DeepDyve Offers Viable Alternative To Academic Paywalls
March 30, 2020
Academic paywalls are the bane of researchers even in the midst of the current health crisis. Why? Unless you are affiliated with a university or learning institution, you do not have immediate access to credible academic databases. Sure, there are there public libraries, but their database resources are limited . There might be an alternative solution that is actually viable and affordable: DeepDyve.
What is DeepDyve?
“DeepDyve offers an affordable monthly subscription service that gives unlimited full-text access to an amazing collection of premium academic publications.”
Users have access to over eighteen million articles, including full text pieces from over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals. The great thing about DeepDyve is that it is free for freelancers to create accounts, save their searches, curate their content, and export their citations. The freelance version of DeepDyve is limited to articles from Google Scholar (a notoriously low quality database), PubMed, and abstracts from all other publications. DeepDyve has a Pro account option for $49/month or $360/year that gives users access to all content.
That is much cheaper than signing up for academic databases on an individual basis as well as allows users to research from their own home without an academic institution affiliation. However does the cheaper price offer decent research materials?
DeepDyve does not appear to be hiding anything, because it lists all the different resources users can access with a subscription fee. Users can explore resources by research topic and see what a Deepdyve subscription offers.
DeepDyve could be a newer model for academic database and journal access. The big academic publishers still hold tons of power, but companies like DeepDyve could turn the publishing tide.
Whitney Grace, March 30, 2020
Big Tech: Adulting Arrives But A Global Challenge Proved Stronger Than Silicon Shirkers
March 29, 2020
Interesting item from NBC News: “Coronavirus Misinformation Makes Neutrality a Distant Memory for Tech Companies.” DarkCyber thinks the the write up should have used the phrase “finally adulting,” but, alas, the real news story states:
Most major consumer technology platforms embraced the idea that they were neutral players, leaving the flow of information up to users. Now, facing the prospect that hoaxes or misinformation could worsen a global pandemic, tech platforms are taking control of the information ecosystem like never before. It’s a shift that may finally dispose of the idea that Big Tech provides a “neutral platform” where the most-liked idea wins, even if it’s a conspiracy theory.
The recursive nature of the click loops creates some interesting phenomena. Among the outcomes is the myth of Silicon Valley bros, the mantra “Ask for forgiveness, not permission,” and the duplicity of executives explaining how their ad-fueled money systems have chopped through the fabric of society like a laser cutter in an off shore running shoe factory.
The write up includes some good quotes; for example:
“Neutrality — there’s no such thing as that, because taking a neutral stance on an issue of public health consequence isn’t neutral,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor of communication at Syracuse University who researches online harassment and disinformation. “Choosing to be neutral is a position,” she said. “It’s to say, ‘I am not getting involved because I do not believe it is worth getting involved.’ It is internally inconsistent. It is illogical. It doesn’t work as an idea. “So these tech platforms can claim neutrality all they want, but they have never been neutral from the very outset,” she added.
Okay, interesting. One question:
Why has it taken a real news outfit such a long time to focus on a problem?
Answer:
We wanted a free mouse pad.
The problem is that undoing the digital damage may be a more difficult job than some anticipate.
Adulting permits a number of behaviors. Example: Falling off the responsibility wagon. Perhaps a recovery program is needed for dataholics?
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2020
Duh Report: Smart Software Creates Change
March 28, 2020
Another report from the edge of the obvious:
New technology changes lives. Duh.
Not exactly a news flash. But some are surprised. Ali Jazeera explores how artificial intelligence is changing modern society in the article, “Dataland: The Evolution Of Artificial Intelligence And Big Data.”
Classic science fiction generally takes an analog approach to futuristic technology as the concept of a digital landscape was not in the human scope. Our digital data is as identifiable as our fingerprints and different organizations use it to track us. In democracies, it is mostly used to sell products with targeted ads, while authoritarian governments use it to track their citizens’ locations and habits.
Dataland is a documentary that tracks how AI is used in different countries:
“Dataland illustrates the different facets of big data and artificial intelligence being unleashed by the world’s most prolific data scientists. The film goes to Dublin where artificial intelligence is becoming an increasing influence on community life; to Finland where citizens transmit their DNA to improve public health and predictive medicine; and finally to China where facial recognition is routinely used by the state to track the movement, habits and private lives of common people.”
It is inspiring and startling to see how different societies use AI. We literally can only imagine how AI will be used next, then the technologists will make it a reality. It is only a matter of time (years or decades?) before AI is as common as mobile devices.
Interesting source too.
Whitney Grace, March 27, 2020
Rediscovering What Once Was Taught: Why Software Goes the Wrong Way
March 27, 2020
DarkCyber spotted a link to an essay called “The Expert Blind Spot In Software Development.” The write up states:
I stumbled upon the theory of the expert blind spot…
What’s the blind spot? DarkCyber knows that Microsoft cannot update Windows 10 without creating problems for some users. Google cannot update Chrome without wizards in the office. Apple cannot update the iPhone without breaking things like the hot spot function. In fact, software pretty much is one set of things that don’t work. Some large, some small—Most are friction, costing money, slowing down actions.
Modern software development explains why Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft make their cloud technologies complex and opaque. Increasing friction generates revenue, not happy users. The image is from Go Physics’ depiction of entropy.
The article explains that beginners operated with the “illusion of competence.” What’s omitted is that institutional pressure forces beginners to operate as if they were chock full of information germane to a task. Managers don’t want to manage, and most managers know that their responsibilities exceed their competence. But that’s the way the world works: Everyone is an expert, and the leaders lead, or that’s the theory in many organizations. The managerial forces create Brownian motion in which those creating software operate like sailboats, each generally heading in some direction: Just with poorly defined rules of the road.
The write up works through an interesting explanation of how “memory” works. But the core of the essay is that “expert blind spots” exist, and those blind spots are problems. The article states:
The best way to be aware of somebody’s level of knowledge in some precise areas is simply to speak with him. In my experience, informal, relaxed conversations, around a cup of coffee, a tea or whatever you like, is the best way to do so.
The idea is that interaction and talking fill in some of the knowledge gaps between those who work together to achieve a goal. There are a number of tips; for example:
- Map your schemata which seems to edge close to the idea of taking notes
- Write a journal which seems to be taking notes, just on a time centric trajectory
- Writing a blog, which seems to be converting the two previous ideas into a coherent essay.
What’s quite interesting about this write up is that the core idea was well stated in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” an essay / lecture by William James, yeah, the novelist’s brother.
James wrote:
And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.
Several observations:
- A certain blindness defines the human condition
- Technical people are rediscovering why their software sucks but lack an pre-conditioning or early alert about why their work product is half baked or just good enough
- A flawed mechanism for creating the fuel for the 21st century guarantees that the friction will wear down the parts; that is, software becomes more and more of a problem for its users.
What’s the fix? On one hand, there is no fix. On the other, a more comprehensive education might reduce the frustration and time consuming rediscovery of what’s been known for many years.
Now about those new nVidia drivers which cause crashes when a cursor is repositioned…
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2020
Cellebrite: Low Profile Outfit Shares Some High Value Information
March 27, 2020
Cellebrite, now owned by Japanese interests, is not a household word. That’s good from DarkCyber’s point of view. If you want to know more about this company, navigate to the company’s Web site.
“Cellebrite Unveils the Top Global Digital Intelligence Trends for 2020” provides observations / finds in its Annual Digital Intelligence Industry Benchmark Report for 2020. Our video program will consider some of these findings in the context of cyber intelligence. However, there are four items of interest which DarkCyber wants to highlight in this short article.
Intelligence and other enforcement agencies are slow to adapt. This finding is in line with DarkCyber’s experience. We reported on March 24, 2020, in our DarkCyber video that the Canadian medical intelligence firm Bluedot identified the threat of the corona virus in November 2019. How quickly did the governments of major countries react? How is the US reacting now? The “slowness” is bureaucratic friction. Who wants to be identified as the person who was wrong? In terms of cyber crime, Cellebrite’s data suggest “43 percent of agencies report either a poor or mediocre strategy or no digital intelligence strategy at all.” [emphasis added].
Government agency managers want modernization to help attract new officers. The Cellebrite study reports, “Most agency managers believe police forces that embrace mobile tech to collect digital evidence in the field will help reduce turnover and be significantly more prepared to meet the digital evidence challenges of 2020.” DarkCyber wants to point out that skilled cyber professionals do not grow on trees. Incentives, salaries, and work magnetism are more important than “hopes.”
Budgets are an issue. This is a “duh” finding. DarkCyber is not being critical of Cellebrite. Anyone involved directly or indirectly in enforcement or intelligence knows that bad actors seem to have infinite scalability. Government entities do not. The report says, “With the deluge of digital devices and cloud data sources, examiners face an average 3-month backlog and an average backlog of 89 devices per station. The push for backdoors is not designed to compromise user privacy; it is a pragmatic response to the urgent need to obtain information as close to real time as possible. Cellebrite’s tools have responded to the need for speed, but for many governments’ enforcement and intelligence agencies, a 90 day period of standing around means that bad actors have an advantage.
DarkCyber will consider more findings from this report in an upcoming video news program. Watch this blog for the release date for the program.
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2020
Amazon AWS Challenge to Microsoft JEDI Win Reported
March 27, 2020
If you follow the grudge match between Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, you may be interested in “AWS Charges Pentagon Wants to Give Microsoft a Do-Over on Contested JEDI Bid.” The article states:
In a court filing made public today, Amazon Web Services Inc. is charging that the Pentagon is unfairly favoring rival Microsoft Corp. as part of its reevaluation of the JEDI contract.
The today is March 24, 2020.
The article quotes the document as saying:
“Offerors would be able to change only the services they proposed for Price Scenario 6, and would not be allowed to adjust the unit prices and discounts for those services.
Discriminatory? Maybe.
The article also quotes the document as saying:
“DoD provides no meaningful commitment to evaluate the other serious errors identified by AWS’s protest,” the company wrote. “Even if taken at face value, DoD’s proposed corrective action fails to address in any meaningful way how it would resolve the technical issues AWS has raised, or which specific technical challenges it intends to address.”
Stay tuned.
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2020
Microsoft Azure: A Capacity Problem?
March 27, 2020
In a conversation earlier this week, an expert in Microsoft Azure pointed out that Azure, despite its technical challenges, was pretty good at billing.
There are other challenges at Microsoft too. How about those Windows 10 updates, bugs, and delays?
The Register reports that there is another Microsoft hitch in the gitalong. “Azure Appears to Be Full” states:
Customers of Microsoft’s Azure cloud are reporting capacity issues such as the inability to create resources and associated reliability issues.
And what about Microsoft Teams, which is another attempt by Microsoft to pile more utensils in its digital kitchen sink. The article includes this paragraph:
Is it possible that resource capacity allocated to Teams is affecting customers of other kinds of resource? We have asked Microsoft for any information it can share and will report back.
Is Microsoft up to the task of becoming the go to vendor for the US government? Sure, good enough technology may be what the procurement system is designed to deliver.
But the company’s billing system seems to be working just fine.
PS: The Register is offering free job ads. For information, send email to regjobs@sitpub.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2020
Tech Embraces Ethics: A Borgias Play?
March 27, 2020
It looks like the tech industry is taking the concept of ethical AI seriously—or at least that is the optic a pair of the largest players seems to be going for. ITProPortal reports, “Vatican Teams Up with IBM and Microsoft on AI Ethics.” Will this solve problems like biased algorithms? I would not hold my breath. But I suppose bringing the Pope on board implies the industry is taking the matter Very Seriously. Writer Joel Khalili tells us:
“Executives from the two tech giants met senior officials from the Roman Catholic Church and signed a document entitled the Rome Call for Ethics, which calls for collaboration on ‘human-centered’ AI models.
Microsoft President Brad Smith, IBM Executive Vice President John Kelly and President of the Pontifical Academy for Life Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia were all signatories. According to the BBC, the initiative is designed to ensure humans are placed at the heart of new technologies. The document calls for AI models to be crafted with ‘our common and shared home and its human inhabitants’ in mind.”
Though Pope Francis bowed out of the conference due to illness, he did release an official statement:
“There is a political dimension to the production and use of artificial intelligence…In other words, it is not enough simply to trust in the moral sense of researchers and developers of devices and algorithms. The ethical development of algorithms can be a bridge enabling [a clear ethical framework] to enter concretely into digital technologies through an effective cross-disciplinary dialogue.”
Saying they hope to launch a fresh conversation on ethics in tech, Microsoft and IBM have urged other companies to join them in this initiative. Yep, ethics.
Cynthia Murrell, March 27, 2020
Clearview: More Tradecraft Exposed
March 26, 2020
After years of dancing around the difference between brain dead products like enterprise search, content management, and predictive analytics, anyone can gain insight into the specialized software provided by generally low profile companies. Verint is publicly traded. Do you know what Verint does? Sure, look it up on Bing or Google.
I read with some discomfort “I Got My File From Clearview AI, and It Freaked Me Out.”
Here are some factoids from the write up. Are these true? DarkCyber assumes that everything the team sees on the Internet meets the highest standards of integrity, objectivity, and truthiness. DarkCyber’s comments are in italic:
- “Someone really has been monitoring nearly everything you post to the public internet. And they genuinely are doing “something” with it. The someone is Clearview AI. And the something is this: building a detailed profile about you from the photos you post online, making it searchable using only your face, and then selling it to government agencies and police departments who use it to help track you, identify your face in a crowd, and investigate you — even if you’ve been accused of no crime.”
- “Clearview AI was founded in 2017. It’s the brainchild of Australian entrepreneur Hoan Ton-That and former political aide Richard Schwartz. For several years, Clearview essentially operated in the shadows.”
- “The Times, not usually an institution prone to hyperbole, wrote that Clearview could “end privacy as we know it.” [This statement is a reference to a New York Times intelware article. The New York Times continues to hunt for real news that advances an agenda of “this stuff is terrible, horrible, unconstitutional, pro anything the NYT believes in, etc.”]
- “the company [Clearview] scrapes public images from the internet. These can come from news articles, public Facebook posts, social media profiles, or multiple other sources. Clearview has apparently slurped up more than 3 billion of these images.” [The images are those which are available on the Internet and possibly from other sources; for example, commercial content vendors.]
- “The images are then clustered together which allows the company to form a detailed, face-linked profile of nearly anyone who has published a picture of themselves online (or has had their face featured in a news story, a company website, a mug shot, or the like).” [This is called enrichment, context, or machine learning indexing and — heaven help DarkCyber — social graphs or semantic relationships. Jargon varies according to fashion trends.]
- “Clearview packages this database into an easy-to-query service (originally called Smartcheckr) and sells it to government agencies, police departments, and a handful of private companies….As of early 2020, the company had more than 2,200 customers using its service.” [DarkCyber wants to point out that law enforcement entities are strapped for cash, and many deals are little more than proofs-of-concept. Some departments cycle through policeware and intelware in order to know what the systems do versus what the marketing people say the systems do. Big difference? Yep, yep.]
- “Clearview’s clients can upload a photo of an unknown person to the system. This can be from a surveillance camera, an anonymous video posted online, or any other source.”
- “In a matter of seconds, Clearview locates the person in its database using only their face. It then provides their complete profile back to the client.”
Now let’s look at what the write up reported that seemed to DarkCyber to be edging closer to “real news.”
This is the report the author obtained:
The article reports that the individual who obtained this information from Clearview was surprised. DarkCyber noted this series of statements:
The depth and variety of data that Clearview has gathered on me is staggering. My profile contains, for example, a story published about me in my alma mater’s alumni magazine from 2012, and a follow-up article published a year later. It also includes a profile page from a Python coders’ meet up group that I had forgotten I belonged to, as well as a wide variety of posts from a personal blog my wife and I started just after getting married. The profile contains the URL of my Facebook page, as well as the names of several people with connections to me, including my faculty advisor and a family member (I have redacted their information and images in red prior to publishing my profile here).
The write up includes commentary on the service, its threats to individual privacy, and similar sentiments.
DarkCyber’s observations include:
- Perhaps universities could include information about applications of math, statistics, and machine learning in their business and other courses? At a lecture DarkCyber gave at the University of Louisville in January 2019, cluelessness among students and faculty was the principal takeaway for the DarkCyber team.
- Clearview’s technology is not unique, nor is it competitive with the integrated systems available from other specialized software vendors, based on information available to DarkCyber.
- The summary of what Clearview does captures information that would have been considered classified and may still be considerate classified in some countries.
- Clearview does not appear to have video capability like other vendors with richer, more sophisticated technology.
Why did DarkCyber experience discomfort? Some information is not — at this time or in the present environment — suitable for wide dissemination. A good actor with technical expertise can become a bad actor because the systems and methods are presented in sufficient detail to enable certain activities. Knowledge is power, but knowledge in the hands of certain individuals can yield unexpected consequences. DarkCyber is old fashioned and plans to stay that way.
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2020
Fours Hours to Learn IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure. Believe It or Not. Hint: Not
March 26, 2020
DarkCyber believes that online instructional videos are useful. However, DarkCyber believes that overstatement, hyperbole, and general buzzword craziness undermine the credibility of those offering a program.
An excellent example of basic marketing information packaged like a six figure F.P. Journe Tourbillon Souverain Vertical watch, navigate to “Machine Learning with Watson and Azure.” You can download a four hour chunk of video which presents 20 lectures. That works out to 12 minute videos at which time, you
would be able to develop and deploy your applications over IBM Cloud- Bluemix. and having command over the Watson services and tools available.
Now what will you learn? Here’s the line up:
- Cognitive Computing and how Watson changes the game
- Using Watson Visual Recognition to tag and classify visual content using machine learning
- Capabilities of the Watson API and how to choose the best features for your task
- Using Watson Assistant to build an AI assistant (ChatBot)
- Using Watson Watson Discovery to unlock hidden values to find answers , monitor trends and surface patterns
- Using Watson Natural Language Understanding for advanced text analysis
- Using Watson Knowledge Studio to discover meaningful insights in unstructured text.
- Using Watson Speech to Text to easily convert audio and voice into written text
- Using Watson Text to Speech to convert text into natural-surrounding audio
- Using Watson Language Translator to translate from one language to another
- Using Watson Natural Language Classifier to interpret and classify natural language with confidence
- Using Watson Personality Insights to predict personality characteristics through text
- Using Watson Tone Analyzer to understand emotions and communications style in text
- Text Analytics
- Detecting Language
- Analyze image and video
- Recognition handwritten from text
- Generate Thumbnail
- Content Moderator
- Custom Vision
- Translate
But wait!
The programs will also explain Microsoft Azure services; for example:
- Computer Vision
- Content Moderator
- Custom Vision
- Text Analysis
- Translator.
You will not need an IBM account, but you will need a Microsoft Azure account.
This seems like an interesting program. Perhaps the overselling contributes to some of IBM’s more interesting deployments?
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2020
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