The wisdom of ages

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Today’s Observer has my “Everything you need to know…” piece which encapsulates some of the stuff in the book I’ve been working on. I particularly like one of the comments:

This article reads as if it is written by an 80 year old for other 80 year olds. Something to talk about at bingo.

LATER: Generous comment from Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing:

John Naughton’s feature in today’s Observer, “The internet: Everything you ever need to know,” is a fantastic read and a marvel of economy, managing to pack nine very big ideas into 15 minutes’ reading. This is the kind of primer you want to slide under your boss’s door.

Ulysses app causes Apple to blush

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last Wednesday, 16 June, was Bloomsday, a day revered by admirers of James Joyce the world over. It's celebrated because 16 June 1904 is the day in which all the action in Joyce's novel Ulysses takes place. Readers follow the perambulations around Dublin of the book's endearing hero, a freelance advertisement-seller named Leopold Bloom, who is tactfully keeping out of the way while his wife is being unfaithful to him in the marital home at No 7 Eccles Street.

Bloomsday celebrations take many forms but usually involve readings from the novel, and often the consumption of food and drink (gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy, for example, in honour of Bloom’s lunchtime fare). This year there was an added frisson to the festivities, for it transpired that Apple, a company not hitherto noted for its interest in modernist literature, had been paying close attention to the content of Joyce’s great work…

AOL offloads Bebo – for ‘exceptionally uninspiring number’

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For anyone seeking perspective on the social-networking business, the news that AOL has sold Bebo for what sounds like a fire-sale price should be required reading.

AOL is set to reap an "exceptionally uninspiring" sum for Bebo, the moribund social networking site for which it paid $850m just two years ago.

The Wall Street Journal says a sale could be announced today, with the likely buyer Criterion Capital Partners LLC of Studio City California. This is an interesting location – a suburb of LA nowhere near Silicon Valley.

The deal was confirmed this afternoon, though no details of the price were revealed.

The buyer apparently specialises in turning around companies with revenues of $3m to $30m, which doesn't say too much for the state of Bebo.

Still, it's AOL that is taking a bath on the deal. The journal, ahead of the official announcement, quoted one source familiar with the negotiations who said AOL's price was "an exceptionally uninspiring number" with almost total "value destruction".

As the say in the small print, the value of investments may go down as well as up.

Cape Cod is tweeting

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Interesting glimpse of what you can do with a combination of sensors and Twitter. From Tech Review.

If you want to know whether or not the tides are high enough to get your sloop out of Ockway Bay in Cape Cod, you could consult NOAA's tide tables. Trouble is, less'n you're a pipe-smoking old-timer who's handy with the lobster cages and a sextant, they're as likely to get you stuck going in and out of the bay as they are to tell you, with sufficient accuracy, whether the already-shallow draft below your boat is enough to let you safely navigate the muddy shoals of your home port.

That's where the internet comes in, and not the kind that's stuck behind a desk, twiddling with an iPad – we're talking about the Internet of Things. Using an ultrasonic level sensor to bounce sound waves off the sea surface in order to determine its height, an XBee radio to send that data to a receiver on shore, and most importantly, an ioBridge IO-204 to relay that information to servers in the cloud, Cape Cod resident and ioBridge hobbyist Robert Mawrey is able to broadcast to his entire community near real-time data on actual sea level.

Actually, in this particular case, the Americans are just catching up. See, for example, the stuff that Andy Stanford-Clark has been doing with south coast ferries.

Tony Blair, technophile (for a fee)

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This morning’s Observer column.

“Blair to join venture firm as adviser on technology” said the headline in the New York Times. Eh? The first thing that came to mind is the celebrated story of the emperor Caligula and his attempts to have his horse, Incitatus, appointed as a consul. Anyone familiar with our former prime minister’s encounters with technology one thinks, for example, of the time he tried to order flowers for Cherie over the web will have been puzzled by this development. Tony has many talents, but the one thing he doesn't do is technology.

So who’s playing Caligula in this particular farce? Answer: Vinod Khosla, an Indian-American venture capitalist with impeccable academic and technology credentials, who now runs a $1bn fund that invests in ‘green’ technology aka cleantech and IT…

The economics of peer review

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My Open University colleague Martin Weller has done some interesting calculations of the cost of the academic peer-review process.

Peer-review is one of the great unseen tasks performed by academics. Most of us do some, for no particular reward, but out of a sense of duty towards the overall quality of research. It is probably a community norm also, as you become enculturated in the community of your discipline, there are a number of tasks you perform to achieve, and to demonstrate, this, a number of which are allied to publishing: Writing conference papers, writing journal articles, reviewing.

So it's something we all do, isn't really recognised and is often performed on the edges of time. It's not entirely altruistic though – it is a good way of staying in touch with your subject (like a sort of reading club), it helps with networking (though we have better ways of doing this now don't we?) and we also hope people will review our own work when the time comes. But generally it is performed for the good of the community (the Peer Review Survey 2009 states that the reason 90% reviewers gave for conducting peer review was "because they believe they are playing an active role in the community")

It’s a labour that is unaccounted for. The Peer Review Survey doesn’t give a cost estimate (as far as I can see), but we can do some back of the envelope calculations. It says there are 1.3 million peer-reviewed journals published every year, and the average (modal) time for review is 4 hours. Most articles are at least double-reviewed, so that gives us:

Time spent on peer review = 1,300,000 x 2 x 4 = 10.4 million hours

This doesn’t take into account editor’s time in compiling reviews or chasing them up, we’ll just stick with the ‘donated’ time of academics for now. In terms of cost, we'd need an average salary, which is difficult globally. I’ll take the average academic salary in the UK, which is probably a touch on the high side. The Times Higher gives this as £42,000 per annum, before tax, which equates to £20.19 per hour. So the cost with these figures is:

20.19 x 10,400,000 = £209,976,000

Martin points out the implication of this — that academics are donating over £200 million a year of their time to the peer review process. “This isn’t a large sum when set against things like the budget deficit”, he continues,

“but it’s not inconsiderable. And it’s fine if one views it as generating public good – this is what researchers need to do in order to conduct proper research. But an alternative view is that academics (and ultimately taxpayers) are subsidising the academic publishing to the tune of £200 million a year. That’s a lot of unpaid labour.

Now that efficiency and return on investment are the new drivers for research, the question should be asked whether this is the best way to ‘spend’ this money? I’d suggest that if we are continuing with peer review (and its efficacy is a separate argument), then the least we should expect is that the outputs of this tax-payer funded activity should be freely available to all.

And so, my small step in this was to reply to the requests for reviews stating that I have a policy of only reviewing for open access journals. I’m sure a lot of people do this as a matter of course, but it’s worth logging every blow in the revolution. If we all did it….”

Yep.