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Beware phishing attempt: Google Wallet for Business Beta

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:18:50 +0000

A new “phishing” attempt that is circulating is an invitation to install what appears to be a beta development of Google Wallet, called Google Wallet for Business Beta. The invitation arrives as an e-mail and looks very convincing. At the bottom is a “copyright” statement:

©2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 You received this email because A Google Wallet user [soch0653] has requested to pay you using Google wallet. . Wallet For Business Beta is available free for a limited time. If you choose not to complete registration you will not receive further email communication from Google regarding your invitation.

Consign it to the wastebin — it is an attempt to discover your credit card details and relieve you of money!

FraudWatch International maintains a regularly-updated guide to phishing attempts: http://www.fraudwatchinternational.com/phishing/index.php

Beware phishing attempt: Google Wallet for Business Beta is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Google at thirteen

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:13:24 +0000

Did you notice what happened on Tuesday? Google celebrated its thirteenth birthday! In a thought-provoking piece, Danny Goodwin acknowledged this moment and reviewed the recent history of Google in order to remind us that the “terrible teens” can affect companies and organisations as well as people. His article, in Search Engine Watch of 27 September 2011, identifies twelve major developments that have occurred during the previous year and warns that these may be symptomatic of the behaviour of the search engine company in the future. In a summarising comment, Goodwin says, “Google faced several lows – luring Bing into public fights, revealing their Facebook envy, releasing baffling algorithmic improvements, facing public humiliation in the form of mainstream news stories calling out the quality of Google’s results, and relinquishing $500 million for accepting advertising from online Canadian pharmacies, but also had several highs – Google bought several shiny new companies (retail therapy?), Larry Page returned to his role as CEO and cleaned house, Google saw record revenues, Google introduced a suite of Instant products, and Android continued to grow”.

Google at thirteen is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Citation mapping

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 06:00:41 +0000

Bibliometrics is an information science technique that aims to show the relationships between documents; however, the results have often been difficult to understand and the real meaning obscured by mathematical and statistical relationships. A new approach is being developed by three researchers at the University of Washington, United States of America: Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West and Martin Rosvall. the essence of the work is to develop a mapping technique that can be used to capture the associations between patterns of citations and, thus, to map relationships. In her article of 11 September 2011, Jennifer Howard explains the origin and reasons for developing the technique (Citation by citation, new maps chart hot research and scholarship’s hidden terrain, Chronicle of higher education, 13 September 2011). Their system, InfoMap, makes use of a statistical technique called “Eigenfactors” that provides a rather more sensitive measure than the Journal Impact Factor that has been so widely used. The researchers aim to make their system freely and easily available. Rosvall and Bergstrom’s paper about the technique as applied to the development of neuroscience, Mapping change in large networks (PLoSONE, 5(1) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008694) explains the technique and highlights its advantages.

Citation mapping is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

DuckDuckGo receives plaudits

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 06:08:31 +0000

DuckDuckgo, the search engine that offers searching without snooping, has been selected by Time Magazine as one of the fifty best websites of 2011. The search engine was launched in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg and is remarkable in having only one full-time employee! It has built its reputation on offering excellent searching and allied this with the promise that searches will not be tracked and recorded — many search engines, including Google, keep records of searches and link them to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses so searches emanating from a particular computer can be tracked.

DuckDuckGo receives plaudits is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Happy birthday PC . . . but is it also “Goodbye”?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 10:43:47 +0000

Mark Dean, chief Technology Officer of IBM’s Middle East and Africa Division notes the birthday of the IBM PC, released on 12 August,thirty years ago. As a member of the original development team he is well-placed to comment on the past and the future of the PC which, he says, is heading towards obsolescence: “My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing. They’re going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs”. He also comments, “PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device—though there’s plenty of excitement about smart phones and tablets—but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress. These days, it’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact. It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives”.

Happy birthday PC . . . but is it also “Goodbye”? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Computer, give me . . .

Peter G. Underwood — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:24:03 +0000

Here we are on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise; “Computer, give me a list of the planets with more than 75% of surface covered with water”. Moments later, the reply comes back. Far-fetched? Perhaps, at the moment, but a computer scientist at the University of Washington, Oren Etzioni, has suggested that this is where strong investment in natural-language query processing systems would pay off handsomely. His article in the journal Nature (4 August, 476: 25-26) provides some powerful arguments in favour of experimentation and further research into ways in which searching of electronic and other sources can be radically improved. Perhaps it will be some years before the voice-controlled search is possible — but major improvements in the way in which searches are conducted would be a step towards improved information management.

Computer, give me . . . is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

A fresh round of cuts at Google!

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:09:56 +0000

Rob Young, in his blog entry of 2 August, “7 Google Projects shut down in the Page era (the Google friends newsletter is the latest)“, on Search engine watch lists seven Google Projects that have been shut down by Larry Page, who took over the running of Google in April 2011. Some of them, such as the “Google friends newsletter”, are unlikely to be missed but others, such as the withdrawal of the Firefox browser bar, are inexplicable decisions. Google Translate has gone, as has Google Labs, which often provided interesting small-scale applications for testing and experimentation. Is Google redefining its “core business”? If so, what else will vanish?

A fresh round of cuts at Google! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Journal package costs and benefits

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 09:38:49 +0000

The Research Libraries UK Group (RLUK) has announced the development of a tool to analyse the cost-benefit of various approaches to journal subscription. The research underpinning the tool has been spurred-on by the decision of some aggregators of journal titles to offer large and, apparently, attractive collections of journals at a keen price. The problem with this approach to pricing has always been for the library or information service manager who knows that only part of the “package” will, in fact, be used. The RLUK model “allows members to carefully analyse the value-for-money of publisher packages and to determine whether there would be cost savings to be made from moving back to title-by-title purchasing. The model allows each member to combine pricing information with the usage their community makes of the relevant journals. The library can then alter the combination of title-by-title subscriptions and document delivery options and compare the costs of these combinations to the cost of the big deals”. It is, as yet, unclear whether the model will be released for use by non-members of the RLUK; if it is not, it would be a very useful idea to be developed for use within the South African consortia.

Journal package costs and benefits is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The skill set is changing!

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:00:51 +0000

In his blog entry on Information today (Europe) of 22 July 2011, John Davies of TaskForceProLibra (TFPL), discusses research that uncovers trends in the design of roles and skill requirements in the information sector. In particular, he draws attention to the way in which knowledge management and information management are coalescing. He comments, “One of the outcomes [of the research] was the identification of knowledge and information management (KIM) as a single discipline that would unify and replace information management (IM) and knowledge management (KM)”.

The full report Connecting information with innovation may be downloaded from the TFPL site.

The skill set is changing! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Enterprise risk: the role of information management

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:13:22 +0000

Pat Bryant, a recent speaker at the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange (NetIKX) Information Risk Management Workshop (London, 19 July 2011), emphasised that information is not only a resource, the value of which needs to be enhanced through proper management, but is also a resource that can lead to harm if it is not properly managed, as the recent events at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation graphically demonstrate.

Some important guidelines are:

concealing information (“top secret’) creates silos and can create the impression that it has been hidden for a reason — this encourages attempts to discover it and thus discredit the organisation;
paradoxically, organisations tend not to be very successful at managing boundaries between information sectors — much more can be gained by creating a culture of transparency;
a key role in an organisation is the manager of information — and this is an appointment that should be considered carefully.

Further comment can be seen in the Information today blog (Europe) for 20 July 2011, by Pat Skelton.

Enterprise risk: the role of information management is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates