Google: More on the Good Fight
March 1, 2019
Yep, prohibiting unmoderated comments seems like a real wow moment for the Googlers. Breakthrough ideas take time, particularly with each tiny step, Google is moving from a platform to an old fashioned, curated news outfit.
Google and Facebook are drowning in fake news. The tech giants are routinely chastised in the media and on Capitol Hill for failing to maintain customer trust over fake news and privacy. So, the search king has taken it upon itself to fight these fights. But, is it enough? We gathered information from a recent Engadget story, “Google Explains How It’s Fighting Fake News.”
According to the story:
“Google is not immune to the scourge of fake news that has dominated headlines over the last few years. The company has taken various steps in fighting the problem — from partnering with fact-checking networks to launching the $300 million Google News Initiative. Now it’s expanded its transparency efforts further by detailing at length the steps it takes to fight disinformation across its services.”
Self regulation seems like a good idea—if you are a stakeholder in the Wild West world of Silicon Valley. Other countries’ regulators have a different view it seems.
Does the phrase “digital gangster” ring a bell. Local problems once were just that, confined and local. Global online information services are a bit broader and appear to have much more far reaching consequences.
Patrick Roland, March 1, 2019
Professional Publishing: Push Back and Grousing
March 1, 2019
The University of California is a foreign territory here in Harrod’s Creek. The nearest library harbors a few individuals who want to dive into the Commonwealth’s deep and thrilling history.
UC is different. For vendors pitching library centric products from smart shelving to digital copies of journals related to the fascinating insights into misbehaving cells, California UC is a very big deal. The reasons range from money to standing orders. Oh, that’s money too. Sorry.
I read “UC Terminates Subscriptions with World’s Largest Scientific Publisher in Push for Open Access to Publicly Funded Research.” This fine title means, “The library system will no longer pay professional publishers like Elsevier and others outrageous subscription fees about research funded by government research grants.
Okay.
The reason is that the cost of certain professional journals is brutal. To add to the irritation of high prices, authors have to pay the professional publishers to have their content in the journal. Then, the professional publishers ask “experts” to read these articles in order to maintain quality. Hey, it is cheaper to let unpaid “experts” read and comment instead of hiring an expensive subject matter expert. (How fresh are articles in professionally published math journals? Answer: Not very.)
What companies are likely to be hit in the pocketbook with this policy? Elsevier, for sure. Probably Wolters Kluwer, some units of Thomson Reuters, maybe sickly fish like Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and Ebsco too. Even outliers like Emerald could be affected but I am not sure if Emerald has a “must be published in” title.
The UC news release said:
Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.
From my point of view, universities have fed the high costs of professional journals. Here’s how the big time academics stumbled into an MBA trap:
- Unpaid, unloved, and often wacky PhDs have to prove that their work is important as part of the elusive and possibly endangered “tenure” track
- The academics whip up research using even more needy graduate students
- The “research” is crafted into a journal article published by an Elsevier-type outfit
- The PhD, tenure and approbation seeking author or authors then pay for page proofs and corrections. This is a nice way of saying, “You write this crazy stuff, so pay for the typesetting.”
- The journal’s editor sends out the submitted “research” to subject matter experts. Some of whom may not be paid or given a free copy of the journal or an invitation to the publisher’s suite at an academic conference
- The “good” write ups are queued for publication
- The author buys copies of the article, prints off citations, prays for or induces someone to write a review. These are then provided to the appropriate tenure track committee
- The tenure committee then uses these “research” publications in “important” journals as evidence of the desperate PhD’s academic work.
Nifty.
What Elsevier type outfits have done is monetize this institutional, symbiotic process. The UC system wants to change the rules.
Will this method work? Yes, if other universities jump on the bandwagon and stay there. The problem is that Elsevier-type publications may have more influence over academic institutions than the individuals who work in the university bureaucracies?
Nifty, eh. Universities like the UC units set up a system which feeds back high prices in a loop the hapless PhDs cannot escape. Who wants to accept a blog post or a tweet as proof of excellence. Certainly few on a tenure committee are keen on this approach. There are standards to maintain.
Stephen E Arnold, March 1, 2019
Oldster Teaches Young Dogs Some Tricks
March 1, 2019
It can be easy to forget just how long IBM has been around compared to other huge tech companies, but that venerable giant was incorporated in 1911. An article at The Conversation examines “Lessons from IBM for Google, Amazon and Facebook.” Writer and former IBM employee James Cortada, author of the recently published book, IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon, shares his observations. He observes:
“There is a difference between individual products – successive models of PCs or typewriters – and the underlying technologies that make them work. Over 130 years, IBM released well over 3,600 hardware products and nearly a similar amount of software. But all those items and services were based on just a handful of real technological advances, such as shifting from mechanical machines to those that relied on computer chips and software, and later to networks like the internet. The transitions between those advances took place far more slowly than the steady stream of new products might suggest. These transitions from the mechanical, to the digital, and now to the networked reflected an ever-growing ability to collect and use greater amounts of information easily and quickly. IBM moved from manipulating statistical data to using technologies that teach themselves what people want and are interested in seeing.”
The write-up goes into more depth on the progression of IBM advances, emphasizing that the company’s success comes more from developing technologies over time than from sudden breakthroughs. Cortada notes that, unlike IBM, Microsoft, and Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have yet to evolve away from their original functions. Those internet-born companies, he advises, can last out the century if, and only if, they adapt to evolving technologies as IBM has done.
Cynthia Murrell, March 1, 2019
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