I’ve had occasion to perform genealogical searches for my family as well as for others. Genealogical searches can be rewarding, but more often than not you wind up with nothing. So when starting on such searches one expects that little can be found; only one’s optimism determines whether to continue searching.
This weekend, my optimism paid off. Probably.
Frequently, particularly when searching for work related to possibly novel research ideas I or others at FXPAL have had, it is not easy to determine when to stop searching. This dilemma comes up any time anyone is searching for something we are not sure exists. After doing N searches, and finding nothing, how certain can we be that it isn’t there?
An unusual example of an existence search came up as I was doing background research for my review of N. David Mermin’s book Quantum Computer Science that was recently published in ACM SIGACT News. As part of the review, I wanted to give a sense for the extent that Mermin’s thoughts and writings have influenced scholarly and popular thought on quantum mechanics. I thought I remembered that he was the originator of the “Shut up and calculate” interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I wanted to fact check before putting it in my review. Would this search be a hard or easy one?
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This recent XKCD cartoon made me think of Miles Efron’s project on language change and information retrieval. Perhaps the tools he develops will help scholars in the future parse what we declaim to our tweeps.
After a round of price reductions, Nook has now joined Amazon Kindle in offering a software application to read books on Android devices. I take this as more evidence in support of my earlier assertion that dedicated book reading hardware is not useful for customer who also carry other devices such as smart phones or tablets, and that multi-purpose devices will win out in the not-so-distant future.
I was excited to see annotations mentioned in the description of the updated Papers app for the iPad, but was disappointed in the execution. They added two kinds of annotations: text notes and highlighted passages. While both are useful for active reading and appropriate given the characteristics of the device, the implementation left a lot to be desired.
Hereford Cathedral Chained Library, Hereford, England
I came across an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on St. Leo’s University, whose library is investing heavily in electronic titles for its students. This makes sense for them because a large number of their students are off-campus (and perhaps even off-continent). The article didn’t go into much detail on how students would actually read these books (other than to mention “computers, smartphones, and iPads”). I expect that most of the interaction with the books will consist of clicking on links in a browser, without the benefit of interfaces for active reading.
What intrigued me more were the comments, particularly the one by zenbrarian, who pointed out that the way these e-libraries are typically implemented is by the library obtaining electronic access to titles without actually hosting the books themselves. It makes sense if a library doesn’t want to get too deeply into the IT business, but it does mean that the publish not only retains the right to jack up the fees at will, but also maintains control over who gets to read the books.
Large companies often find it difficult to innovate, but not for lack of trying. Most major corporations have regular means by which new product or product line ideas are vetted. Unfortunately, such processes are designed to select incremental improvements to existing products and services, rather than to introduce radically new offerings. One significant reason for this is that when senior management considers a new idea, they often look at the revenue stream, and compare it, implicitly, with revenue streams from existing (successful) products. Proposed products that are not immediately comparable in their revenue streams with existing product lines are often not approved.
This is the trap of success. A company learns how to do something well, and then gets stuck in that rut. When the market changes, few companies are able to systematically get out of that rut and regain their past levels of success in new areas. IBM’s reliance on mainframe computing, Xerox’s on xerography patents, and Microsoft’s ignoring the Internet for a long time are examples of companies that actually managed to survive these painful transitions; many other companies did not.
This analogy applies to research as well.
Not having gone to SIGIR 2010, I missed Gary Flake’s keynote address, in which he described and demonstrated Microsoft Pivot, a zoomable, faceted search interface that his group built. Jeff Dalton has a good summary of the talk, which parallels Gary’s previous presentations, including a TED talk (video below). The demos are pretty slick, and the scale at which the system operates is impressive.
In some ways, his emphasis on rich clients and interactive control over large, pre-computed datasets, is a great illustration of HCIR principles. The user is encouraged to explore by making fluid, immediate, reversible operations over large data sets with the goal of finding useful information.
Miles Efron wrote about a research project he is starting on statistical processing of 17th and 18th century English texts with the goal of establishing similarities between passages written with different spelling and vocabulary. This is a problem that humanities scholars might have when applying modern information retrieval tools to historical texts, as accepted English spelling and vocabulary was considerably more varied that it is now. (For a fun read about some of the issues, see Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue on the history of the English language.)
Just a short note to point at two articles on Facebook that discuss issues relating to streaming media and the home. It is a continuing frustration that the vendors are not building the open environment we all want. No surprise there. But it is interesting that even when a vendor (Apple) has many of the required pieces it does not put them together well.
First note: my posting about the Sonos system I have installed at home. I am a big fan of Sonos – we now use our iPad sitting by the TV to control it. Now, if we could just get control and inter-operation between more devices.
Second note: Surendar Chandra has an interesting take on how Apple has all the pieces needed to make for a better environment but they don’t seem to do it.