Monthly Archives: December 2009

Readability

31 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations

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Readability is an interesting experiment. With one button-click it attempts to auto-detect the interesting/worthwhile content on a web-page, throws out the clutter, and then presents you with that selected content as a simple page of nicely formatted text.

Before (“watch TV, use social medja, read our twits!” — blah!):

After (just read the article):

It’s intended to work on pages which have a decent amount of article text, which you’d like to read comfortably. What it needs now is a neat text-to-speech button addon, which would convert the article to speech and then add it into a combined personal daily podcast*

Running it on the Jurn blog correctly picked the most substantial post currently on the front page, the group test of business search-engines, and just showed me that. I’m impressed. Readability is another pointer (along with the excellent SurfClarity and Stylish FF addons) to a future in which the intelligent user enjoys a robustly ad-blocked, domain-blocked, user-in-control browsing experience. It won’t just be Google’s caffeine update which will be giving webjunk a hard time in 2010.

   * There are some decent SAPI TTS voices out there, believe it or not, and I can highly recommend the American-accented NeoSpeech VW Paul and the British-accented ScanSoft Daniel. If you have such extra voices, to change the default Windows 7 voice you need to delve into: Control Panel – Ease of Access – Ease of Access Center – Start Narrator – Voice Settings – then change your SAPI voice. Or you can use the TextAloud Firefox toolbar, which makes it easy to change voices at the flick of a button — although you’ll still need to edit certain words using the Pronunciation Editor, to get flawless readings.

Google Scholar new feature – highlights free PDFs

29 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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A small addition at Google Scholar. They’re now pulling out a right-hand identifier for the few free PDFs that appear in search results, to distinguish them from paywall PDFs…

Although it does fall down on muse.jhu.edu — which is effectively a paywall site, albeit a worthy one. And I did see one such link for emeraldinsight.com (although most emerald links didn’t have it), so the feature obviously still needs a little more tweaking.

Of course, if you use JURN then you can assume that everything in the results is free. Heh.

Most Obscure Academic Search-Engine of 2009 Award

29 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by in My general observations

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And the winner of the Most Obscure Academic Search-Engine of 2009 Award goes to the… Academic search engine about the Sun Mushroom. Don’t chuckle too much, though. Out of seemingly obscure research can come wonders. As Roger Scruton said in England (2000)…

“Those who make discoveries frequently have no use for them. But almost invariably a use is found, and that which was most useless, and perhaps even valued for its pristine futility, like the theory of the transfinite cardinals, is suddenly revealed to be an indispensable asset of mankind. Who would have supposed that Boole’s algebra and Frere and Russell’s logic would lead to anything more than the rarefied speculations of philosophy? In fact they led in time to the computer revolution.”

Studies on access: a review

23 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in Academic search, Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

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“Studies on access: a review” by Philip M. Davis (20th Dec 2009) is a… “review of the empirical literature on access to scholarly information. This review focuses on surveys of authors, article download and citation analysis”. From the conclusion…

“There is a dearth of research on whether free access to the scientific literature is making a difference in non-research contexts, such as in teaching, medical practice, industry and government policy making.”

   [ Hat-tip: Open Access News ]

A group test of business research engines

21 Monday Dec 2009

Posted by in Academic search, My general observations

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A group-test of business research engines.

Just a quick test, looking for open free texts. I was testing with the term “intrapreneur”.

* Google Scholar:

Only paywall articles on the first page of results. On the second page, one free PDF (“The impact of the library ‘intrapreneur’ on technology”). On the third page, two free PDFs (“Innovation through intrapreneurship: The road less travelled” and “From employees to intrapreneurs”).

* Microsoft Academic Search (indexing almost all science and tech, in beta):

Three papers, all free full-text PDFs not yet available from other engines — “Skunkwork as a learning methodology : findings from venture development projects in industry”; “Behavioral Consequences of an Entrepreneurial Climate”; and “When do ideas survive in organizations?”. In terms of free content for this search, Microsoft is directly comparable to Google Scholar — three results. And, frankly, noticeably better results.

* Google Books:

The first page of 18 results had “limited preview” options for the likely-looking books: Intrapreneuring in action: a handbook for business innovation; Entrepreneurship and the internationalisation of Asian firms; Strategic entrepreneurship‎; Enterprise and small business: principles, practice and policy; and Creating the Intrapreneur: The Search for Leadership Excellence.

* Biznar.com:

I had to add the search modifers -emeraldinsight -metapress -jstor -elsevier -questia to remove a slew of paywall material.

First page of results were all from either the press-agency Reuters or the popular portal BNET (part of FindArticles.com). Second page results were also all from BNET. Third page results were mostly from Reuters, but did include three articles from BusinessWeek — although clicking through on these merely bounced me to the BusinessWeek front-page, not to the article. There was a sidebar option to filter results by publisher. I chose to filter by Google Scholar, but that returned Google Books and paywall journal results (see the Google Scholar test, above).

* FindArticles.com:

There seemed to be some problem with their site scripts, since all results had the title “$result->getTitle()”. There were three likely results when searching only the free articles. These hits were: “Analysis of strategic management of intrapreneurial venture capital and angel capital investments” (2008) from the International Journal of Strategic Management; “Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship and Development: A Practitioner View of Organizational Intrapreneurship” (2007) from the Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship; and “Understanding Intrapreneurship: a Process Model for the Logic of Action Used by Intrapreneurs” (2007) from the now seemingly defunct Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship. Not bad, but other results were just press-releases and/or article-spam material from Market Wire; Black Enterprise; Internet Bookwatch; Malaysian Business; and Deseret News.

* BASE:

37 results from academic repositories. But of the first 12 results tested only one had a full-text PDF associated with it, our old friend from Google Scholar “The Impact of the Library ‘Intrapreneur’ on Technology”. One of the results was actually pay-walled and had an associated shopping-cart(!).

* Open J-Gate (searching peer reviewed journal only, and searching for the word “intrapreneur” only):

Zero results. Surprisingly, there were also zero results when searching just the trade journals.

* DOAJ article search:

Zero results.

* Northern Light Business Research Engine (set to “all” recent news search, searching for the word “intrapreneur” only):

Zero results.

* Google News:

Results from articles in the Times of India, the Patriot Ledger, Western News, Financial Chronicle website (India).

* TicTOCS and JournalTOCS:

Zero results.

* FUSE:

All the results below, from one keyword. All are free and full-text. I’ve since optimised to remove a couple of duplicates, a ‘call for papers’, and one Powerpoint.

DSpace@MIT : The Pursuit of Acquisition Intrapreneurs (2002). Massachusetts Institute of Technology report.

DRIVING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN INTERNAL CORPORATE VENTURES … (2003). Proceedings of the 2003 U.S. Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference.

Fostering Innovation and Intrapreneurship in an R&D Organization (1995). Report for the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare dept.

RELEVANCE OF INTRAPRENEURSHIP IN SMB : THE INFLUENCE OF AGENCY CONFLICTS AND INSTITUTIONALIZED PRACTICES (2008). From USASBE 2008 conference proceedings.

Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs in Corporations (2006). Vikalpa journal. (although painfully mis-titled with the Chomsky quote “Corporations are essentially fascist and incompatible to democracy …”).

Individual Intentions towards Entrepreneurship vs. Intrapreneurship (2008). Paper from the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurs conference.

Innovation through Intrapreneurship: The Road Less Travelled (2006). Vikalpa journal.

Fostering Intrapreneurship : The new Competitive Edge (2008). Paper from the Conference on Global Competition & Competitiveness of Indian Corporates.

The Impact of Intrapreneurial Programs on Fortune 500 Manufacturing Firms (2000). From the Journal of Industrial Teacher Education.

Corporate Social Entrepreneurship (2009). Harvard Business School Working Papers.

THE STRATEGIC ENTREPRENEURIAL THINKING IMPERATIVE (2007). From the journal Acta Commercii.

THE ENTREPRENEUR AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP: OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS OF THEIR ROLE IN SOCIETY (1998). Proceedings of the International Council for Small Business World Conference.

Since FUSE is a CSE, you can also “force” full-text results using filetype:pdf — although as you can see from the above results, that would remove a couple of useful results.