Sep 2, 2010

Older Adults Adopting Social Media at Rapid Clip

Posted by Kent Anderson under Historical, Metrics and Analytics, Research, Social Media, Technology, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , |
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It’s an upside-down world when it comes to age and social power. Maxims like “respect your elders” and “follow in your father’s footsteps” indicated a social orientation favoring experience and forebears. Cultural continuity came from younger people looking up to older people, with apprenticeships, mentoring, and internships reflecting this deference to seniority.

An interesting change has come in the modeling of society over the past few decades, namely the move from a generation gap to a fixation on youth to a reorientation on youth showing elders the way. Now, a study from the Pew Research Center indicates that older adults are adopting social media quickly, with those 50-64 years old picking it up at an 88% greater rate in just one year. Overall, 47% of people in this age group now use social media, up from 25% in April 2009.

Email is still the favorite online technology for people 50 and older, with 89-92% using it daily.

The researchers attribute the appeal of social networks in these older age groups to a few factors:

  • Renewing connections for social support, fun during retirement, or second careers
  • Increased likelihood of living with a chronic disease, with social networks providing important support
  • Connecting with younger members of a family, bridging the generation gap

My question is, “Will that generation gap close in the next 10 years?” After all, the first part of Generation X is going to turn 50 next year, and the Generation Y denizens are approaching 30 years of age. As someone born in the early years of Gen Xers, I have to remind myself that I’m officially five years away from being in this 50-64 year old cohort now — that little insouciant voice I acquired in the nascent days of the Internet, when I was a fringe member of the Young Turks and the oldsters were out of touch . . . well, they’ve learned, and we’ve aged. And now, we’re all inhabitants of the Interwebs.

The Internet is quickly becoming the norm for all age groups. May it was just a matter of time — literally.

And maybe we’re even more likely than our predecessors to model our behavior on acting young through technology.

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Sep 1, 2010

Tackling the Data-Driven Funding Challenge — a New Skill for Nonprofit Managers

Posted by Alix Vance under Experimentation, Metrics and Analytics, Research, Tools | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |
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Can you measure your mission? Many nonprofits are being asked to provide metrics of success in order to keep and attract donations and funding.

But it’s not exactly clear how to do this. According to a working paper posted in July to Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge site by faculty members Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan:

The social sector is in the midst of a search for metrics of impact. Over the past 20 years, there has been an explosion in methodologies and tools for assessing social performance and impact, but with little systematic analysis and comparison across these approaches.

When it comes to fundraising and donors, it’s no longer enough for non-profit organizations to talk about the relative value of their mission, activities, and results. Funders are comparison-shopping, and they want to know that their gifts will deliver more bang-for-the-buck if contributed to one organization versus another.

As a sign of this bottom-line orientation, foundations increasingly speak of their contribution “portfolios” using terms borrowed from the financial industry — and nonprofit staffs are under pressure to develop their analytical capacity.

According to a 2009 article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy:

The absence of common standards means that investors can’t compare the social and environmental benefits of different investment opportunities.

The Rockefeller Foundation is working with Acumen Fund, B Lab, Deloitte, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers to develop the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards taxonomy. Work has also begun on a Global Impact Investing Ratings System (GIIRS), which will look at how third-party ratings systems can be developed and aggregated under IRIS.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal underscores the need:

Many potential donors worry that charities will waste their money. Measuring the impact charities have on the problems they seek to solve—and, in some cases, deciding whether one cause is more deserving than another—has become a pressing issue for the multitrillion-dollar philanthropy industry.

Measuring social value is a highly subjective process. As Ebrahim and Rangan point out, it is not always feasible for nonprofits to gather data in every aspect of their operations. Sometimes funders and government agencies may be better positioned to evaluate impact.

Policy measurement is an area ripe for further exploration. By creating and overlaying data collected about key indicators, such as media coverage, staff activities, public opinion, and legislative decisions and/or votes, policy departments can create indicators and data-driven visualizations that inform their strategy and provide compelling evidence to Boards, funders, and individual donors.

The art of developing an impact measurement program lies in discerning what is possible and striking a balance between detailed analysis and clear presentation. Scalability and sustainability are also important considerations. Presentation requirements favor a limited number of measures, real-time access, and automated data collection and processing techniques using standardized data sources.

Owing to nonprofit disclosure requirements, a volume of nonprofit financial data is publicly available. Subscription databases like GuideStar Premium sell subscription access to downloadable data, which includes income, program expenses, fundraising expenses, administrative expenses, as well as enterprise data systems. GuideStar has also developed a nonprofit ranking system.

Simply conceiving of impact in these terms is evolutionary for many nonprofits. The learning curve and work involved can be daunting. Nevertheless, measures of impact offer significant competitive advantages in marketing and fundraising — and can give major advantages to organizations that crack the code.

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Aug 31, 2010

The “Burden” of Peer Review

Posted by David Crotty under Authority, Authors, Peer Review, Reading, Social Role | Tags: , , , , , , |
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The practice of pre-publication peer-review of scholarly papers has recently come under attack from a wide variety of sources, ranging from bloggers to The Scientist to The New York Times. Nearly every discussion of peer-review refers to it as a “burden,” and that burden is often described as “overwhelming.”

I’ve always thought of peer-review as a tremendously efficient bargain (review a small number of papers and get back the entire set of literature that’s been filtered and scrutinized at the same level).

How overwhelming is the burden of peer-review, and does the proposed solution of post-publication review offer any relief?

The Scientist quotes UCSF biologist Keith Yamamoto, as just one example of the stated burden:

“The culture of having to publish means the burden of papers is just enormous,” Yamamoto says. And the burden of reviewing this glut of papers goes almost entirely unrewarded.

It’s tempting to immediately dismiss the recent set of “advertorials” in the Scientist, conveniently timed as they are with the announcement of  their new partnership with the post-publication review service Faculty of 1000. But even taken at face value, there seems to be little data given to support the concept of “overburdening.” Another Scientist article merely states that there are more articles submitted each year, but neglects to mention that the population of scientists, and hence potential reviewers, is also growing.

How big of a problem is peer-review for most scientists?

A recent study suggests that “unpaid non-cash costs of peer review” undertaken by academics works out to £1.9 billion. That seems like a lot of money, but when one amortizes it across the total number of working scientists (best estimate I can find is around 11.5 million worldwide, sourced here and here), and using today’s exchange rate, it works out to around $256 per researcher per year. Is that a reasonable amount of effort to contribute?

The Research Information Network’s data shows that peer-reviewed journal content is valued as more important than any other source, quoting one researcher who stated, “Anything that isn’t peer-reviewed . . . is worthless.”

What is the value in having your most important information source vetted by experts? Is it worth less than $256 annually to you? Isn’t having the literature filtered in this manner — the time saved from having to go through the unacceptable dross — the very “reward” Yamamoto is seeking above?

I wanted to get a feel for how burdensome peer-review is in my field, biology. In a thoroughly non-scientific study, I asked a dozen biology professors about their peer-review burden, trying to get a good cross section of people at different stages of their careers and at different types of institutions. The vast majority told me they review around 1-3 papers each month. Scientists are under enormous work and time pressures these days, but how much of that can be blamed on reviewing a few papers each month?

Some senior researchers review more papers, often because they’re on the editorial boards of journals, and their burden can range as high as 10 to 15 papers per month. That does seem like a sizable workload, but it’s hard to think of it as an unbearable burden when it’s an entirely voluntary one.  Can one really call a voluntary activity a “burden”? There’s no stigma for turning down an editor’s review request. All professors I contacted said they had no problem with this.  Some well-known senior professors deliberately limit their reviews to no more than a few per month, and in times when they’ve got a heavy workload in other areas, they refuse all review requests.  Do other fields differ greatly from biology, or is this a reasonable picture of science as a whole?

Editors and researchers in other fields, please chime in with comments below and let us know how well my admittedly small sample size reflects things in your area.

If these sorts of numbers are accurate, then peer-review does seem to offer a superb bargain in efficiency. A recent study showed that 50% of biologists use academic journal articles every working day (and another 30% use them “most days”). So by agreeing to review 1-3 articles per month, you’re guaranteed that the multiple articles you’re using nearly every day of your career have been scrutinized and filtered at that same level.

Let’s compare this level of efficiency with that seen for the most commonly proposed alternative, post-publication review, the idea of putting everything up on the web and letting “the crowd” filter things out.

If we start with the idea that information overload is a problem — that researchers are buried in an constant avalanche of papers — then imagine the size of that avalanche in a system where no paper is ever rejected, where everything gets published.

Not only will you be reading more papers, but those papers are going to be of lower quality than those you now read.  One of the key rewards of our current peer-review system is that the criticisms are used to improve papers before they’re published. Time and attention are incredibly valuable commodities. A system that requires you to spend more time reading more papers that are of lower quality is already looking problematic.

One of the main complaints against peer-review is that it delays the dissemination of research results:

Peer-review is too slow, affecting public health, grants, and credit for ideas. . . . Another common frustration among authors is the lengthy time delay between submission of a manuscript and its publication.

Does post-publication review solve this problem? Peer-reviewed journal articles are considered “very important” information sources by 92% of researchers in the study mentioned above compared to 4% giving that rating to “un-refereed articles.” Given this attitude, are researchers going to be willing to read articles that have not yet been reviewed in any manner at all?  Or will they wait, particularly for articles outside of their area of expertise, until a trusted source has posted a review?  That introduces a new delay into the system — instead of waiting for an editor-driven review process, we’ll instead be dependent on a stochastic process.

For that stochastic process to work, it asks participants to review every article they read.  And that’s where the efficiency of the system bottoms out.  Which is a bigger burden — serving as the peer reviewer for 1-3 articles per month, or serving as the peer reviewer for every article you read?

Beyond efficiency, post-publication peer review suffers from a likely lack of expertise and trust. A highly respected journal with a track record for editorial excellence in selecting qualified reviewers is likely to be trusted more than an anonymous commenter who may or may not be qualified:

Many professors, of course, are wary of turning peer review into an “American Idol”-like competition. They question whether people would be as frank in public, and they worry that comments would be short and episodic, rather than comprehensive and conceptual, and that know-nothings would predominate. After all, the development of peer review was an outgrowth of the professionalization of disciplines from mathematics to history — a way of keeping eager but uninformed amateurs out. “Knowledge is not democratic,” said Michèle Lamont, a Harvard sociologist who analyzes peer review in her 2009 book, “How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.” Evaluating originality and intellectual significance, she said, can be done only by those who are expert in a field.

As Phil Davis recently asked:

Is a system that allows anyone to comment on a paper — anonymous or not — really a form of “peer-review.” Where is the “peer” in “peer review?”

Replacing a flawed system with one that’s even more flawed is not an option.

Most proposals for doing away with pre-publication peer-review suffer from “Highlander Syndrome” (“There can be only one!”), the notion that everything must be a zero-sum game, and that if a new layer is added, a previous layer must be removed. In an age of information overload, we need more filters, not fewer. Yes, peer-review can be improved, and yes, if one could actually generate participation, post-publication review could be tremendously valuable. Wouldn’t it be better if these filters were additive rather than having to choose between them?

Even if one assumes that peer-review is an enormous burden, it’s possible to turn it into an important educational opportunity for students. One thing — and possibly the most valuable thing — I learned in my graduate school lab was how to write a scientific paper. The evaluation of submitted papers provides a hands-on opportunity to hone these sorts of skills.

The head of a major research institution recently told me the following about his peer review practices:

One reason I do accept review responsibilities is that I work with lab members to do some of the reviews. This helps people learn the system and how to evaluate papers. Because reviewer opinions are available, I can sit down with the person from the lab and go over how their opinion relates to the other reviewers. It helps them learn to be a better reviewer, understand what to expect from their own papers and how people respond to reviewers comments.

If done right this is a great training opportunity. If a PI just gives a lab member a paper and turns in that review, it can be problematic. However, if they get the review from the lab member and sit down to go over whether it is fair, balanced, accurately deals with strengths and weaknesses etc., and compare it with their own take on the paper, it can be a great learning experience. When I do this and then show the lab member the other reviewers comments after they are available, it can be very interesting. They are often surprised about what was said, missed, or put in the review and are reassured when others found similar issues. I find they also learn a lot from the author rebuttals and revisions the authors make if they resubmit the paper. It really prepares them for how to deal with comments when their own papers are reviewed.

Ultimately, what matters most is the near-universal demand for peer-review as a necessary filtering system:

Our study indicates that many researchers are discouraged from using new forms of scholarly communications because they do not trust what has not been subject to formal peer review… [R]esearchers seek assurances of quality above all through peer review, and that they do not see citation counts, usage statistics or reader ratings or other ‘wisdom of the crowds’ tools as providing an adequate substitute.

In seeking to replace pre-publication peer-review, one must look at the whole picture, at all of the benefits the current system provides, rather than focusing solely on the limited instances where it is problematic or open for abuse. Can peer review be improved?  Of course, but the best bet for the future is adding to peer-review rather than doing away with it altogether.

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Aug 30, 2010

Is Amazon Still Man’s Best Friend?

Posted by Joseph Esposito under Authors, Books, Business Models, Commerce, Technology | Tags: , , , , |
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This is a short post simply to call attention to another post by Peter Brantley. Brantley has a bone to pick with Amazon, and after reading his post a couple of times, I think he’s right.

What’s at issue is whether a few large organizations that have entered the publishing world (the accused are, obviously, Amazon, Google, and Apple) have too much influence in the industry.  Sometimes bigger is better, sometimes it isn’t. I for one feel uncomfortable when any aspect of human expression falls under the inordinate influence of a large commercial enterprise. I don’t feel that way about, say, coffee shops or straight razors, though perhaps I should.

Brantley notes that Amazon’s “gift” to authors — the promise of a 70% royalty — comes with unacceptable strings attached.  Under the Amazon plan, the publisher or author sets the price of an ebook and gets a royalty of 70%.  Sounds good so far. But if another vendor is selling the same book at a lower price, Amazon has the right to match it, without further consultation with the author.  If the author prices the book at $9.95 and a competitor begins to sell it for $5.95, Amazon immediately lowers the price, and thus the royalty paid to the author.

What’s increasingly clear is that authors and publishers are struggling to maintain control of the marketing and pricing of their products. Part of this is because of the ongoing platform wars, in which technology companies devalue content in order to create support for their own technological solution; part of this, at least in the U.S., is the legal prohibition against having manufacturers set prices when products are sold through intermidiaries.

Is it any wonder that more and more publishers are beginning to experiment with direct sales, bypassing the traditional supply chain altogether?

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Aug 30, 2010

Taxes Clash with Free Speech in the Philadelphia Blogosphere

Posted by Kent Anderson under Authors, Controversial Topics, Social Role, Technology | Tags: , , , , , |
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Have you paid your income tax this month ?
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Recently, the city fathers in Philadelphia began bringing local blogs under existing small business ordinances, asserting that money-making blogs are, in fact, small businesses. (In the story linked above, these financial powerhouses made $50/year in one case, $11/year in another.) Federal tax returns shared with the city showed that Philadelphia bloggers were claiming income from blogs generated within city limits, giving someone at city hall the bright idea that a tax revenue opportunity lay in their midst.

It seems a logical argument, and the registration fee of $50/year or $300/lifetime isn’t extravagant. And, unlike some who are calling this a “blogging tax,” the fact is that existing small business licensing and income tax provisions are being applied to blogs that make money. (Note: New York City has a similar tax on small businesses, but it exempts the first $3,400 of tax liability, a smart move.) So, while it’s not a “blogging tax” per se, in practice it is picking out a new class of business for taxation.

Correcting the misconception that Philadelphia has levied a “blog tax” has preoccupied many, including the Guardian, which states:

But there is no blog tax. Philadelphia levies a licence fee on small businesses, which is no more a tax on bloggers than the UK’s VAT is a tax on chocolate buttons.

But chocolate buttons aren’t as complicated as blogs. Two problems arise when laws written for traditional small businesses are applied to blogs:

  1. Most blogs — even those that try to make money — don’t make enough to cover the relatively small ($50/year) business fee Philadelphia wants to impose
  2. Most blogs are exercises of freedom of speech, while most small businesses are not

By combining the chilling effect of taxes that might exceed incomes, thus forcing some blogs to cease operations, combined with the type of conduct blogs inherently engage in — namely, expression of ideas — the big question will come down to issues about freedom of speech.

Earlier this year, a Texas tax law designed to make it more difficult to operate strip clubs was struck down when exotic dancing was found by an appeals court to be protected by the First Amendment:

While nude dancing ‘falls only within the outer ambit of the First Amendment’s protection,’ it is nevertheless protected as expressive conduct.

If dancing without clothes on is protected from new taxes, can something within the inner ambit of the First Amendment be protected from taxation policy that could purposely or accidentally eliminate free speech?

Of course, newspapers and other publications have to pay taxes, but they are usually larger entities and not run by individuals. Again, this is why a carve-out for very small businesses makes sense.

I’ll bet this goes to court, and when it does, Philadelphia will have a hard time defending its practice as it exists. People within city limits who sell on eBay or who sell corn from their gardens each summer probably aren’t forced to register or pay annual registration fees — either because the city doesn’t go after them, or they don’t report the modest income on their taxes.

And registration is another vulnerability here. By forcing bloggers to register with the city, a perceived intrusion by the government could be argued. In fact, a political blogger in Missouri suggested that one Congressional candidate might like the idea of the registration and taxation scheme. It seems he’s trying to silence two bloggers in his area by filing complaints with the Federal Election Commission. So, clearly, the notion of using tax policy and registration requirements to chill free speech is occurring to people in the political realm.

Blog software is free. Blogging is free speech. Well, except in Philadelphia at the moment, where any blog with a small widget of Google ads or an infrequently trafficked Amazon storefront might find itself forced to consider whether $11/year and the urge to blog is worth another $39 in local small business fees.

Free speech indeed.

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Aug 27, 2010

Penn & Teller on the Vaccines and Autism Debate: A Model of Great Science Communication

Posted by Kent Anderson under Controversial Topics, Education, Social Role, Usability | Tags: , , , , |
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Penn & Teller, the most amazing magician tandem of our era, are also incredibly smart guys. Now, while Carl Sagan may have been the urbane ambassador of science, Penn & Teller demonstrate here their potential to be the rock stars of science communication. Warning: A few very well-placed swear words are used, but they are f-ing appropriate to anyone who has been as outraged by this nonsense as I’ve been over the years.

Enjoy!

Happy Friday.

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Aug 26, 2010

Today’s UK Researchers: E-journals Dominate, Access Not an Issue, Skimming Increasing

Posted by Kent Anderson under Authors, Education, Reading, Research, Sociology, Technology, Usability, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , , |
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The Research Information Network recently published a study evaluating the use and role of e-journals in UK researchers’ professional lives. It builds on an earlier study of the computer logs of researchers in the UK by adding interviews, observations, and an online questionnaire so that the earlier findings could be placed in context.

The study focused on researchers, not on practitioners or information consumers. This more tight-knit group always differs somewhat in their behaviors, being more voracious in their information consumption habits. The researchers who were studied came from a wide swath of fields — biological sciences, chemistry, environmental sciences, history, economics, and physics. This is a big problem with the study, actually. The mix makes it really hard to draw firm conclusions for any specialist group.

So, this is an interesting study of UK researchers, but nothing earth-shattering.

The good news is that journals are more important in the professional lives of researchers than ever. But how journals are accessed and used has changed significantly.

Among many interesting findings is that these researchers do much of their research outside of normal office hours, with some laughing outright at the suggestion that there are “normal office hours” anymore.

One major finding of the study is that e-journals are the primary way of accessing the journal literature. Another is that access to journals has improved dramatically. As the researchers state:

. . . few barriers to academic literature were identified by [interviewees] and many prized the extent of academic literature available and the mechanisms to provide access to those articles and papers not readily accessible online.

Passwords were the least of the researchers’ concerns when it came to barriers to access. Most often, a lack of subscription was cited as the reason for access problems, ahead of having to pay for a download. This suggests that the expectation is on the institution to provide access, not on the publisher (or on content being free). From the vantage point of these employees, it might look as if their employers are not providing what they need to do their jobs.

There are plenty of other stimulating findings in this paper:

  • Web of Science is the preferred portal for most researchers, except historians, who like JSTOR
  • Publisher portals don’t fare well as search starting points — ScienceDirect, Proquest, Embase, and the like barely register, with ScienceDirect doing the best, equivalent to a publisher site or journal site as a search starting point
  • Individual journal home pages rarely surface important articles

Generally, researchers are dealing with too much information, and feel there’s “too much literature being produced.” The abundance of articles and other demands created “too many time constraints militating against full and considered reading.” As a coping mechanism, researchers are “skimming and dipping” more than ever — not a new observation, but apparently the behavior is becoming more prevalent.

Print is peripheral for these researchers — not the print that comes out of their laser printers, but the bound magazines of old. Only 12.5% of their regular awareness of research comes from non-online sources (mostly colleagues and meetings, 2% via print), and only 11.9% said they’d recently discovered an important article via a print journal.

One theme should bother publishers both large and small — the low usage their sites get, even the major portals that publishers like Elsevier and Springer have created. The study shows that, at least in the UK, researchers visit these far less often than the true aggregators like Web of Science, PubMed, Google Scholar, and Google. The big plays like ScienceDirect don’t perform much better than a plain old journal home page, and some do much worse. It brings to mind the entire notion of the big Web site build yet again, and how potentially futile it is to create anything but something simple, straightforward, and designed for established aggregators and Web 2.0 realities.

I also got the feeling while reading this study that I was back in 1998, but reading a rehash of the story we were telling then. Maybe it’s just a matter of seeing some notions and predictions and trends come true, a kind of intellectual anticlimax, but the overall effect was a sort of deja vu.

The world has moved on for researchers in the UK. They have great access to academic materials, they use online resources heavily, they rarely derive value from print, and they prefer comprehensive aggregations to even big publisher silos.

Really, is anybody surprised by this?

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Aug 25, 2010

The SSP IN Conference — An INfernal Event!

Posted by Michael Clarke under Advertising, Education, Marketing, Social Role, Society for Scholarly Publishing, Tools | Tags: , , , , |
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My manservant, Winfred, recently brought some positively dreadful news to my attention. I had just returned from taking the hounds on their morning constitutional and was preparing to chase the hobos off their encampment in the woods adjacent to my estate (in retrospect, these two activities might have been best combined) when Winfred delivered the latest circular from the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

It appears that the Society will be holding another SSP IN meeting next month, over my strenuous objections as a long-standing member of the Society. My objections are not concerning SSP holding a Fall meeting – indeed, the autumn is my favorite time of the year to repair to a fine club, properly provisioned with brandy and cigars, to discuss the affairs of the Society with other learned gentlemen (as a side note, I have noticed an increasing number of women at Society meetings of late, and am concerned for the image of the Society that so many gentlemen think it proper to travel openly with their secretaries – we are a Society of scholars, not poets!).

Rather, my concerns are regarding the topic of the meeting. I am told that “IN” stands for INnovation, INspiration, and INteraction. I am wont to think of a more unholy trinity of concepts. Indeed, I think “INfernal” is more apropos!

If this were not bad enough, I am told that this year’s theme is “Imagining the ‘Dream E-Tool’ for Education and Training.” The dream tool for education and training, as everyone knows, is a rod or ruler and a firm hand (Clarke Industries has long made such rods, which we sell alongside our line of buggy whips). I see no reason to “imagine” any other tool for this purpose.

Indeed, I was aghast when my grand-nephew Chesterton rung me on Alexander Graham Bell’s phone (an example of an “innovation” that has done nothing but disturb the peace since it has infected nearly every household in our great republic) to inform me that Harvard now requires its students to use Babbage machines to write their essays! And now I discover that a Society of which I am a member, is not only not opposing this “electronic education,” but instead is actively encouraging it!

The Society has, I am told, recruited a number of agitators to speak at the conference, including: Kathy Hurley, Senior Vice President for Strategic Partnerships at Pearson and Chair of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills; Ariella Lehrer, PhD, President and Chief Executive Officer, Legacy Interactive; and Kara Malenfant, Scholarly Communications and Government Relations Specialist, Association of College and Research Libraries/American Library Association, and co-author of the Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025 report.

I am troubled to report that, in addition to featuring such agitators, SSP IN will be conducted in an interactive format. As all right-thinking persons know, conferences should be delivered in a lecture format with questions strongly discouraged. (Indeed, I have standing instructions with Winfred that he is to physically remove any hecklers, socialists, union sympathizers, or progressives from lecture rooms in which I deliver an address.) Unfortunately, attendees of SSP IN will be organized in small groups where they will work together through exercises designed to explore new ideas, facilitate networking, and challenge thinking.

Though I am reluctant to disseminate this information further for fear that some unsuspecting gentleman might accidentally register for SSP IN, it has occurred to me that you, dear reader, might find this entire missive incredulous. And indeed, I found the entire idea so far-fetched that I dispatched Winfred by rail to Philadelphia, where the meeting is purportedly to be held September 21-23 at the Sofitel Philadelphia. My trusted servant has confirmed that meeting preparations are, in fact, underway. They even have, predictably, set up a registration page on Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s infernal Interweb for those of you who countenance the use of Babbage machines.

As despondent as I am over these events, I am confident that not many learned gentlemen (nor, for that matter, their now ubiquitous secretaries) will accidentally attend this meeting, and so the exposure of such unorthodox and novel ideas will hopefully be limited. For those esteemed members of the Society who wish to attend a more traditional meeting, limited to discussion of tried-and-true publication formats and pedagogical practices — and not will-o’-the-wisp fads and progressive ideas — I will shortly be organizing a competing event, which will be called the SNOB (Say No to Online Books) Conference. Details will be delivered via post as soon as Winfred types up a pamphlet for the mimeograph.

Yours in letters,

M. Tiberius Clarke

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Aug 24, 2010

Rectifying Asymmetries — Experts Are Battered From All Sides, But Are We Any Smarter?

Posted by Kent Anderson under Authority, Authors, Education, Peer Review, Research, Social Role, Sociology, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , , |
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Escher Symmetry
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It’s not easy being an expert these days, it seems. Every time you turn around, there’s someone challenging you, raising an objection, making a point. And the proliferation of channels has the potential to not only thin your message but level the playing field with antagonists.

But are experts worth defending from the onslaught of the new information economy?

In an article earlier this summer in the New York Post, David Freedman, obviously pimping his book “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us–and How to Know When Not to Trust Them,” talks about the pace of change in the medical literature in particular, assigning a reliability problem to a high-churn publishing environment in which frequent, novel findings are prized over infrequent and/or non-novel results. This pursuit of novelty to fill hectic publishing and academic schedules erodes trust in a cumulative fashion as refutation, disputation, and uncertainty emerge in a literature supposedly bent on producing something approximating the truth. And it goes beyond the medical literature, into the ubiquitous split-screens of television shout shows and the blogosphere:

Most people just don’t know how to pick it out from the constant stream of flawed and conflicting findings — the housing market is recovering, the housing market is getting worse, video games deaden children’s brains, video games boost rapid thinking. That’s why much of the public has simply stopped listening to experts, and sometimes with potentially catastrophic results, as when parents don’t get their children recommended vaccines and treatments, or believe they can eat whatever they want, or invest their savings in whatever stocks seem exciting.

The problem returns to filter failure — yet again. But which filter is failing?

That’s a harder question to answer.

There is a common sense filter that all journals sometimes fail, their staffs seduced by some combination of relationships, reputation, and results. There are the uncertainties of study design, study execution, results analysis, researcher rigor, and statistical analysis. In other words, there are problems with doing and reporting science that a research report can elide, minimize, or obscure, either consciously or accidentally. Teasing these out is something that can thwart even the best editors. As Michael Gazzaniga has written:

. . . to separate the verifiable from the nonverifiable is a conscious, tedious process that most people are unwilling or unable to do. It takes energy and perseverance and training. It can be counterintuitive. It is called analytical thinking. It is not common and is difficult to do. It can even be expensive. It is what science is all about. It is uniquely human

Then there’s the filter of peer-review, rife with well-known flaws and limitations. Amplifications and syntheses of research results — the media, surveillance publications, abstracts read in isolation, and interviews with authors — can further complicate results reporting and create unwarranted impressions in the minds of readers and the general public. And more outlets for authors means their enthusiasm for their findings can overwhelm the more measured findings in the source article.

And every channel creates an opportunity for a naysayer or critic or skeptic to appear.

In the era of abundance, traditional filters may be overwhelmed, and experts are looking a bit beat up. And it’s not just abundance, but the tone that abundance has assumed — disputatious, restless, and relentless. A RAND paper covered in the Publishing Frontier blog talks about the extra steps of “bulletproofing” that experts have to attend to in an increasingly vocal and polarized information sphere:

To some of us who were trained to believe that the most important part of the QA process is the scientific peer review, this can sometimes be an alien concept. Of course, the scientific peer review is the sine qua non; the science must speak. But if controversy lurks, bulletproofing is essential. This involves thinking in advance about the political lines of attack against the results and then identifying individuals who might come from those political quarters. Such individuals should be brought into the review process.

Left unprotected in a world filled with relentless demagoguery and spin, experts can flee, become reluctant to engage, and have gaps exposed by unfriendly forces.

Or perhaps experts are a vestige of a mass media age of scarcity, where information imbalances were captured by a select few and exploited for power. In a provocative essay, J.P. Rangaswami writes that the Web is relieving asymmetries in information creation and access, education, and design, all positives overall. So, while expertise may be viewed as eroding, in fact this erosion is part of a leveling function in which experts have to compete in a more dynamic, less authoritarian information environment based on abundance:

There’s been a lot of talk about the web and the internet making us dumber. I think it’s more serious than that. What the web does is reduce the capacity for asymmetry in education. Which in turn undermines the exalted status of the expert. The web makes experts “dumb”. By reducing the privileged nature of their expertise.

Of course, facts are still facts. Or are they? Virginia Heffernan, writing in the New York Times’ column “The Medium,” reflects on the quaint art of fact-checking — how it was done, how it has changed, how “Google became the only thing,” and how fact-checking has become part of everyone’s everyday life now, with some worrisome side-effects:

. . . fact-checking has assumed radically new forms in the past 15 years. Only fact-checkers from legacy media probably miss the quaint old procedures. But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that.

Were we smarter with more books on the shelves and a cadre of experts leading us into the future? Or are we smarter with overlapping, exchanged, shared, compounding, sometimes confusing information available widely, with experts diminished or disposable?

This seems to be a debate that will only be settled with the passage of time.

Or is the expert of the future the one who finds a way to have it all?

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Aug 23, 2010

Teaching the End of Print — Using Books Poised on the Edge of Oblivion

Posted by Kent Anderson under Authors, Books, Education, Historical, Reading, Social Role, Sociology, Technology, Tools, World of Tomorrow | Tags: , , , |
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The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989. The photo s...
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People often say that an era is “bookended” by certain events — one ushering it in, the other closing it out. You could argue that the Cold War was bookended by Kruschev pounding his shoe on the table at the United Nations and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You could argue that the 1970s were bookended by the breakup of the Beatles and the appearance of HIV.

But what do you say when an era is bookended by actual books?

C.W. Anderson, a teacher at the College of Staten Island, writes in the Atlantic about putting together a syllabus for a course on “Print Culture.” In so doing, he notes:

Now that the electronic word has become embedded in our lives, we have a new perspective on what might have been special and specific about the last few hundred years of information dissemination.

That is, the Internet, e-readers, email, text messaging, and so forth may have effectively placed the terminal bookend on the print era, so that now we can examine what was special about the era defined by the print book and its offshoots.

Of course, print isn’t dead, and it won’t ever be gone, but its cultural centrality has diminished and continues to move to the periphery. However, Anderson’s syllabus shows us what the culture of print contributed to the advancement of our intellectual lives, as this selection shows:

  • Weeks 3-4: From Orality to Literacy to Print
  • Week 5: The Invention of the Author
  • Weeks 7-8: Copyright
  • Week 9: The Print Network — Bookstores, Libraries, Google
  • Weeks 12-13: The End of Print?

The books Anderson has chosen for his class are fairly definitive, a property of books themselves — the best historical books can provide a firm foundation for future scholarship. The notion of widespread, shared knowledge is another debt we owe to the power of multiple copies with high fidelity to the original — a concept most familiar with the book, but used again and again for movies, records, and so on.

Anderson is wise in his assessment of how media and culture interact and extend and mix:

I want to convince my students that different media cultures don’t replace each other in any sort of straight line. Rather, a culture of orality joins up with, and mixes with a culture of printing, which itself mixes with (but is not vanquished by) digital culture, and so on.

As a teacher and essayist, Anderson is straddling the eras himself, using books as references but introducing blogs and online articles to challenge them. His Atlantic article is highly enriched by links that could not have existed in print. His approach is completely modern, normal in today’s communication environment, and displays exactly the kind of mixing he talks about.

Two other recent articles discuss why the book as a print artifact is so troubled, poised on a precipice. Mike Shatzkin observes and/or argues in a recent post that while the print book was essentially perfected hundreds of years ago, e-books are improving regularly. Reactionaries who claim they will never give up the printed book are neglecting this important aspect. As Shatzkin writes:

. . . the insistence by some people that they will “never” give up the printed book — which leads to rather ludicrous glorification of the smell of the paper, ink, and glue and the nonsensical objections that the screen would be unsuitable for the beach (depends on the screen) or the bathtub (I can’t even imagine what the presumed advantage of the printed book is there) — must ignore the fundamental dynamic. Print books aren’t getting better. Ebooks are.

I recently observed this exact dynamic with visitors at our house. In a discussion of an obscure recipe, the “book lovers” scurried off to find something in the cookbooks. Their question as they left — “What’s your best book for recipes?” — elicited my answer of “My iPhone.” They scoffed, one saying, “We like books too much.” Sure enough, I had the answer before any of the book users. The tools available to the book users were the same ones as always — an index, page numbers, a table of contents, some section tabs (these were cookbooks). But the iPhone, like other e-readers, is facile now, and only getting better. The books I was competing against were the same as they were in the 1970s or 1990s.

A recent article in the New York Times observes that users of e-readers may also have a social advantage — the technology of the e-reader is intriguing, so people with iPads and Kindles get attention from strangers who want to touch, hold, gaze upon these new devices. Some users believe these devices are erasing the social stigma about reading alone in public. It’s an arguable point, as the article notes, but there definitely is something unique about a device (either the Kindle or the iPad) that can hold many types of content. With a book, it’s clear you’re reading one thing. With an e-reader, you have many more options at your fingertips, and that’s more socially interesting.

But while there may be some social benefit to e-books, one nagging concern about e-readers and the digital information experience in general was summed up nicely by author Jeanette Winterson:

If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.

Browsing is still a problem with e-readers and online reading in general. Feeds, email alerts, and other techniques can help, but there’s nothing like wandering a bookstore, where you can experience the slow seduction, seeping inspiration, or random connection of real books. So while Shatzkin may be right that e-books and e-readers are improving, the macro book environment could suffer severely during the shift. Books could become files that are just plain hard to find. The marketing challenge of e-books aren’t well-addressed by the current devices.

The print era may be winding down, but many of the cultural transformations it wrought will be with us forever, shaping our journey. We are building from books, not destroying them. And as e-readers evolve, it’s interesting to ponder what the wireless information era will bring us. In a few decades or centuries, what will the syllabus of a class entitled “Connected Culture” look like?

Hat tip to Jill O’Neill for the syllabus link.

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