There are clearly some very smart folks behind Google given that they provide us with a great service and continually add useful features. That said, at times I am surprised by some of the decisions. Should they be placing their machine intelligence over user preferences? I am surfing the Web in Budapest. When I try to go to google.com, I am redirected to google.co.hu. I change the URL because I prefer to see the site in English. Fine. Then I run a search using English words and get Adwords Sponsored Links on the right in Hungarian. The rest of the interface is in English as are all of the results, but the ads are not. (Granted, the one term that matched the search term “domain” was in the ads, but every other word was in Hungarian.) Geography does not equal language preference or knowledge, especially when the user has already signaled so. It seems getting meaningful ads would be in the interest of both Google and its Adwords clients, why this decision then? (I commented on something very similar a year ago and although it seems some progress may have been made, need for improvement remains.)
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It is not often that “a dissertation gets written up in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/arts/20DEVA.html so I thought it was worth a mention here. Kieran has written here about Devah Pager‘s work earlier including a bit of context. Since Devah is a friend of mine, I would like to add that not only is she really smart and great at finding innovative approaches to research questions, but she’s also a delightful person. It’s wonderful to have people like her in academia and in sociology in particular using her talents to work on important questions… and it’s also nice to see good academic work get public recognition for a change!
Update: Be sure to check out Kieran’s note in the comments for more details about the public life of this dissertation.
Does anybody have experience altering copyright forms? I recall someone once mentioning that they usually change part of the text to say that they retain rights to make available a copy of their article on their Web site.
The copyright form I am looking at right now says that “[p]ermission is also granted for you to make available electronically the abstract and up to 50% of the published text on the World Wide Web…”. But what if I want to make available 100%?
I am in the interesting position of having to sign this form after the piece has already been published. So it is unclear to me whether I even have to sign it and if I do sign it, it seems I would have the leverage to change some of the text. After all, what can the publisher do at this point? Am I missing something?
It seems “googling” is now used by many as a synonym for online searches just like kleenex is used to refer to a tissue or xeroxing to using a copier. I have yet to see empirical evidence that suggests Google is used by the majority of Internet users, yet many people talk about it as though it was the only existing search engine. References to Google as the be-all and end-all of search engines abound at least among journalists and academics, and perhaps it is not surprising that such people know about and use Google. But not everybody does although you’d be hard-pressed to know that judging from the rhetoric.
I have a small piece in this month’s First Monday in which I discuss this issue and why it is problematic to assume everyone uses a certain service when that is not necessarily the case.
Actually, I only mention one concern in that piece. Another that I do not bring up there but have alluded to elsewhere is that it is problematic to have so much riding on a proprietary service. We do not know where it is headed and since the details of its algorithm for displaying results are not transparent to the public we should not depend on it to guarantee equal access to all types of information indefinitely.
There will be a panel discussion this afternoon at Princeton (4:30pm EST) about the Passion movie (see live Webcast). My good friend, the very smart Steven Tepper will be on the panel as will some other interesting Princeton academics plus representatives of national Catholic and Jewish organizations. Steve studies controversies over art and culture so it should be interesting to hear his take on the reactions to this movie.
In the comments section of Chris’ recent post about a date, people have started debating whether it makes more sense to list the year, month or day first in a date. This discussion made me think about how different languages/cultures present names. In Hungary, “last” name comes first. To me this always made logical sense. After all, even in cultures where given name comes first (a practice that seems to be prevalent in most places I know) the order of the names gets reversed on certain lists to put the family name up front. This makes more sense, for example, when alphabetizing people in a group (e.g. in a classroom). So why does given name come before family name otherwise? Other than Hungary, I have heard in Japan family name is listed first, can anyone confirm that? Are there any other examples of such ordering of names?
I don’t usually watch the Oscars but I hope to tune in this weekend. A friend of mine, a frequent visitor of CT – comments by “laura” – will be performing at the event.
So how does a Sociology PhD student make it to the Oscars? Certainly not by planning for it. Laura’s dissertation is on Sacred Harp singing. It’s not something most of us know anything about. I’ve learned from her that it’s an a capella four-part harmony style that’s been a living tradition in the South for over 150 years and has undergone something of a folk revival in the Northeast, Midwest, and West coast over the past 20-30 years. It is participatory singing, not usually performed in this way so the Oscar performance will be a bit artificial. But anything is possible in Hollywood, as we know.
Ed Felten has posted a call for science/tech books we’d like all students to read. Ed is disturbed by the low number of science- and technology-related books that appear on the “must read” lists of an international group of college presidents. (Note that the response rate to the survey was quite low at around 25%.) Another interesting result is that very few contemporary books are on these people’s lists.
I went to a great klezmer concert yesterday in Princeton. It started off with the Princeton University student klezmer group: the Klezmocrats. They are a talented young group. The main attraction was the Klez Dispensers. They, too, started out as a Princeton student group some years ago but by now work independently. It’s been wonderful to watch them grow over the years. They’re amazing. But don’t take my word for it (admittedly somewhat biased given my friendships with about half of them:), according to Pete Sokolow they are “the finest young group playing classic American Klezmer style today”. I recommend their new CD, the New Jersey Freylekhs. (I realize blogging about this before the concert would have been more helpful than doing so after.. I’ll try to be better about that next time.)
Sometimes quotes take on a life of their own. They become famous and get attributed to someone without anyone citing a traceable origin. I ran into such a problem about five years ago when I wanted to use a quote by Herbert Simon in an article. The quote was this:
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
I remember doing all sorts of searches online to figure out the exact source of that quote. But others using those lines either cited no source or pointed to a piece by Hal Varian in Scientific American as the source of the quote. I checked out that article, but there was no citation. What to do? I ended up contacting Hal Varian directly for the source and he very kindly provided a pointer to it (p.40.).
Those interested in reproductive health and rights probably already know that back in December an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration recommended that the “morning after” pill[1] be sold over the counter (OTC). The easy availability of such emergency contraception (EC) could reduce unwanted pregnancies significantly. Unfortunately, the issue is now running up against political hurdles.
Check out this conference on cybercrime and digital law enforcement to be held at the Yale Law School next month. It’s being organized by folks at the Information Society Project and features a list of interesting speakers from related fields. Some of them are frequent bloggers (Balkinization, Discourse.net) so hopefully we’ll get to read about it as it happens. It’s not too late to get a spot on a panel (or a publication in a related special issue of IJCLP and YJOLT) thanks to a paper-competition [pdf] they are having.
Ed Felten reports that the entire editorial board of a journal has quit to protest the high price of the journal. I agree with Ed that it is somewhat surprising this does not happen more often given the increasing price of many academic journals (a topic we’ve discussed here on CT several times). It looks like these computer scientists were able to take this action at least in part because they found a good alternative for publishing a similar journal. Such alternatives may not be quite as obvious in other fields, unfortunately. After all, the ACM is a very established organization with numerous high-quality publications already so it seems like a good candidate for publishing a new journal. The major associations in some other disciplines do not seem to have this kind of infrastructure in place to support such a cause, which may explain why we do not see such en masse editorial-board resignation more often.
A copy of the letter [pdf] that seemed to initiate much of the above is available online. It contains lots of interesting information – including a summary of this informative piece [pdf] – about academic journal publishing especially with respect to cs/math fields.
This makes so much more sense to me than this. I certainly appreciate the goal of getting more women in the White House and other political positions, but I think it’s a stretch to suggest that the gender of a candidate trumps all other factors including a candidate’s position on all issues. (I came across the EMILY’s List Web site by clicking on this ad in the NYTimes.)