It’s 2024, we’re in the throes of the AI revolution… and eBay’s taste-matching / suggestions algorithm is still running on dumb keyword-matching.
eBay’s taste-matching
27 Thursday Jun 2024
Posted in Ooops!
Category Archives: Ooops!
Drop it
10 Saturday Jun 2023
Posted in Ooops!
Work lost per week, due to Internet connection line-drops:
6 minutes per drop, at four per day = 24 minutes a day = 2.8 hours working time lost per week. Possibly more if you have to crawl under a desk to reboot the router, and thus also have to go wash your hands each time.
Ooops…
04 Monday Oct 2021
Posted in Ooops!
Hello Monday…
I guess not all of this could be the SSL root certificate problem I showed readers how to fix on Sunday. Sometimes a DNS bjork is just a DNS bjork. But if not, then it’s great dramatic timing.
Action required…
21 Saturday Aug 2021
Posted in Ooops!
Subject to change
04 Sunday Oct 2020
Posted in Academic search, Ooops!, Spotted in the news
“Subject indexing in humanities: a comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service”, Journal of Documentation, May 2020.
… the use of subject index terms in humanities journal articles [is] not supported in either the world’s largest commercial abstract and citation database Scopus or the local repository of a public university in Sweden. The indexing policies in the two services do not seem to address the needs of humanities scholars for highly granular subject index terms with appropriate facets; no controlled vocabularies for any humanities discipline are used whatsoever.
Stuckdemia.edu
22 Wednesday Jul 2020
Posted in Ooops!
It appears that, as of Summer 2020, only inbound links from Google Scholar can trigger a public PDF download from Academia.edu. Other public download attempts, if not logged in to the service, get a “404”. Readers may wish to update any link-lists accordingly.
Dumb devices
25 Saturday Apr 2020
Posted in Ooops!
Oh dear, it’s 2020 and the biggest and most AI-powered services on the planet are still relying on dumb keyword-blocking. AbeBooks reports that the pulp sci-fi double-bill paperback Mask of Chaos/The Star Virus has been classed by Amazon as a “medical device” and banned from sale.
Ironically, Amazon is still listing bat faeces sent from China, delivered to your door here in the UK. Apparently medical pseudo-science believes it to be a remedy for poor eyesight.
DOI hard
08 Wednesday Apr 2020
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
“On the Persistence of Persistent Identifiers of the Scholarly Web” is a new paper from Los Alamos, finding that many DOIs in a 10,000 random sample are unreachable…
“consistently across request methods, more than half of our DOIs fail to successfully resolve to a target resource”
Despite the misleading “2004” tag on the page identifier tag, the paper was actually presented in March 2020 at the CNI Spring 2020 Project Briefings.
UK Social Media Archive
14 Tuesday Jan 2020
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
The UK’s government’s completist and public Social Media Archive is now reported to be fully operational and primed, after its 2014 soft launch. Although a quick test shows that ‘exclude word’ still doesn’t work, in terms of removing results…
The worthless Peter Lowe ad-blocking list
05 Saturday Oct 2019
Posted in My general observations, Ooops!
The Peter Lowe ad-blocking list is obviously now worthless, due to its over-reach and scattergun blocking of all sorts of legitimate things. Back in June I found it blocking Harvard. I’ve since found all sorts of similar blocks on things that should not be blocked. I’ve unsubscribed my browser’s ad-blocker addon from the Peter Lowe list, and I suggest that you also consider doing so.