I gave a talk today at the European Business Schools Librarians’ Group Annual Conference. The title was "Get on the Net so I can link to you: Academic search and findability in the age of Google," the slides are here (PDF. 2.8Mb), and the (17Mb, 37 minutes, mp3) podcast is available here.

It can’t be said too often, but Techdirt sums it up yet again: Innovation is an ongoing process, and companies compete by creating a series of fleeting competitive advantages.

When I worked for CSC Research, we used to joke that you could always, during a presentation or in a report, make the point that "X is a process, not an event", and get away with it. Chiefly because, for most values of X, it is true.

Here is a great little video of Fedex planes being routed around a Memphis thunderstorm. Note the change first to shorter approaches and then to holding patterns as the storm moves in over the airport. And more importantly – note how many planes go in and out of that place…

The Becker-Posner blog is a delight, something I have come to appreciate even more after my eldest daughter started studying international politics and economy and Dad needs access to rapid and pointed analysis to hold his own around the dinner table.

Their latest discussion is about leftism in South and Latin America, with Becker starting and Posner adding a few points, primarily about the cultural and even religious angle.

I particularly liked Posner’s take on how democracy works:

Democracy is not a deliberative process (as many academics believe), in the sense that voters examine and discuss issues and so formulate a thoughtful, knowledgeable opinion on what policies are right for the nation or for them. Voters have neither the time, the education, nor the inclination for such an activity, as intellectuals imagine. All they know is results. So if the Right fails to deliver on its promises, the Left takes over, whether or not it has better or even different policies.

Blogging is a conversation, and Becker and Posner’s conversations are better than most.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a Norwegian-language article for the newspaper Aftenposten, called 11 reasons to chose math (11 grunner til Ã¥ velge matte). I aimed the piece at parents who need to convince their teenagers that doing math in high school is smart, even if you don’t want to become an engineer or a math teacher. It was rather successful, as these things go, here in Norway: I had more feedback (all of it positive) than anything else I have written, have been invited by the Department of Education to plan strategies for getting more youngsters into the natural sciences, and the piece itself was on the top 10 list of most forwarded articles in this newspaper for three weeks running (I picture parents frantically forwarding this to MSN and Yahoo accounts.) I think one reason was that I actually said right out that if you learn math, you will, on average, make more money. Something you don’t say out loud to young people in a country as obsessively egalitarian as Norway.

So – I translated it, padded it out with an additional point (on math as creativity) by Jon Holtan, a mathematician, and it has now been republished in ACM Ubiquity as Why you should choose math in high school. For your forwarding pleasure – should you have a petulant teenager aiming for an education of the softer kind, sic this thing on him or her.

At least you tried.

Update March 28: In addition to having been blogged by Cory, the essay was briefly mentioned in New York Times online.

Update, much later: …and, eventually, quoted by Tom Friedman in the 2nd edition of The World is Flat.

Harvard Magazine has a good introductory article on behavioral economics (with sidebars). I liked the idea that the field should have been called cognitive economics – makes sense, with fewer pigeon connotations.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

More good videos from MIT: Stephen Wolfram speaks on his widely discussed and sublimely idiosyncratic tome A new kind of science. Exciting stuff, though I am still only halfway through and need to think carefully about what I hear – the transition from understanding snowflakes as modelled by cellular automata to more abstract examples takes some thinking.

Update two days later: This really is a great video, best absorbed in small increments. The book is fascinating, first from the viewpoint of "Wow!, how could someone spend 10 years of his time doing only this?" (aside from being CEO of a company), but a lot gets answered in the video – Stephen Wolfram is no crank, for one thing, and does not claim to have found the answer to anything. Only a new and very interesting branch of something between formal mathematics and computer (or, at least, computational) science. Makes me want to get Mathematica and start playing with patterns…

The flip side, of course, you can see from reading the reviews at Amazon, which alter between five stars and one, the latter claiming he is taking credit for lots of papers and ideas that others have produced before him. It seems to me that the five stars are by people who are relatively new to the subject, and the ones are by people who have studied some of it – meaning that in a sense, Stephen Wolfram may be the Bill Gates of computational science – not the one to come up with the idea, but certainly the one that managed to pull off the instantiation that made the difference. I guess history will be the judge. I for one found this fun – and until the chips fall down, enjoy the ride…

Side note: My wife, who does knitting and quilting, found the book fascinating because of the many interesting patterns it describes. Which got me thinking about whether it is possible to reprogram a knitting machine to do cellular automata.

Mike over at Techdirt makes the point that it is time European politicians stop talking about creating the European version of MIT or Google or whatever and instead start to think about making the next version of something. Hard not to agree. Then again, the label "European" is mostly stuck on projects to make them fundable by the EU – not because they are European in any specific sense aside from name.

Brad Delong has an excellent review of Ben Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, which really sounds like required reading for any politician or student of international economy. I especially like his conclusion about what the structural changes currently happening in the USA are doing:

The desirability of the United States as a place in which to locate economic activity is growing rapidly: the underlying engine of technological progress is spinning faster than it has in at least a generation. I see rising working- and middle-class incomes in America during the next generation generating what is in Friedman’s terms a virtuous, not a vicious, circle.

Via Brad himself, incidentally.

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), a team at George Mason University is developing Firefox Scholar, an academically oriented reference harvester for Firefox. Boy, would this be a godsend – I spend way too much time entering references by hand into my Endnote database. The tool is meant to replace Endnote – I am not sure I am ready to replace that very useful tool, but I sure would like to have some interoperability.

Bonus: When looking up Dan Cohen, I found this great history site with a list of what seems to me very interesting research tools.Not to mention that Dan has one of the best designs for an academic web page I have ever seen – excellent combination of blog and archive site. Something to emulate.

(Via Edupage)

Some years ago (December 1998, according to my email archive) I participated in an online discussion on the ISWORLD mailing list, about what an information system really is. I posted this story, which I had heard told somewhere but never found a source for:

A CEO with hotel chain A found himself having to spend a night in a hotel from hotel chain B. Naturally, he was very curious as to what kind of information systems they had, and resolved to keep an open eye for competitive use of IT. As he approached the reception for first time, the woman behind it smiled at him and said "Welcome back, Sir!"

Flabbergasted, he said "But…it is 12 years since I was here last! How could you know that I have stayed here before, what kind of advanced information systems do you have that can store and find the fact that I was here 12 years ago?"

"Well, it is really very simple", she said. "When the doorman opened the door to your cab, he asked if this was your first stay with us. You answered no, and as you walked through the door, the doorman looked at me through the window and touched his nose. That told me that you should be welcomed back…."

Moral of the story: Information systems don’t have to mean information technology (at least not digital information technology)…. 

I was going to use this story in a paper I am writing, did a Desktop Google search for it – and found it not only in my email file, but also on a number of web pages (here and here, in addition to a previous story here).

It is kind of fascinating to see how these things move, but I still don’t know the real source of that story – does anyone?

(And incidentally, this story is an excellent teaching device…) 

Thomas Crampton guestblogs at Joi Ito’s place about how there are regional differences in e-commerce usage patterns (based on his article in International Herald Tribune.)

Actually, I am not surprised that there are differences – but I was a little surprised that online purchasing was so low in the States compared to Europe. Europeans don’t use credit cards to the same extent as Americans do – both because they trust them less and because debit cards are more common (but not yet ported to the Net). I also think that US shoppers use the telephone for shopping much more than in Europe (thus causing underreporting of e-commerce numbers) – credit cards can be used over the phone in the US, but not normally in Europe. The infrastructure for physical goods transportation is much better in the US (thanks to UPS and Fedex), meaning that telephone and mail orders shopping was developed earlier and over a larger area. I also agree with the mall hypothesis – not only are malls easier available in the US, but they also tend to have more inventory and greater selection, rather than running out of winter coats in early December like they do here in Norway.

Regional differences come both from culture and from differences in timing of introduction of technologies. Credit cards were slow in Europed because the giro payment system was introduced (obviating paper checks) which allowed fast interbank clearance and interoperable debit cards. Cellphones were standardized earlier in Europe because the countries were smaller and needed roaming agreements. Cell phones grew faster in Europe because the fixed line phones were more expensive (the local call is still metered in most of Europe), because voice mail and 800 numbers did not catch on until late, and because the mobile phone market was a competitive almost from the start. In the US, with larger land areas, coverage was worse and the alternative for the consumer (800 numbers, pay phones and phone cards, and voice mail) was seen as adequate for a long time. In Japan, the high degree of Internet surfing via cell phone was due to a proprietary and almost monopolistic player offering all layers in the function stack – and the fact that many Japanese spend long hours on public transportation and have time to surf at 9600 bps.

Consumers are sensible, but a little slow. They use what works best for them. And what works best differs by country, for reasons of culture and history. Even under Web 2.0. 

Richard Posner argues that elite universities should raise tuition and then pay it back according to whether students work full time, to combat the perceived problem of super-educated mummy-trackers which recently seems to have ruffled a few feathers.

I for one think this is one area we can safely let people work out by themselves – the net effect of a pay-and-get-back policy would be to reduce the number of women applying for elite schools, and that is sure not a worthwhile outcome, even though the utilitarian economic case Posner makes (and it seems a bit tongue-in-cheek) has merit. That’s why economics is fun – you can rile people with logical arguments.

Well, I am sure this will be pointed out in spades – but I would like to point out that some schools do this already, for doctoral programs at least. When I did my DBA at the business school, I was supported by a loan from the school, 20% of which was forgiven every year after graduation as long as I was working full time in a degree-granting academic institution. That worked – it was a factor for me when deciding to teach, as for, I think, most of my classmates, rather than to work full-time in consulting. The benefit to the school, of course, was that a higher proportion of its graduates go into teaching than otherwise would have (given that the school has a practice-oriented reputation, that might increase its scholarly standing). For the students that do chose to go into consulting or other non-academic work, the pay differnential finances the loan payback anyway – and the school knows that it is not spending money educating super-consultants.

The ‘Intelligent Design’ Hoax is a great refutation (one of many) of the current claptrap making its way into education. I liked the web site it is on, too: The Textbook League leaves no stone unturned in exposing vague, fake, and feel-good pieces in text books.
Another benefit is that this site has a copy of my favorite cartoon – reproduced here. For another bonus, read Richard Feynmann’s account of how textbooks are approved.

Came across the SCIgen page at MIT, complete with its own fantastically hilarious blog. This is a computer program that generates computer science papers randomly. The three students behind this program even got a paper accepted at a conference, and then went to the conference where they gave three randomly generated talks.
I am not sure what this indicates, other than that the “publish or perish” system seems to generate some seriously deficient reviewing. There seems to be a market out there for weird conferences (always held in attractive locations) with vague (but long) titles, as well as truly obscure journals. Time to clamp down at some point?
Anyway, kudos to the SCIgen guys – now all they need to do is get published, as was done in the Sokal affair. Wonderful.

Very thorough and interesting paper from Eugene Volokh on Crime-facilitating speech – that is, where (and how) do you draw the line between free speech and speech that should be banned because it facilitates crime. Many examples, from flashing your lights to warn approaching cars about a speed control to publishing nuclear secrets.
I particulary enjoyed the up-to-date references to computer technology and software – there aren’t many law professors (and even fewer regulators) who can discuss law and technology to this level.
An interesting aspect here might be how the revlution in information access changes the rules – since anything published can be instantly found on the Internet (thus removing obscurity as a defence), this would argue for a limitation of certain rights of speech. On the other hand, rapid publishing might be a good defence against evolving crime – such as publishing software insecurities so users can block them, which will also alert criminals and expose the users who don’t block immediately to an increased risk.
Anyway, I never thought I would see the term “script kiddies” in a serious academic paper, especially in law, so this was welcome.
(Via Ed Felten)

Bruce Schneier, renowned cryptography and security expert, has had personal experience of plagiarism, by three Pakistani academics in, of all things, an ACM publication. The reaction of ACM – seemingly, they have no policy about plagiarism and therefore cannot ban the authors from submitting again – seems rather strange to me.
I have some experience with plagiarism, though mostly by students. When teaching at night school some years ago, I caught half a class in plagiarizing, with some students expelled as a result – and I wrote a letter to CACM about the experience. In those days I had to sift through Lexis/Nexis to find the copied text.
Times have changed. At the Norwegian School of Management, we have started to run student papers through a tool called SafeAssignment which seems to work well – it gives me as a teacher a score for plagiarism for each paper submitted (matched against anything on the Web + all papers previously submitted to SafeAssignment). The match is “fuzzy”, and catches even those students who thought they could get things in by changing a just a few words.
Most of the effect is probably preventive – students refrain from plagiarizing for fear of being caught. But I have caught students plagiarizing with this tool and have also used it for control of suspicious papers. It is much less work-intensive than the “pick a prominent sentence and Google it” technique, and seems to catch most copying. Of course, you have to manually check every suspicious paper, since the score can be driven up by quite legitimate quoting.
But why stop at students? I think (as an ACM member and author) that ACM should institute as a policy that they run all received submissions through a tool like Turnitin or SafeAssignment – this will immediately catch flagrant plagiarism such as the one reported by Bruce. In fact, it would be a fun excercise to run all ACMs published papers through a plagarism tool – or, why not, every academic paper ever published….
Google’s strategy is to “organize the world’s information”. Eliminating plagiarism would be an interesting advancement of that strategy – after all, plagiarized material does not really add information, except about the plagiarizer. In the long run, we should have everything back to first normal form, with no copies – just links…..
(And yes, parts of this text is plagiarized from my own comment in Bruce’s blog. At least I acknowledge it, and have extended it….)