Cuban aid in Haiti

Here's a story you don't read much about - Cuban doctors and medical workers are doing more work to relieve the cholera and earthquake victims in Haiti and workers from any other country.  Read about it in today's Independent on Sunday I wonder why we hear so little about Cuba's aid work around the world? Could it be that the US government is unhappy to hear any good news about that little island?  I have heard nothing about this on BBC radio or TV, or any other UK TV channel - and yet it's a big story. One bit that the UK government will not like to hear (besotted as it is by anything American) is this:

Imti Choonara, a paediatrician from Derby, leads a delegation of international health professionals at annual workshops in Cuba's third city, Camaguey. "Healthcare in Cuba is phenomenal, and the key is the family doctor, who is much more proactive, and whose focus is on prevention ... The irony is that Cubans came to the UK after the revolution to see how the NHS worked. They took back what they saw, refined it and developed it further; meanwhile we are moving towards the US model,"

One thing is for sure: the longer the US maintains its stance of having nothing to do with Cuba, the better it will be for Cuba.  The moment US business interests are allowed into Cuba, the values that support this kind of aid will begin to disappear and Cuba would be on its way to becoming another Puerto Rico.

The future of newspapers

There's a very thoughtful article by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books on the future of newspapers.  Basically, his point is that newspapers are going to get rid of their print editions - the big costs of printing and distribution simply are not being met by the current level of ad income and especially since classified ads moved to the Web.  I recall, in the late 90s being at a conference organized by a management consultant friend of mine.  Present was the owner of a local newspaper chain from the mid-West of the USA.  I asked him what he was doing about the threat of the Internet - he replied that he didn't see the main source of his income, classified ads, disappearing.  I wonder what he is doing now and what he might have been doing had he listened to what I was saying?  So, I agree with Lanchester - newspapers would find it cheaper to go totally digital and give away e-readers to those who subscribed.  Lanchester suggests some form of micro-payment and argues that people will be willing to pay to read selected material. Possibly. I think, however, they are going to have to be smarter at negotiating deals with all kinds of advertisers and Web services in addition to making it easy to pay for content you enjoy.

The blog gets listed

I received an e-mail today telling me that this blog has been ranked number 7 in a list of interesting information science blogs.

I recommend taking a look at the list, there's some interesting stuff there that I hadn't known about previously.

Giving open access a bad name

I am continually being pestered to review papers for journals that are quite outside the scope of my interests from editorial assistants working for the open access publisher Academic Journals.  I imagine that I am not the only one suffering in this way and the publisher ought to understand that this practice is damaging the open access movement.  Clearly, the people involved have no idea of how to select referees for papers and are presumably relying on a mailing list developed by the publisher without reference to the range of interests of the people involved.  The latest was a request to review for the International Journal of Peace and Development Studies a paper on "Creating space for community-based conservation initiatives (CBCIs) in conventional academics" - I assume that "academies" is intended here.  The paper would need an enormous amount of language editing to make it suitable for any Western journal and my impression is (judging from papers in other journals from this publisher) that they do not receive that kind of attention. This serves only to feed the notion that open access = low quality.  One can't imagine how these journals (and the publisher's home page lists more than 100 titles) are going to survive.

A nice bit of mail

I was pleased to find in my mail yesterday something of which I had no previous notice.  Apparently, the Bulletin of ASIST, volume 36, no. 3, which celebrated the SIG on Information Behaviour Research, won the 2010 Publication of the Year Award. And, because I contributed a short paper to that issue, I get a Certificate of Recognition!  Now I have to decide if I can find a space on my study wall :-)

Celebrating Archie

This week, the New Scientist magazine celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first attempt to produce a search engine for the Internet.  This was Archie, developed by Alan Emtage and students at McGill University.  The time was pre-Web and the level of disorganization on Internet sites was even greater than that of Web sites today, so it didn't work very well :-)

The feature in the New Scientist (only available if you subscribe - or buy the paper copy) is not a very coherent study - basically it's a set of "windows', each by a different person, plugging a particular point of view - not the best technology journalism you've ever read.  It's suggested that all kinds of development are in train, and no doubt they are, but will any of these new Google killers every amount to anything?

It's instructive to follow the time chart on page 49, which shows the emergence of Cuil and WikiSearch... and their decease a couple of years later (or in the case of WikiSearch, even earlier).  The fact is that, to get anywhere near challenging Google (assuming you do so before Google buys you up) the technology investment required is enormous.  This is not a low cost of entry business and you are going to have to produce something pretty miraculous to get venture funding that would enable you to grow - fast!

There's the usual nod in the direction of yet another promise of semantic search, depending, as ever, on the willingness to Web authors to tag their work with meaningful tags instead stuff like <h2></h2> - and how soon do you think that will happen? Just about as soon as authors and organizations begin to put up validated xhtml.

Never mind, there's one fun graphic on page 46, with the note: "If this spread [i.e., two times A4] was everything on the Internet, the yellow box [2cms x 1cm] would be the surface Web visible to search engines and the red [3mm x 1.5mm] would be the Websites indexed by search engines so far."  So, a little way to go, eh?

Norman Horrocks

I was saddened to learn of the death of Norman Horrocks, a man of wide experience and great kindness. I had been in contact with him only recently, as Norman took it upon himself to advise me of changes in the Web sites of US library and information schools, so that I could update the World list... Norman, born in Manchester, England, had worked all over the world, before settling down at the library school of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and it was in Halifax that he died, at the age of 82.  Norman had worked for military intelligence during the Second World War and he recounted something of his time in that role in a chapter in "Covert and overt", published by Information Today.