Shorter Content Means Death for Scientific Articles
December 26, 2016
The digital age is a culture that subsists on digesting quick bits of information before moving onto the next. Scientific journals are hardly the herald of popular trends, but in order to maintain relevancy with audiences the journals are pushing for shorter articles. The shorter articles, however, presents a problem for the authors says Ars Technica in the, “Scientific Publishers Are Killing Research Papers.”
Shorter articles are also pushed because scientific journals have limited pages to print. The journals are also pressured to include results and conclusions over methods to keep the articles short. The methods, in fact, are usually published in another publication labeled supplementary information:
Supplementary information doesn’t come in the print version of journals, so good luck understanding a paper if you like reading the hard copy. Neither is it attached to the paper if you download it for reading later—supplementary information is typically a separate download, sometimes much larger than the paper itself, and often paywalled. So if you want to download a study’s methods, you have to be on a campus with access to the journal, use your institutional proxy, or jump through whatever hoops are required.
The lack of methodical information can hurt researchers who rely on the extra facts to see if it is relevant to their own work. The shortened articles also reference the supplementary materials and without them it can be hard to understand the published results. The shorter scientific articles may be better for general interest, but if they lack significant information than how can general audiences understand them?
In short, the supplementary material should be included online and should be easily accessed.
Whitney Grace, December 26, 2016
Neural-Net AI Service Echobox Manages Newspaper Presences on Social Media
November 18, 2016
An article at Bloomberg Technology, titled “It Took Robots for This French Newspaper to Conquer Twitter,” introduces Echobox, a startup that uses a neural-network approach to managing clients’ social media presences. The newspaper mentioned in the title is the esteemed Liberation, but Echobox also counts among its clients the French Le Monde, Argentinia’s La Nacion, and The Straits Times out of Singapore, among many others. Apparently, the site charges by the page view, though more pricing details are not provided. Writer Jeremy Kahn reports that Echobox:
… Determines the most opportune time to post a particular story to drive readership, can recommend what headline or tweet to send out, and can select the best photograph to illustrate the post. Using the software to post an average of 27 articles per day, Grainger [Liberation’s CTO] said that Liberation had seen a 37 percent increase in the number of people it reached on Facebook and a 42 percent boost in its reach on Twitter. ‘We have way more articles being seen by 100,000 people or more than before,’ Grangier said. He also said it made life easier for his digital editors, allowing them to spend more time curating the stories they wanted to publish to social media and less on the logistics of actually posting that content.
So, it seems like the service is working. Echobox’s CTO Marc Fletcher described his company’s goal—to create a system that could look at content from an editor’s point of view. The company tailors their approach to each customer, of course. There are competitors in the social-media-management space, like SocialFlow and Buffer, but Kahn says Echobox goes further. He writes:
Echobox professes to offer a fuller range of automation than those services, with its software able to alter a posting schedule to adjust to breaking news, posting content related to that event, and delaying publication of less relevant stories. Echobox uses a neural network, a type of machine learning that is designed to mimic the way parts of the human brain works. This system first learns the audience composition and reading habits for each publication and then makes predictions about the best way to optimize a particular story for social media. Over time, the predictions should get more accurate as it ‘learns’ the nuances of the brand’s audience.
This gives us one more example of how AI capabilities are being put to practical use. Founded in 2013, Echobox is based in London and maintains an office in New York City. The company also happens to be hiring as I write this.
Cynthia Murrell, November 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
No Microfiche Required
November 16, 2015
Longstanding publications are breathing new life into their archives by re-publishing key stories online, we learn from NiemanLab’s article, “Esquire Has a Cold: How the Magazine is Mining its Archives with the Launch of Esquire Classics.” We learn that Esquire has been posting older articles on their Esquire Classics website, timed to coincide with related current events. For example, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death last April, the site republished a 1968 article about his assassination.
Other venerable publications are similarly tapping into their archives. Writer Joseph Lichterman notes:
“Esquire, of course, isn’t the only legacy publication that’s taking advantage of archival material once accessible only via bound volumes or microfiche. Earlier this month, the Associated Press republished its original coverage of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 150 years ago…. Gawker Media’s Deadspin has The Stacks, which republishes classic sports journalism originally published elsewhere. For its 125th anniversary last year, The Wall Street Journal published more than 300 archival articles. The New York Times runs a Twitter account, NYT Archives, that resurfaces archival content from the Times. It also runs First Glimpses, a series that examines the first time famous people or concepts appeared in the paper.”
This is one way to adapt to the altered reality of publication. Perhaps with more innovative thinking, the institutions that have kept us informed for decades (or centuries) will survive to deliver news to our great-grandchildren. But will it be beamed directly into their brains? That is another subject entirely.
Cynthia Murrell, November 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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