Flaws in the Peer Review System
June 2, 2015
The article titled Does Peer Review Do More Harm Than Good? on Maclean’s explores the issues facing today’s peer review system. Peer review is the process of an expert looking over a scientific paper before it is published in order to double check the findings. It is typically unpaid and as a result, can take a long time. In an effort to solve the wait time problem, some journals started offering “fast tracking” or a hefty fee that would guarantee a quick turnaround for peer review. The article quotes Professor Alex Holcombe on the subject,
“It ran contrary to many of the scientific values that I hold dear,” says Holcombe, “which is: What appears in scientific journals is determined not by money, but rather the merit of the actual science.” He says fast-tracking is a formula for taking shortcuts—such tight timelines may force reviewers and editors to make decisions without proper scrutiny—and worries it will jeopardize reviewers’ neutrality.”
The article goes on to compare peer review to democracy- the best of all evils. But now predatory journals are posing as legitimate academic journals in an attempt to get money out of desperate-to-publish scientists. Not only is this exploitative, it also leads to bad science getting published. For scientists, the discrepancies may be obvious, but the article points out that journalists and politicians might not know the difference, leading to the spread of “crackpot views” without a base in science.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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Loon Balloon: Ups and Downs
June 1, 2015
I think the idea of a search vendor creating balloons to extend Internet access is a swell idea. I would prefer a bit more effort on relevance, precision, and recall, but balloons are good. Two items snagged my semi buoyant attention while catching up on my reading yesterday.
The first concerns an alleged Loon dégonfle as reported in “Google’s Solar-Powered Internet Drone Crashes During Test Flight.” The write up states:
Google has confirmed that a prototype solar-powered drone intended to one day provide Internet access from way up in the sky crashed earlier this month during a test flight in New Mexico. The unmanned Solara 50 built by Titan Aerospace, the company Google bought last year, crashed on May 1 shortly after takeoff at a test field east of Albuquerque. The incident was first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed Friday by Google.
Google i/o was history when I first noticed the story.
The second Loon item I noted was “Google Details New Project Loon Tech to Keep Its Internet Balloons Afloat.” The article highlights two improvements in the Loon balloons:
First, balloons will be autolaunched. Coming down, at this time, may be automatic.
Second, Google engineers “have devised a way to pass high-frequency Internet signals from balloon to balloon in midair, which allows individual balloons to roam 400 kilometers to 800 kilometers away from a ground station.”
Yep, balloons, as I recall from my callow youth, drift.
I highlighted this passage, which does not suggest relevance will be improved with the launch of balloons:
By the end of the year, Cassidy [a Google wizard] hopes to be able to provide a few days of continuous service in its tests. So far during trials in Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Brazil, and other countries, Google has succeeded only in providing intermittent access before the wind carries a balloon off. If it can overcome the remaining challenges, Cassidy is hoping to roll out the service more widely by the end of 2016 and is looking at underserved Internet markets such as Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia as the best places to start.
No mention of improved search results, however.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2015
Russian High Tech Propaganda
June 1, 2015
The Soviet Union was known for its propaganda, and Russia under Vladimir Putin seems to have brought the art into the digital age. The Guardian gives us the inside scoop in, “Salutin’ Putin: Inside a Russian Troll House.” Journalists spoke to two writers who were formerly among the hundreds working at the nondescript headquarters of Russia’s “troll army” in St Petersburg. There, writers are tasked with lauding Putin and lambasting the evils of the West in posts and comment sections on a wide variety of websites. Though the organization cannot be directly tied to the Kremlin, it’s reported the entity does not pay any taxes and does not register its employees. It does, however, seem to have grown heartily in the two years since Russia went (back) into the Ukraine.
It is said that working conditions at the “troll house” involve 12-hour shifts, a dreary environment, strict rules, and low pay, though that sounds no different from conditions in many jobs around the world. Workers describe writing a certain number of “ordinary posts” about things like music, travel, or dating advice; writers are responsible for coming up with those topics themselves. Interspersed with such bland content, however, they write pieces asserting political perspectives assigned to them each morning. Editors check carefully to make sure the stories are on point.
I’d recommend reading through the whole article, but this is the section that struck me most:
“‘I would go home at the end of the day and see all the same news items on the television news. It was obvious that the decisions were coming from somewhere,’ said Marat. Many people have accused Russian television of ramping up propaganda over the past 18 months in its coverage of Ukraine, so much so that the EU even put Dmitry Kiselev, an opinionated television host and director of a major news agency, on its sanctions list.
“After two months of working in the troll agency, Marat began to feel he was losing his sanity, and decided he had to leave. From the snatched conversations over coffee, he noted that the office was split roughly 50/50 between people who genuinely believed in what they were doing, and those who thought it was stupid but wanted the money. Occasionally, he would notice people changing on the job.
“‘Of course, if every day you are feeding on hate, it eats away at your soul. You start really believing in it. You have to be strong to stay clean when you spend your whole day submerged in dirt,’ he said.”
Sounds like some people I know who always have a certain U.S. news channel blasting away in the background. Writer Shaun Walker is unsure whether the site they found in St Petersburg is the only location for this activity, or whether there are other hubs throughout Russia. The effectiveness of such propaganda on Russian citizens, however, seems clear to Russian journalist Andrei Soshnikov (quoted in the article), especially with the older, less tech-savvy set. As disheartening as these revelations are, they should not be surprising.
Cynthia Murrell, June 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Free Book from OpenText on Business in the Digital Age
May 27, 2015
This is interesting. OpenText advertises their free, downloadable book in a post titled, “Transform Your Business for a Digital-First World.” Our question is whether OpenText can transform their own business; it seems their financial results have been flat and generally drifting down of late. I suppose this is a do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do situation.
The book may be worth looking into, though, especially since it passes along words of wisdom from leaders within multiple organizations. The description states:
“Digital technology is changing the rules of business with the promise of increased opportunity and innovation. The very nature of business is more fluid, social, global, accelerated, risky, and competitive. By 2020, profitable organizations will use digital channels to discover new customers, enter new markets and tap new streams of revenue. Those that don’t make the shift could fall to the wayside. In Digital: Disrupt or Die, a multi-year blueprint for success in 2020, OpenText CEO Mark Barrenechea and Chairman of the Board Tom Jenkins explore the relationship between products, services and Enterprise Information Management (EIM).”
Launched in 1991, OpenText offers tools for enterprise information management, business process management, and customer experience management. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company maintains offices around the world.
Cynthia Murrell, May 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
SharePoint Server 2016 Brings Along Deprecated Software
May 26, 2015
As SharePoint Server 2016 gets closer to a release date, experts turn their attention to its various components. Along with those that are getting an update to accompany the new release, there are several pieces of deprecated software that will come along for the ride. Read the details in the Redmond Magazine article, “SharePoint Server 2016 To Rely on Some ‘Deprecated’ Software.”
The article begins:
“SharePoint Server 2016 will arrive with a deprecated InfoPath 2013 forms creation technology. In addition SharePoint Server 2016 will require Windows Server AppFabric 1.1, which also is being deprecated. Per Microsoft’s definition, ‘deprecated’ software can continue to work. It doesn’t exactly mean that the software is dead product. It just means that Microsoft won’t perform any further development work on it.”
Keep an eye on these and other components that may cause a hiccup at the time of upgrade, or further down the road. Also, stay tuned to ArnoldIT.com for workarounds, tips, and tricks to help ease the transition to Server 2016. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and an interested party in SharePoint. His SharePoint feed is a concise and professional rundown of need-to-know information.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Computing Power Up a Trillion Fold in 60 Years. Search Remains Unchanged.
May 25, 2015
I get the Moore’s Law thing. The question is, “Why isn’t search and content processing improving?”
Navigate to “Processing Power Has Increased by One Trillion-Fold over the Past Six Decades” and check out the infographic. There are FLOPs and examples of devices which deliver them. I focused on the technology equivalents; for example, the Tianhe 2 Supercomputer is the equivalent of 18,400 PlayStation 4s.
The problem is that search and content processing continue to bedevil users. Perhaps the limitations of the methods cannot be remediated by a bigger, faster assemblage of metal and circuits?
The improvement in graphics is evident. But allowing me to locate a single document in my multi petabyte archive continues to a challenge. I have more search systems than the average squirrel in Harrod’s Creek.
Findability is creeping along. After 60 years, the benefits of information access systems are very difficult to tie to better decisions, increased revenues, and more efficient human endeavors even when a “team of teams” approach is used.
Wake up call for the search industry. Why not deliver some substantive improvements in information access which are not tied to advertising? Please, do not use the words metadata, semantics, analytics, and intelligence in your marketing. Just deliver something that provides me with the information I require without my having to guess key words, figure out odd ball clustering, or waiting minutes or hours for a query to process.
I don’t want Hollywood graphics. I want on point information. In the last 60 years, my information access needs have not been met.
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2015
A Bigger, Faster, Better Technology Innovation Pipeline: Think Corporate Funding of R&D
May 24, 2015
I read the opinion piece by MIT president Rafael Reif. This item appeared in Mr. Bezos’ pet newspaper, the Washington Post. You can find a version of the editorial in the MIT News. Dr. Reif is, if Wikipedia is spot on, on the board of Alcoa. He also has invented “Method of forming a multi-layer semiconductor structure having a seamless bonding interface” and more than a dozen other systems and methods. You can get the biographical details in Wikipedia and on the MIT Office of the President’s Web site. Neither of these sources reference, as far as I could tell, “Trendy Reif Strikes Again” and this selfie:
The write up points out:
Together, the public and private sectors make investments in higher education and scientific research. (LiquiGlide emerged from research funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department.) These investments spawn graduates and ideas that, through venture-capital-funded start-ups, pay off in innovations that serve society: the ultimate return on investment.
Okay, corporate funded academic research. The approach is a bit different from the now out moded Bell Labs’s angle of attack. But corporate funding generates some nifty architecture, even niftier piles of money to use for various purposes, and some nifty opportunities for the students and faculty.
There is a downside. I was surprised to learn:
But this system leaves a category of innovation stranded: new ideas based on new science. Self-fertilizing plants. Bacteria that can synthesize biofuels. Safe nuclear energy technology. Affordable desalination at scale. It takes time for new-science technologies to make the journey from lab to market, often including time to invent new manufacturing processes. It may take 10 years, which is longer than most venture capitalists can wait. The result? As a nation, we leave a lot of innovation ketchup in the bottle.
What?
The problem has to be addressed. I assume that a hamburger without ketchup is not going to keep the conscientious, serious students and their mentors on the beam. MIT has to produce innovation. If ketchup is in the bottle, we need a vacuum device equipped with artificial intelligence and next generation features which perform non chaotic bottle maneuvers to remove the condiment while reporting data in real time. Yes.
What the fix?
There are two—count ‘em—two ways to tackle ketchup left in the bottle problems.
- Do the corporate funding of schools like MIT. That one percent silliness does not apply to academic institutions near the Charles River.
- Move faster. Hey, that nuclear bomb development which dragged on for a decade, old fashioned. We need to accelerate innovation.
The assumption is that innovation is the way to fix the challenges in today’s world. Nothing works, its seems, unless we have more, better, faster technology.
The only problem is that certain technologies like search and information access are not improving. I can identify a couple of other technological enhancements which are not having the desired impact. I wrote about the attention span of a goldfish and a 20 something.
The goldfish had the ability to concentrate for a longer period of time. MIT and other techno-havens are ecosystems. I lived in central Illinois in the winter. When I was a freshman in high school in 1958 I created a terrarium and grew some of the plants which overran my mother’s garden in Campinas, Brazil, before we returned to America.
I got the plants to thrive. I had a glass walled box that was just like Brazil until I left the lid off one day. The plants died. Whatever lived in the terrarium probably assumed the real world of Illinois in January was just like a tropical clime.
Bzzzz. Wrong.
Stephen E Arnold, May 24, 2015
Is Collaboration the Key to Big Data Progress?
May 22, 2015
The article titled Big Data Must Haves: Capacity, Compute, Collaboration on GCN offers insights into the best areas of focus for big data researchers. The Internet2 Global Summit is in D.C. this year with many exciting panelists who support the emphasis on collaboration in particular. The article mentions the work being presented by several people including Clemson professor Alex Feltus,
“…his research team is leveraging the Internet2 infrastructure, including its Advanced Layer 2 Service high-speed connections and perfSONAR network monitoring, to substantially accelerate genomic big data transfers and transform researcher collaboration…Arizona State University, which recently got 100 gigabit/sec connections to Internet2, has developed the Next Generation Cyber Capability, or NGCC, to respond to big data challenges. The NGCC integrates big data platforms and traditional supercomputing technologies with software-defined networking, high-speed interconnects and visualization for medical research.”
Arizona’s NGCC provides the essence of the article’s claims, stressing capacity with Internet2, several types of computing, and of course collaboration between everyone at work on the system. Feltus commented on the importance of cooperation in Arizona State’s work, suggesting that personal relationships outweigh individual successes. He claims his own teamwork with network and storage researchers helped him find new potential avenues of innovation that might not have occurred to him without thoughtful collaboration.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 22, 2014
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Long-term Plans for SharePoint
May 21, 2015
Through all the iterations of SharePoint, it seems that Microsoft has wised up and is finally giving customers more of what they want. The release of SharePoint Server 2016 shows a shift back toward on-premises installations, and yet there will still be functions supported through the cloud. This new hybrid emphasis provides a third pathway through which users are experiencing SharePoint. The CMS Wire article, “3 SharePoint Paths for the Next 10 Years,” covers all the details.
The article begins:
“Microsoft Office 365 has proven to be a major disruption of how companies use SharePoint to meet business requirements. Rumors, fear, uncertainty and doubt proliferate around Microsoft’s plans for SharePoint’s future releases, as well as the support of critical features and functionality companies rely on . . . So, taking into account Office 365, the question is: How will companies be using SharePoint over the next 10 years?”
Stephen E. Arnold of ArnoldIT.com is a leader in SharePoint, with a lifelong career in search. His SharePoint feed is a great resource for users and managers alike, or anyone who needs to keep on top of the latest developments. It may be that the hybrid solution is a way to keep on-premises users happy while they still benefit from the latest cloud functions like Delve and OneDrive.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Developing an NLP Semantic Search
May 15, 2015
Can you imagine a natural language processing semantic search engine? It would be a lovely tool to use in your daily routines and make research a bit easier. If you are working on such a project and are making a progress, keep at that startup because this is lucrative field at the moment. Over at Stack Overflow, an entrepreneuring spirit is trying to develop a “Semantic Search With NLP And Elasticsearch”:
“I am experimenting with Elasticsearch as a search server and my task is to build a “semantic” search functionality. From a short text phrase like “I have a burst pipe” the system should infer that the user is searching for a plumber and return all plumbers indexed in Elasticsearch.
Can that be done directly in a search server like Elasticsearch or do I have to use a natural language processing (NLP) tool like e.g. Maui Indexer. What is the exact terminology for my task at hand, text classification? Though the given text is very short as it is a search phrase.”
Given that this question was asked about three years ago, a lot has been done not only with Elasticsearch, but also NLP. Search is moving towards a more organic experience, but accuracy is often muddled by different factors. These include the quality of the technology, classification, taxonomies, ads in results, and even keywords (still!).
NLP semantic search is closer now than it was three years ago, but technology companies would invest a lot of money in a startup that can bridge the gap between natural language and machine learning.
Whitney Grace, May 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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