apple News and the tags a publisher appends to the individual article as well as according to whether it appears on an iPhone or iPad. Audience-wise, the ads can be targeted by a person’s location (though only at the designated market area level), their gender and their age group.
What’s this mean? A partial answer can be excavated from the glorious prose of these public documents:
- US7039599, Method and apparatus for automatic placement of advertising
- US7085682, System and method for analyzing website activity
- US7349827, System and method for reporting website activity based on inferred attribution methodology
- US7844488, Method of delivery, targeting, and measuring advertising over networks.
These documents can be downloaded from the USPTO. Think of the link as a beacon which is a heck of a lot less effective than the inventions disclosed in these patents.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2018
Facebook: Collateral Damage?
May 17, 2018
The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal has rightly been scrutinized by everyone from individual users to entire government bodies. As could be expected when the players are this large, what people are finding links together unlikely suspects and victims in this data breach. One such surprise popped up this week when we read a Gizmodo report, “Facebook ‘Looking Into’ Palantir’s Access to User Data.”
According to the story:
“The inquiry was led by Damian Collins, chair of Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee. According to CNBC, Collins asked if Palantir was part of Facebook’s “review work.”
“While it’s unclear if it gained access to the Facebook user data that Cambridge Analytica harvested, Palantir’s connection to the social network extends beyond any potential collaboration with Cambridge Analytica. Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member, is a Palantir co-founder.”
We aren’t sure what the big data powerhouse Palantir knew or didn’t know, but if they are found to have violated laws it could get ugly. And the ugliness doesn’t seem to know any depths in this case. Take for example, the recent news that Cambridge Analytica’s data could be up for sale since the company declared bankruptcy after the data breach news tanked the company. Buckle up, because we don’t think the dominoes are done falling yet.
Patrick Roland, May 17, 2018
IBM Watson: Did You Generate These AI Requirements Answers?
May 16, 2018
I read a darned remarkable write up called “The 5 Attributes Of Useful AI, According To IBM.” IBM, of course, has Watson, the billion dollar bet that continues to chase other horses in the artificial intelligence derby. What Facebook and Google lack in marketing, IBM has that facet of grooming expensive horses nailed tighter than a stall barn door.
Let me run through the five attributes of “useful AI” which are explained in the write up:
- Managed. I think this means one pays a big outfit to do the engineering, tuning, and servicing of the useful AI. Billability seems to lurk around the edges of this seemingly innocuous term.
- Resilient. My hunch is that when the AI goes off the rails and generates nonsense or dead wrong outputs, the useful AI is going to fix itself. See item number 1. If the AI is resilient, why do we need the “managed” approach?
- Performant. I first encountered this word in Norway when a person who taught English to hearty Norwegians used it when communication with me. I think it means “works” or “performs in an acceptable manner.” The idea is that the AI system delivers a useful output. Keep in mind the “managed” and “billability” angles, please.
- Measureable. I like this idea almost as much as I like precision and recall. However, when one asks Watson how to treat a cancer, it seems to me that the treatment should nuke the cancer. I am on board with statistical analyses, but in the case of a doctor depending on AI for a treatment, the operative number is one and the key value is 100 percent. Your mileage may differ unless you have life threatening cancer.
- Continuous. I loop back to “managed” and the notion of “billability.” I like the notion that smart software should operate continuously, but there are challenges associated with “drift” as new content enters the system, the cost of processing real time or near real time flows of information which has a tendency to expand over time, and built in algorithmic biases. Few want to talk about how popular numerical recipes output junk unless tweaked, retrained, tuned, and enhanced. This work is obviously “billable.”
I would point out that one attribute important to me is that the useful AI should generate a beneficial financial positive for the customer. I understand the revenue upside for an outfit like IBM, but AI has an interesting characteristic: The smart software becomes increasingly expensive to maintain and operate in a “useful” manner over time.
If I look at “useful” from IBM’s perspective, the task for the stalwarts in Big Blue is making money from this “useful” software. Seems like it has been slow going.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2018
LightTag Helps AI Developers Label Training Data
May 16, 2018
The creators of LightTag are betting on the AI boom, we learn from TechCrunch’s post, “LightTag Is a Text Annotation Platform for Data Scientists Creating AI Training Data.” Built by a former Natural Language researcher for Citigroup, the shiny new startup hopes to assist AI developers with one of their most labor-intensive and error-prone tasks—labeling the data used to train AI systems. Since it is a job carried out by teams of imperfect humans, errors often abound. LightTag’s team-based workflow, user interface, and quality controls are designed to mitigate these imperfections. Writer Steve O’Hear cites founder Tal Perry as he reports:
“Perry says LightTag’s annotation interface is designed to keep labelers ‘effective and engaged’. It also employs its own ‘AI’ to learn from previous labeling and make annotation suggestions. The platform also automates the work of managing a project, in terms of assigning tasks to labelers and making sure there is enough overlap and duplication to keep accuracy and consistency high. ‘We’ve made it dead-simple to annotate with a team (sounds obvious, but nothing else makes it easy),’ he says. ‘To make sure the data is good, LightTag automatically assigns work to team members so that there is overlap between them. This allows project managers to measure agreement and recognize problems in their project early on. For example, if a specific annotator is performing worse than others’.”
For the organizations in certain industries like healthcare, law, and banking that simply cannot risk outsourcing the task, LightTag offers an on-premise version. The write-up includes a couple GIFs of the software at work, so check it out if curious. Though it only recently launched publicly, the beta software has been tried out by select clients, including these noteworthy uses: An energy company is using it to predict drilling issues at certain depths with data from oil-rig logs, and a medical imaging company has used it to label MRI-scan reports. We are curious to see whether the young startup will be able to capitalize on the current AI boom, as Perry predicts.
Cynthia Murrell, May 16, 2018
Voice: Why Write? Why Read?
May 16, 2018
Voice search is the next big thing in the search industry for those younger than I. This is a pretty universally accepted trend among tech thinkers. With that in mind, it’s a good time to look at one’s own personal use and your business uses for search, and ask: “Do I need to talk instead of thinking, doing a bit of research, and then formulating a query?”
The is for millions upon millions of mobile enabled is, “Why on earth would I waste time doing those inefficient things?”
We learned more from a recent article in The Next Web, “By 2020 30% of Search Will Be Voice Conducted. Here’s What That Means for Your Business.”
According to the story:
“I would also invest in trying to get clients to review my restaurant on Yelp and Tripadvisor so that when people click through, they will see relevant and recent information on my restaurant. If I were providing services, I would make an effort to get listed in Yelp and Google My Business to increase my chances of showing up.”
Another big way to prepare that experts are recommending is to think about SEO in a totally different way. The way we search through our fingertips and through our voice boxes are totally different. In short, we tend to say less than we type when searching so SEO will have to be even more precise than before. This is only the tip of the iceberg. Get ready for irrelevant results, quite a bit of floundering around for the information one requires, and manipulation.
Those free services come at a cost. But aren’t chatting and voxing easy?
Patrick Roland, May 16, 2018
Oracle Brews Java Revenge with a Taste That Lingers
May 15, 2018
I assume that the “real” news experts at Fortune have their facts lined up. I hope so because the story “Google Is Now Under Investigation after Oracle Accused It of Secretly Tracking Android Users.” In my view, if one uses a mobile phone, one is tracked. This is my supposition, and I have a handy dandy copper lined bag which helps me keep my visits to the local ice rink a secret. Imagine. A 74 year old who ice skates albeit carefully.
The write up points out two items which surprised me. Remember. I was not surprised by the tracking feature which is old news here in Harrod’s Creek. I noted two points:
- The assertion that Google is under investigation because of an action Oracle took. I find that fascinating. A database company nudging Australian investigators into action. What’s that say about Oracle’s clout? What’s that say about Australian investigators’ interest in the GOOG? I just don’t know.
- The write up links Oracle’s poking at Google to Oracle’s annoyance related to the use of Java in Google’s mobile phone operating system. I thought that the idea today was to engage in “conversations” and move on with Sillycon Valley lives.
I, of course, believe that Google data are anonymized. Why would Google keep track of individual user clicks, photos, email, browser actions, or location for that matter?
I don’t have the slightest idea, but I can guess. Here’s my hypothesis: Google wants / needs to sell ads, create services to help people, and make Google a better workplace. Set aside the internal politics and the grousers who are quitting because the GOOG wants government contracts.
What else does Oracle have up its old fashioned, very capacious technology sleeve?
Stephen E Arnold, May 15, 2018
Free Keyword Research Tools
May 15, 2018
Short honk: Search Engine Watch published a write up intended for SEO experts. The article contained some useful links to free keyword search tools. Even if you are not buying online ads or fiddling with your indexing, the services are interesting to know about. Here they are:
- Bulk Keyword at http://tools.seochat.com/tools/suggest-tool/#sthash.Jbkkmbfm.dpbs
- Google Correlate at https://www.google.com/trends/correlate
- Keyword.Guru at http://keyword.guru/
- Serpstat at https://serpstat.com/
- Soovle at https://soovle.com/
- Ubersuggest at https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
- Wordstream at https://www.wordstream.com/keywords/
Stephen E Arnold, May 15, 2018
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