Academic Publication Rights Cause European Dispute
September 4, 2017
Being published is the bread and butter of intellectuals, especially academics. publication, in theory, is a way for information to be shared across the globe, but it also has become big business. In a recent Chemistry World article the standoff between Germany’s Project DEAL (a consortium comprised of German universities) and Dutch publisher, Elsevier, is examined along with possible fall-out from the end result.
At the heart of the dispute is who controls the publications. Currently, Elsevier holds the cards and has wielded their power to make a clear point on the matter. Project DEAL, though, is not going down without a fight and Chemistry World quotes Horst Hippler, a physical chemist and chief negotiator for Project DEAL, as saying,
In the course of digitisation, science communication is undergoing a fundamental transformation process. Comprehensive, free and – above all – sustainable access to scientific publications is of immense importance to our researchers. We therefore will actively pursue the transformation to open access, which is an important building block in the concept of open science. To this end, we want to create a fair and sustainable basis through appropriate licensing agreements with Elsevier and other scientific publishers.
As publications are moving farther from ink and paper and more to digital who owns the rights to the information is becoming murkier. It will be interesting to see how this battle plays out and if any more disgruntled academics jump on board.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 4, 2017
Google Bashing: Two Fresh Sidewinders Launch
September 3, 2017
Here in Harrods Creek, we love the Google. The Google bashing, it seems to us near the pond filled with mine drainage, is adopting a new tactic. We call it the sidewinder. Quick and erratic, the new attack may catch the Google by surprise.
The write up “YouTube Video Captions Are More Accurate If You’re White” touches a broken tooth. The idea is that auto generated text explanation and some metadata are biased. The idea that allegedly objective functions manifest biases is an extension of the argument that if algorithms are created by humans, those human creations can reflect the biases of their creators. How does one prove that algorithms which are not easy to parse delivered non objective results? That is a challenge, isn’t it? How will Google respond to this allegation?
The race card article asserts:
But when it came to race, both YouTube and Bing were more accurate when captioning Caucasian speakers than any other race. “The fact that they are recognized with more errors is most likely due to bias in the training data,” she wrote..
We note that Bing has the same “problem,” but the Microsofties are not associated with the “math is it” approach promulgated by Google technical papers and PR as the Google. If this type of racial argument pgets traction, life could get more exciting for the GOOG.
The seocnd tactic seems to surface in a write up not focused on Google. “Silicon Valley Has Been Humbled. But Its Schemes Are As Dangerous As Ever.” The approach here is to assert that the state of mind “Silicon Valley” has become an ideological junk yard. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The reality may ot line up with the assertion, but for making life tough for the Googley, the assertion is at least plausible.
The write up points out:
An industry once hailed for fueling the Arab spring is today repeatedly accused of abetting Islamic State. An industry that prides itself on diversity and tolerance is now regularly in the news for cases of sexual harassment as well as the controversial views of its employees on matters such as gender equality. An industry that built its reputation on offering us free things and services is now regularly assailed for making other things – housing, above all – more expensive.
Care to try to explain these allegations which seem like “factoids” away? Tough job.
The write up asks:
how could one possibly expect a bunch of rent-extracting enterprises with business models that are reminiscent of feudalism to resuscitate global capitalism and to establish a new New Deal that would constrain the greed of capitalists, many of whom also happen to be the investors behind these firms?
I admire “have you stopped beating your dog” questions.
Now these sidewinder attacks are used to question Google’s objectivity and damning the company because it is a keystone of the Silicon Valley’s fragile arch.
Despite our backwoods understanding of these big city issues, we surmise that more sidewinder tactics will be fired against a company we embrace, nay, love. A “star wars defense” is needed. And fast even inInternet time.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2017
Demonizing the Ever Helpful Alaphabet Google XXVI Things
September 2, 2017
Gentle reader, I am horrified at the indirect vilification of my beloved Alphabet Google XXVI things. You must judge for yourself. Navigate to “A Serf on Google’s Farm.” A serf, as I understand the term is a person who is in thrall to a noble. The noble provides the land, and the serf the labor. As our modern world embraces the precepts of the Great Chain of Being, serfs are below the one percent. Thus, it is. In the Dark Ages, one did not grouse too much about the one percent. Bad things could happen because that was the mechanism for the Great Chain of Being. It was a perception that the top spot was occupied by a deity. The lower levels were ranked by their station in life. In short, it was and is good to be up near the top of the pecking order.
The write up makes clear that publishers find themselves lower in the Great Chain of Digital Being than they were in the pre-Google era. Yep, when the king disowned an annoying son, life was not as good outside the castle as it was inside the castle.
Publisher types are now looking at the castle from the mud and straw vantage points close to the pigs and chickens. Big change. The trip to the castle may have been short in terms of steps but long in terms of the Great Chain of Being.
The article points out that Google has put publishers and related content types in the squalid hovels built near the castle walls. Life can be fun when the wine and mead are available, and the harvest is good. But at other times, those lice and muddy lanes were a bummer.
The write up points out that the Google has assembled an advertising Catch 22. Get with the program and you may be squeezed by the program. Thus it was for serfs and thus it is for those who have little choice but accept Google’s way of life.
I noted three statements which characterize the world as perceived by a digital serf:
- as the adage puts it, if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product. Google isn’t doing us any favors. We get these services for free because Google’s empire and the vast amounts of money it brings in every year is built on the unimaginable amounts of data that come from, among other places, DoubleClick for Publishers and Analytics. We’re [the article author’s company] just one of a kabillion [sic] sites allowing Google to harvest our data.
- Running TPM [the article author’s company] absent Google’s various services is almost unthinkable. Like I literally would need to give it a lot of thought how we’d do without all of them. Some of them are critical and I wouldn’t know where to start for replacing them. In many cases, alternatives don’t exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free.
- And in general Google tends to be a relatively benign overlord….Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices.
My view is that the Google has been operating in a consistent manner since it was inspired by the Yahoo, GoTo, Overture pay to play model. That shift from better Web search to the ad thing took place before the Google initial public offering. That works out to 13 years ago.
In that span of time, publishers wanted the world to be like the good old days of print which put the publishers in the role of gatekeepers and power brokers. Nice try, but publishers were unable to adapt to the Googley world. Just like the hapless retail giants, the failure to take advantage of digital opportunities has put Sears, JC Penny, and other “giants” outside the castle walls. Wattle, not Walmart, is the go to operating model.
Forget Google. Had there been no Google, another outfit would have filled the void. Google is a reflection of today’s version of the Middle Ages.
Do I feel sorry for traditional publishers? Nope. These outfits embrace systems and methods like XML, slicing and dicing, and surfing on Google as the skateboard wheels that will carry them to the future.
The wheels spin but don’t win X Games competitions.
Now Google itself is vulnerable. There is Facebook, the Chinese outfits, and the Bezos transformer machine. Perhaps publishers should think about ways to exploit Google’s flaws instead of grousing about Google being Google for 13 years. The Alphabet Google XXVI things are not likely to change their stripes overnight.
Publishers might find life easier if they quit complaining and name calling. Meeting user needs might be a path forward. But Google bashing is so easy and so much fun. Figuring out how to make money is work. Who wants to do that?
Stephen E Arnold, September 2, 2017
Google and Information: Another Aberration or Genuine Insight??
September 1, 2017
I read “Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me.” How many “damore” of these allegations, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations will flow into my monitoring systems? It appears that a person who once labored for Forbes, the capitalist tool, is combining memory, the methods of Malcolm Gladwell, and a surfboard ride on the anti-Google wave.
The write up recounts this recollection of conversations with marketing and PR people, allegedly real, live Googlers:
I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes. After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google. With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting.
If accurate, the method of determining search results runs counter to the information I presented in the Google Legacy,* which I wrote in 2003. In that monograph, I tallied about 100 “signals” that Google used to provide data to its objective algorithm for determining the importance of hits in a results list.
As part of my research for that monograph, I read patent documents stuffed with interesting discussions of what was wrong with certain approaches to search and retrieval issues. (You can find some juicy factoids in the discussion of the background of an invention. The pre-2007 Google patent documents strike me as more informative than Google’s most recent patent documents, but that’s just my opinion.) I recall that Google went to great lengths to explain the objectivity of the methods. I pointed out that judgment was involved in Google’s ranking methods because humans selected which numerical recipes to use and what threshold settings to use for certain procedures. In my lectures about the exploitable “holes” in the most common numerical recipes used by Google and other, the machine-based methods could be fiddled. But overall, the Google was making clear that automation for cost reduction and efficiency was more important than human editorial fiddling.
If the statement extracted from the Gizmodo write up is accurate, Google seems to have machine-based methods, but these can be used by humans to add the lieutenant’s favorite foods to the unit’s backpacks.
The Gizmodo article reveals:
Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn’t been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.
With this non algorithmic interaction, the Gizmodo story depicts Google as a frisky outfit indeed. The objective system can be punitive. Really?
When I step back from this bit of “real” reporting, enlivened with the immediacy of an anecdote which seems plausible, I am thinking about the disconnect between my analysis is the Google Legacy and the events in the Gizmodo story.
Several questions arise:
- If the story is accurate, how “correct” are other articles about Google? Perhaps Google influenced many stories so that the person doing research is working with a stacked deck?
- If I assume that my research was correct in the 2002 to 2003 period when I was actively compiling data for the Google Legacy, what has caused this “objective method” to morph into a tool suitable for intimidation? If the shift did happen, what management actions at Google allowed objective methods to relax their grip?
- Why, after 20 years, are “real” news organizations now running stories about Google’s power, its machinations, and the collateral damage from Google employees who are far removed from the messy cubicles and Foosball games among Google’s elite engineers? Hey, those smart people were the story. Now it is the behavior of sales and public relations types who are making news? What’s this say about “news”? What’s this say about Google?
My hunch is that a large, 20 year old company is very different from the outfit that hired folks from AltaVista, refugees from Bell Labs, and assorted wizards whose life’s work was of interest to 50 people at an ACM special interest group.
Perhaps the problem is a result of Google’s adding people with degrees in art history and political science? There may even be one or two failed middle school teachers among Google’s non technical staff. Imagine. Liberal arts or education majors in Google satellite offices. I can conjure a staff meeting which involves presentations with low contrast slides, not the wonky drawings that Jeff Dean once favored in his lectures about Big Table.
Google’s staffing has shifted over the years from 99 percent engineers and scientists to a more “balanced” blend of smart people. (I don’t want to say “watered down”, however.) One possibility is that these “stories” about the Google’s alleged punitive actions may be less about the Google technical system and methods and more about what happens when hiring policies change and the firms’ technical past is lost in the haze of success.
Could Google’s sales, marketing, and PR professionals, not the engineers and scientists, are the problem? The fix is easy. More math, more algorithms, more smart software. Does Google need staff who can be easily be categorized as “overhead”? I want to think about this question.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2017
* If you want a pre publication copy of the Google Legacy from 2003, just write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. Something can be worked out. Yes, this monograph still sells, just slowly.
Microsoft and Open Source Software: Cost Cutting Tactic or a RedHat Type Play
September 1, 2017
Short honk: We were delighted to read “Windows 10: New Feature Sees Microsoft Blur the Line between Windows and Linux.” The write up explains that Windows allows a person to move outputs to a Linux distribution.
Few have covered Microsoft’s dalliance with Solr and the increased interest in using open source software to reduce development costs at Microsoft.
I suppose that’s understandable. The new president is not giving talks about following in the footsteps of IBM which has based dear old Watson on Lucene, home brew code, and technology from acquisitions.
Open source is an easy way to reduce development costs, keep pace with the innovations from the “community,” and free up time for marketing and sales.
Microsoft is becoming a close cousin to IBM, complete with major league strike outs like the Windows phone adventure.
A more significant misperception appears in the write up. I noted this passage:
The Free Software Foundation Europe, has previously said Microsoft’s gradual acceptance of Linux is a compliment, and a net gain for the Free Software movement.
Microsoft’s enthusiasm for some open source technology may be a precursor of Microsoft’s getting in the open source software business, emulating or duplicating the business models of RedHat and Elastic (the Elasticsearch folks).
Worth watching.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2017
Watson IBMs Only Chance at Avoiding Extinction
September 1, 2017
IBM is facing a massive problem as stock prices continue to drop – they aren’t relevant anymore. While new companies like Amazon and Facebook, along with fellow oldies Apple and Google, continue to grow in popularity and revenue, IBM is slowly but surely falling behind.
Forbes got straight to the point, recently, telling IBM to ‘go big or go home’. Their advice?
Rometty should aggressively rebrand IBM by simply naming it after the one thing in which IBM remains a market leader – Watson. All efforts in the cloud should be geared towards not just acting as a service provider but differentiating IBM by tailoring Watson’s services to the given client’s data so it can augment their decision-making. While they’re at it they can rename their cloud effort Watson Cloud.
Continuing with Forbes analysis of IBM’s situation, at the end of the day if the average millennial, I mean American, can’t use their AI technology in their day-to-day lives, they don’t care about it. The end. For IBM to catch up with the pack they must start routing their resources and attention to expanding Watson – and quickly.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 1, 2017
Former Google Employee Launches a New Kind of Search
September 1, 2017
We learn about a new approach to internet search from Business Insider’s piece, “Once Google’s Youngest Employee, this Woman Just Unveiled a New Search Company that Might Make Google Worried.” The new platform aims to cut through the traditional results list, which, depending on the search term(s), can take a lot of time to comb through. It also hopes to connect users to information that they didn’t know to search for. Reporter Caroline Cakebread writes:
Led by founder and CEO Falon Fatemi, Node emerged from stealth on Tuesday ready to take on its lofty goal of changing the way we discover information. By using AI to connect you or your business with the right opportunity at the right time, Node wants to ‘accelerate serendipity’ on the web. Node’s patent-pending technology works by indexing people, places, products, and companies instead of web pages, and using this data to connect customers to opportunities. So far, it has half a billion profiles. The AI understands the relationships between people and companies, and can marry its data layer with a customer’s personal data. Node is currently integrated with Salesforce, and customers can ask questions like ‘What company will be most interested in my product?’ Node will tell the customer who or what they need to connect with, why it came up with that answer, and even what to say to make the most of the opportunity. It’s searching without using a search box.
Node began as Fatemi’s personal project, and now her firm has raised $16.3 million in funding so far. She envisions her new tech as the “intelligence layer of the internet,” as Cakebread puts it, and believes any realm of life, from sales strategy to dating options, could benefit from this approach.
Fatemi started at Google while still in college. She wrote an article for Fast Company a couple years ago, “I Joined Google at 19. Here’s What I Learned,” in which she credits her time at Google with installing many of the qualities that have made her a successful entrepreneur. See that article for those lessons learned.
Cynthia Murrell, September 01, 2017
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