Reading books

One advantage of flying to the US is the chance to do some reading. At Newark (EWR) I picked up Guy Kawasaki's "Reality Check", which is a fun read. You can get a flavour of the book from this presentation Guy gave in 2006.



While at MIT for the Elsevier Challenge I was browsing in the MIT book shop and stumbled across "Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge" by Frenchman Jean-Noël Jeanneney. It's, um, very French. I have some sympathy with his argument, but ultimately it comes across as European whining about American success. And the proposed solution involves that classic European solution -- committees! In many ways it's really a librarian complaing about Google (again), which librarians just need to get over:



OK, I'm not really doing the arguments justice, but I'm getting a little tired of European efforts that are essentially motivated by "well the Americans are doing this, so we need to do something as well."

Lastly, I also bought Linda Hill's "Georeferencing: The Geographic Associations of Information", which is a little out of date (what, no Google Maps or Google Earth?), but is nevertheless an interesting read, and has lots of references to georeferencing in biodiversity informatics. Given that my efforts for the challenge in this area where so crude, it's something I need to think about a bit more deeply.

Now, if I can just find my gate...

Elsevier Challenge

Stata Center. MIT
Originally uploaded by Roderic Page

Quick post about the Elsevier Challenge, which took place yesterday in the wonderful Stata Center at MIT. It was a great experience. Cool venue, interesting talks, probing questions (having a panel of judges ensured that everybody got feedback/queries). Some talks (like mine) were more aspirational (demos of what could be done), others, such as Sean O'Donoghue's talk on Reflect, and Stephen Wan's on CSBIS (see "In-Browser Summarisation: Generating Elaborative Summaries Biased Towards the Reading Context") were systems that Elsevier could plug in to their existing Science Direct product (and hence are my picks to go forward to the last round).

I was typically blunt in my talk, especially about how useless Science Direct's "2collab" and "Related articles" features were. Rafael Sidi is not unsympathetic to this, and I think despite their status as the Microsoft of publishing (for the XBox crowd, that's a Bad Thing™), the Elsevier people at the meeting were genuinely interested in changing things, and exploring how best to disseminate knowledge. There's hope for them yet! Oh, and special thanks to Anita de Ward and Noelle Gracy for organising the meeting, and the smooth running of the Challenge.