COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository Interoperability
Friedrich Summann, Kathleen Shearer, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), 2015/02/12

Getting online resource providers to cooperate is like the pulling of proverbial teeth. Still, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has a roadmap which takes us a little further along that path. And they see new roles for these services: "Increasingly, repositories are also being integrated with other systems, such as research administrative systems and with research data repositories, with the aim of providing a more integrated and seamless suite of services to various communities."

[Link] [Comment]

Citation-Based Document Categorization: An Approach Using Artificial Neural Networks
Magali Rezende Gouvêa Meireles, Beatriz Valadares Cendón, Qualitative, Quantitative Methods in Libraries, 2015/02/12

Meaning, said Ludwig Wittgenstein, is use. So the meaning of an academic paper would be how it is used, and the most common use of a paper is represented via citations. So instead of categorizing papers through their contents, which mixes together the useful and the useless, a categorization system based on citations might be more interesting. This paper uses neural networks to identify use-based clusters by drawing on citation data, which results in new categorizations distinct from what we might find in content based categorizations using titles and keywords. Good stuff, clearly written, part of the just-released special issue of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries focusing on bibliometrics.

[Link] [Comment]

Samsung's smart TVs are inserting unwanted ads into users' own movies
James Vincent, The Verge, 2015/02/12

What you should be thinking about when you see an article like this is not how bad Samsung is (and how bad Pepsi and Yahoo are) but how you feel about this. It's an important usability point. If we think advertisements like this are off-putting when viewing commercial content, such as movies, imagine how it would feel when your lecture on nucleonics is interrupted for a giant 16:9 Pepsi advertisement. One problem (by no means the only problem) with advertisements in courses is that they would disrupt the flow of a learning experience, leaving you only able to focus on one-liners and the laugh track - just like TV. P.S. the wording of the Yahoo permissions form is a lesson in disjunctive logic.

[Link] [Comment]

Innovation Imperative: Meet Generation Z
Northeastern University, 2015/02/12

University Business tells us that, according to this report, Generation Z wants to design their own learning programs. "The majority of Gen-Zers think col­leges should allow stu­dents to design their own majors, should integrate practical experience into programs and should offer skills like financial planning." I happen to this this is a good idea so of course I'll take this uncritically as conforming my pre-existing beliefs. And... whoa, wait. Maybe not that. What is this Generation Z? What Northwestern has done is survey a (subset of) American youth aged 16-19. We are told "these teenagers reflect the American public as a whole." If so, then 25 percent of Americans are upper-middle or upper class (that's probably why so many of them are interested in 'financial literacy' and more than half of them are not concerned about climate change). So, this isn't a generation (which is 20 years, not 3), and not representative of anything except, maybe, the next class of American college students.

[Link] [Comment]