Google Squared

When you see Google Squared in a couple of weeks or months and you love spreadsheets, you will love the juicy goodness of a search arrayed in splendor and ordered in columns and rows. Or rows and columns if you prefer.

An if, as a spreadsheet user, you enjoy surrounding yourself with stacks of building blocks, you will again be content.

But if you think Google will extract structure out of the disorder, you will only be fooling yourself. I may be wrong. I have only seen a brief demonstration.

But it seems as though Google Squared is like looking at the world and seeing intelligent design. And yes, I believe the lead up was worth the punch line.

Don't Like Open Journal Publishing?

If you think there is something about the Internet that pollutes the purity of journal publishing, think again.

The relationship between big pharma and publishers is perilous. Any industry with global revenues of $600bn can afford to buy quite a lot of adverts, and pharmaceutical companies also buy glossy expensive "reprints" of the trials it feels flattered by. As we noted in this column two months ago, there is evidence that all this money distorts editorial decisions.

This time Elsevier Australia went the whole hog, giving Merck an entire publication which resembled an academic journal, although in fact it only contained reprinted articles, or summaries, of other articles. In issue 2, for example, nine of the 29 articles concerned Vioxx, and a dozen of the remainder were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions. Some were bizarre: such as a review article containing just two references.

Things have deteriorated since. It turns out that Elsevier put out six such journals, sponsored by industry. The Elsevier chief executive, Michael Hansen, has now admitted that they were made to look like journals, and lacked proper disclosure. "This was an unacceptable practice and we regret that it took place," he said.

As you see, there is ample reason to suspect that this kind of thing is not rare as hen's teeth but rather a bit more common. In fact it might not be newsworthy if a journal publisher hadn't been the one to print it. Consider that if you will.

It isn't so different from whipping up a think tank is it? You want opinion, you buy it.

Using Ontologies to Change Government

The Knight Commission on the Information needs of Communities has a survey on how you find and use news. Fine and good, but at the end they ask about how government should change delivery to facilitate public engagement.

I suggested they discuss how an ontology could be developed that would give several levels of summary and detail. This sort of data structure would allow most trained data people to mash up and deliver useful information. For instance you could give contributors filtered by standard industry group (SIG) against politicians votes and agenda items filtered by SIG in a Gapminder display.

So far so good.

But this kind of ontology has the potential to replace current bill tracking methods used in house by governmental entities. After a bill passes or a court case is settled, the record would be an adequate way of archiving records for all types issues at law.

Past Facebook a Hyper-Social Format?

If social media are driven primarily by their ability to facilitate social contact, then we should be moving in the direction of an open social format.

My students like Twitter (speed), Facebook (friends), Myspace (fandom), Digg & Make (interests), Twine and blogging (sharing created content.) Not to mention Geo-location.

I don't see why we couldn't start with a desktop app like Adium to mash it in some way and then move to a cloud app. Then we will be able to see over the walls. Wish list: A sliding indicator for geo-location going from "exactly here" to "nowhere" would be nice.

The move would be invisible to your friends who prefer to stay in a particular comfort zone, yet visible to friends who are shall we say, more adventurous.

It's the heritage of Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and Orlando. The concept of the destination resort with an escape hatch.

Quite a few years ago, a retired judge from Atlantic City gave a talk about the way the city had changed in the wake of casinos. I believe he was trying to warn us that promises of increased tourism from gambling resorts were not reliable. The casinos had captured their tourists and were definitely not sharing them with the rest of the city.

Social Issues and Online Addiction Among Teens

Sun-Sentinel's Education reporter Andrew Tran did a story on students and technology adaptation. Some of my students are quoted here.

The interview ran an hour and a half with a return trip for video a week later. I discovered some new things about my kids and put some more into new contexts.

There are a few things we need to address separately.

Number one, after viewing the Frontline piece on Korea, I think we can say that addictive behavior is probably limited to less than ten percent (between 5.5 and 10) of highly wired individuals. Let's let that problem plop into the laps of the psychologists. *plop* Now we can move on and not worry about the other ninety percent.

Number two, the remaining ninety percent have to deal with adaptation. Adaptation includes the temptation of addictive behavior. This is a real issue that should be dealt with explicitly. Although they don't end up with addictive behavior, they *are* the actual environment the addicts live in. The addictive behavior is socially immersive. But adaptation is much more than simply avoiding temptation.

The stories my students provided Andrew were about adaptation. It is about how to immerse yourself without drowning.

It seems that this, like every other part of adolescence is about learning. Maybe we can figure out how to help them learn rather than standing to one side screaming.

Observations on Florida's high school graduation rate

That's misleading. It's really an observation on child abuse by state versus graduation rate and prison population. Gapminder US View of HIgh School Graduation rate, child abuse, number of prisoners.

Observation of other states shows much lower rates of child abuse that *aren't* regionally associated. High school graduation rates *are* regionally associated.

Student blogs

Lexa Indigoes Again

Michael #42

Josue Underscore

Noelle Musings of Noelle

Skylar The Winna of Cinema

Will What The Mind Wants

Larry The Mind Divide

Quinton Reflectionsz of Me

Earl dishallucinations

Ask yourself Punk. "Should I Twitter?"

Twitter itself

This link explains best practices on Twitter - OR how to make a fool of yourself on Twitter.

Let Mr. Tweet look for relevant people using Twitter.

Look for people who use key words on Twitter.

Check out your influence on Twitter.

Check out your influence yet again on Twitter.

Filter your Twitters.

Incentivize Wellness

The news item this morning from Boston about the "near-universal" health care made me think about wellness. There is difficulty incentivizing behaviour.

As with other things in life, there are probably as many reasons for not taking care of yourself are multitude.

One thing that could contribute would be having your gym count days in attendance each month and granting credit for it in some way. The gym could use RFID on membership cards and you wouldn't get credit if your stay is under 45 min. In essence, you get paid for attending the gym.

Open Access and Self-Destructive Acts (edited rant repost)

Open access to research funded by the U. S. Government at any level is not really a matter of debate any longer. What we are witnessing with attempts to head off open access may be a DMCA-like act of desperation. In any case, the behaviour of citizens, whatever they do for a living, has changed as they interact with increasingly democratcized channels of information distribution over time. The trend is obvious and resistance is indeed futile. This much is plain and I believe we all agree on the ubiquity of the conversion of these cultural artifacts to digital form.

What we don't agree on is the right of last year's concessionaire to be this year's gatekeeper. Certainly a graceful segue into a different business model is the proper solution, but at whose expense?

As we see in the courts, it will be many years before we see a political body that is prepared and knowledgeable in issues of advancing science and technology. Perhaps it is naive of me to think people who are afraid of the future and unwilling to adapt should admit it. Delaying tactics appear to be the order of the day.

I don't want to draw inappropriate parallels, but look at the way Al Gore was treated publicly over his advocacy on global climate change. You have a situation where a long-term trend is recognized by people you pay to research stuff you don't have the inclination to learn, then ignore what they have to say - or - "Decide for Yourself" the immortal motto at Fox News. Obviously the journal publishing industry has a long way to go before they throw money to the think tank prostitution industry the way ExxonMobil does but it's worth considering. Are we indulging in self-destructive acts?

There is evidence that humans will need every single minute available to them in order to learn to deal with earth's changing systems. Delay in this case (global warming) may end up causing irreparable damage to civilization. Delay in the case of open access holds the potential of hindering the movement of information to places we never foresaw, preventing developments we never imagined.

Some of this perspective comes from attending the open access symposium at the 2005 AAAS meeting in Washington, some from watching what the Department of Energy and others such as Deep Web Technologies, think about the future of collaborative research over the last few years, and some from observing the evolution of knowledge systems online.

I'll admit to being unscientific and indulging in advocacy as well but I have students who need need new systems in place for learning and for advancing knowledge. Not tomorrow, but today.