Scientific Data Going Going Gone
December 20, 2013
Years ago I did a report for a sci-tech database publisher. I wrote up the results of a number of on site visits at research universities. I reported that there was no mechanism to preserve researchers’ data. The reason was pretty obvious: Research facilities at universities are less important than sports teams, business activities, and fund raising. When the researcher moved on, the data just sat somewhere until there was a housecleaning or a hard drive wiped. If financial support disappeared, none of the facilities I visited had an old school records management system in place. If a researcher took the data with him or her, those data may or may not have been managed in a thoughtful way. On to the next grant, tally ho.
I was not surprised to read “Researchers Say Valuable Scientific Data Disappearing at Alarming Rate.” (If this link 404s you are on your own, you Google search experts, you.) Here’s the passage I noted:
While all data sets were available two years after publication, the odds of obtaining the underlying data dropped by 17 per cent per year after that, they reported.
So when did I do my report for the grand viziers at the sci-tech outfit? It was 1998. How about that data half life?
Why didn’t the database publishing company fund a program to archive research data? In my experience, the notion of capturing raw data was too far from the familiar path of summarizing articles and selling access to those summaries to libraries.
Too late now? Maybe. This is one more example of “if it is not available, how can one search for information and data”? Will the sci-tech database company remember my report and diagram? Nah. The familiar way is the better way I suppose.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2013
SharePoint Online Adoption is Slow
November 20, 2013
Although Office 365 SharePoint Online makes the enterprise fully accessible on the cloud, the latest research shows that users are slow to move away from the traditional server model. Redmond Magazine covers the story in their article, “Enterprises Slow To Move to SharePoint Online.”
The article states:
“Office 365 SharePoint Online use was at 15 percent among respondents, according to August 2013 survey results produced by Forrester. That result is up just 3 percentile points from last year’s survey. The survey found that 79 percent were using SharePoint Server 2010. The lag in online adoption has its roots in SharePoint being considered as an on-premises solution historically, but there are other concerns.”
Security may be on reason why organizations are keeping deployments on on-site servers, but the functionality of Office 365 is likely another. Enterprises are slow ships, hard to turn. According to Arnold IT, a leading search news service of Steven E. Arnold, another reason may be that for most organizations, SharePoint is not enough in and of itself. Add-ons keep most SharePoint deployments afloat, and most organizations probably aren’t ready to move so much content, with its patchwork approach to ECM.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 20, 2013
Social Media and News: Amazing Graphic
November 15, 2013
“News Use across Social Media Platforms” confirms what I have suspected for a while. The mobile generation has some interesting behavior patterns with regard to news. Among the factoids that the Pew outfit has boiled down to numbers are:
ITEM: YouTube viewers are not using the service to get news. Maybe that explains why experiments with Thomson Reuters proved to be somewhat disappointing.
ITEM: Google Plus is less popular than Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook as a source of news. The push back about Google Plus as a prerequisite for YouTube comments may have more importance than some realize.
ITEM: Facebook is an important source of news. As the demographics of Facebook shift, the importance of news may suggest that Facebook has morphed into a more mature service.
The most interesting “fact” in the report is the apparent importance of Reddit, a service which points to public posts on a range of issues. The Reddit service offers a search function, but I find consistently disappointing. In fact, most of the unusual collections of links and comments are essentially unfindable.
Another interesting facet of the report is the inclusion of some trendy graphics. The diagram below is my favorite.
In my opinion, the good news in the report appears in this passage:
Social media news consumers still get news from a variety of other sources and, in some cases, even more so than the general public does. YouTube, LinkedIn and Google Plus news consumers are more likely than Facebook and Twitter news consumers to watch cable news. Twitter news consumers are among the least likely to turn to local and cable TV. And nearly four-in-ten LinkedIn news consumers listen to news on the radio, compared to about a quarter of the general population.
For now, the digital services cannot celebrate total victory. Publishers of traditional news media live to fight another day. For now.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2013
Leading Publishers: Not What You Think
September 26, 2013
I took a look at the data in “Sensor Tower Publisher Worth Leaderboard – iOS – All-Categories”. Alas, there were no data about the methodology, the time period, or the criterion. Serious flaws, but the list is interesting. The list contains some suggestive information.
For example, the list does include game application developers, Facebook, and Google. There is only one property — ESPN — that I consider a traditional “publisher” but I have to stretch my own connotation of publisher to make ESPN a familiar face amongst the new kindergarten class.
Absent are folks like Bloomberg and Reuters. These are companies which have spent money on creating applications which provide these publishers with a channel to a mobile and tablet users. With the demise of NEXT (yet another Thomson Reuters’ new media initiative), I wonder if traditional publishers will make a Sensor Tower type list.
The list contains a large number of games along with outfits like Google. A few years ago, I wrote a monograph called Google: The Digital Gutenberg. Perhaps Google really is a publisher and not an online advertising company.
Assume the listing is accurate for a mobile/tablet demographic. The failure of a traditional publisher to crack the Top 40 underscores the rather disappointing results from the Herculean effort expended by publishers to remain in the game.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2013
The Way to Fail in San Jose
August 19, 2013
When reading the San Francisco Gate’s article, “San Jose State Suspends Online Courses” our immediate reaction was “ouch!” Many public universities in the US offer online courses as an alternative to traditional face-to-face education. San Jose University offered five online classes and more than half of the enrolled students failed them. In response, the university suspended classes for the time being to reevaluate. This does not mean San Jose University will stop offering online courses; it will just stop classes from Udacity. The failing classes were part of the “Massive Open Online Courses” strategy that incorporated major public universities to increase their online class offerings. These five failures set the plan back, but it is not deemed a waste:
“Despite the high failure rate, Sebastian Thrun, a researcher at Stanford University and Google Inc. who launched Udacity said valuable data and experience were gained from the effort, which will help improve future classes. ‘We are experimenting and learning. That to me is a positive,’ Thrun said. The school and Udacity plan to look into providing more information about the syllabus at the beginning of the class, so students are better informed about the requirements before committing. Officials also want to look at whether the online semester should be longer than traditional school terms to provide students with more flexibility.”
Most of the students in these classes were non-traditional students, working a job and little college experience, which is probably why they failed. It was a learning experience for both students and the university. Both are learning from their mistakes.
Whitney Grace, August 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Data Mining is Part of Online Experience
August 8, 2013
How much are we revealing of ourselves online? Every day we are hearing new information about how even the safest internet users are most likely wide open to spying. It’s hard to say what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden thought would happen, but the world’s reaction is probably pretty close. The NSA isn’t the only one peeking, as we learned in a recent TIME article, “This MIT Website Tracks Your Digital Footprint.”
According to the article about a program called Immersion:
Much like the government phone-surveillance programs, Immersion doesn’t need to access the content of communications. Instead, by gathering information about the senders and recipients of all the e-mails in an inbox, it can create a detailed portrait of the user’s social connections. Each person’s picture on Immersion is as unique as a fingerprint, but much more informative.
While, sure, we treasure our privacy as much as anyone, this news and the NSA fiasco isn’t really much of a bubble on our radar. Much like the President said it’s not really a huge deal. If anyone who spends a lot of time online thinks they have anything resembling privacy, we have a bridge we’d love to sell them.
Patrick Roland, August 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Free AIDS Research Available Online
July 12, 2013
The articles available on Taylor & Francis Online under the heading Highly Cited AIDS Research offer substantial insights into the most current AIDS knowledge. The journals cover everything from timelines, prevention information, geographical breakdowns of the spread of AIDS, studies on the perceptions of those diagnosed with AIDS in all different parts of the world, and even support, like the study titled Is It Just Me? Experiences of HIV Related Stigma. An example from one study titled AIDS Fatigue and University Students’ Talk About HIV Risk states in the abstract,
“Drawing on a qualitative study that included 20 focus group discussions with male and female students at an urban-based university in South Africa, this article reports on perceptions, attitudes and reported behaviour with respect to HIV and AIDS and safer sex in the campus setting, with an aim to better understand how young people are responding to the challenges of HIV and AIDS in contemporary South Africa. The findings demonstrate the gap between reported HIV-prevention knowledge and safer-sex practices among a group of young and educated South Africans.”
The difficulties surrounding AIDS treatment in developing countries has been well documented already, the daily schedule being thought insurmountable in places where the general population does not know the exact time throughout the day. Sharing information can only lead to more breakthroughs in the ability to treat victims of the disease and perhaps lower the social stigma as the world recognizes the extent of the infected population.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Not Safe For Work: How to Avoid Getting Caught Creeping Online
June 12, 2013
The article How to Navigate the Internet At Work on Daily Infographic explains the acronym NSFW (Not Safe For Work). You might have seen those letters in the past, they are used to caution against risqué links to websites and images that you might prefer to not be caught looking at (at work, or in public). With a handy dandy infographic, the article explains the circles of NSFW, like the rings of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Pornography, of course, sits at the center, as the least possible NSFW material. The article explains its logic from there,
“It can be a slippery slope of discretion as to what is safe. This infographic aims to alleviate that confusion. The center represents the heart of NSFW…pornography. Moving outward from the center the NSFW-ness declines with each ring. Outside the circle you have the IRS website and Propublica (a news source). Seemingly a little too ‘SFW’? Not too sure; but the rest of the infographic has a nice gradient from the boring to the time-suckers to the WTF kind of websites. “
Have another browser tab ready’ for quickly switching away from Youtube or tumblr is an example of the jocular circle titles. But what we still have questions. Will this type of search behavior have the desired effect? Will using these methods trigger scrutiny? We don’t know, and and the article is not telling us.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Furthering Free and Online Education
June 5, 2013
The Washington Post reports on a hot topic in education these days: online education. No, this recent article does not simply feature a rundown of online education courses, it delves into the next step: free online text books. The headline reads: “Coursera to Offer Students Free Online Textbooks, with Conditions.”
Coursera, of course, is one of the online providers offering free educational courses online. Textbooks are a logical next step. The have struck a partnership with several publishers to enable students to use certain textbooks for free while they take the courses. Publishers include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE and Wiley will be available through e-readers provided by Chegg.
The article states:
“Koller said the agreement will help instructors who felt restricted in what they could require students to read. She also said it will help publishers market full versions of their books to those interested in buying them. Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif., launched in April 2012, and the company has more than 3 million registered users. Along with edX and Udacity, it is one of the most prominent MOOC providers in a fast-emerging market. Cynthia L. Selfe, an English professor at Ohio State University, said the textbook agreement will benefit thousands who are taking a MOOC on Coursera that she teaches with a group of faculty.”
Does this article suggest that there are more challenges for traditional publishers or is this an opportunity for companies trying to grow and running out of options? The jump from $500 million to $1 billion is a big job.
Megan Feil, June 05, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Quote to Note: Digital Versus Paper
June 1, 2013
The Week section of the Wall Street Journal presents information which is amusing and up to the highest standards of journalistic accuracy. In the short piece “Paper, the Technological Tiger?” the juxtaposition of dead trees, endangered animals, and technology caught my attention. (A link to the digital version of the story is here, but it may be gone in a sort of self fulfilling and self documenting bit of newsiness.) Tucked into the write up which appeared on page C4 of the June 1, 2013, edition of the newspaper was this quote:
Paper documents can last hundreds of years, after all, but there’s still no proven way to preserve digital data beyond a few decades. The new research suggests that someday paper may become so smart that it won’t need any words at all.
What happened to the tiger? The Library of Congress is working on saving tweets. Isn’t that a promising sign?
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2013
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