book reviews | ResearchBuzz: Firehose

July 20, 2021

Top Reviewers Or Bot Reviewers: The Goodreads Bot Problem (Book Riot)

Book Riot: Top Reviewers Or Bot Reviewers: The Goodreads Bot Problem. “Bots. Bots are what’s going at Goodreads. Since Goodreads is also used by non-account holders, it is a desirable internet space for advertisers. What happens is that a company or individual will pay for hundreds of positive reviews of their product, so that when a potential buyer sees the reviews, all they see are positive reviews and 5-star ratings. In the case of Goodreads, the product is books. These reviews can be written by a bot or a person with multiple fake accounts.”

December 13, 2020

Book Review: Legal Protection for Traditional Knowledge: Towards A New Law for Indigenous Intellectual Property by Anindya Bhukta (London School of Economics)

London School of Economics: Book Review: Legal Protection for Traditional Knowledge: Towards A New Law for Indigenous Intellectual Property by Anindya Bhukta. “In Legal Protection for Traditional Knowledge: Towards A New Law for Indigenous Intellectual Property, Anindya Bhukta underscores the value of traditional knowledge and argues that legal systems need to ensure better protection of this knowledge, with a particular focus on India. This book is an ideal primer for readers looking to find out more about the laws concerning traditional knowledge, writes Gayathri D Naik, and Bhukta’s proposals for a new legal approach embody his in-depth research and knowledge of the subject.”

Security & Legal Issues 0

September 17, 2020

Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive (Book Forum)

Book Forum: Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive. “The main purpose of social media is to call attention to yourself, and it was hard to think of a worse time to be doing so. It wasn’t like you were going to get a job thanks to a particularly incisive quote-tweet of President Trump; in the midst of a lockdown, your chances of getting laid based on your Instagram Story thirst traps plummeted. The already paltry rewards of posting disappeared, while the risks skyrocketed. And yet: people kept on going.” A grim – I would almost say techno-nihilist- article, but thought-provoking enough that I’m putting it here.

Around the Search & Social Media World 0

December 18, 2019

The Bookseller: London Review of Books rounds off 40th anniversary

The Bookseller: London Review of Books rounds off 40th anniversary. “The London Review of Books has launched a new website, rounding off its 40th anniversary celebrations with a comprehensive overhaul of the paper’s online presence, with its archive freely accessible for a month. The new website launched on Monday (16th December) with the entire LRB archive of almost 17,500 pieces—including writers such as Frank Kermode, Hilary Mantel, Oliver Sacks and Angela Carter—available to read for free until 15th January.”

Useful Stuff 0

December 6, 2019

JSTOR Daily: An Epidemic of Retractions

JSTOR Daily: An Epidemic of Retractions. “Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis’s new book, Fraud in the Lab: The High Stakes of Scientific Research (translated by Nicholas Elliott) tackles the issue of scientific fraud head-on, with some tough love for the scientific community. The book should be read by everyone interested in the sciences. Chevassus-au-Louis offers a welcome reminder that scientists are human, too, subject to the temptations of ambition, to career pressures, and to plain old greed.”

Research & Opinion 0

November 28, 2019

Books+Publishing: NZ Review of Books Pukapuka Aotearoa to close

Books+Publishing: NZ Review of Books Pukapuka Aotearoa to close. “The quarterly publication was launched in 1991 and is the country’s only periodical dedicated to reviewing New Zealand books. On a fundraising page, publisher Peppercorn Press and the New Zealand Review of Books editors said the summer issue will be their last, and that they are seeking a new home for its online archive and teen review site, Hooked on NZ Books.”

Tweaks & Updates 0

November 26, 2019

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work (The Register)

The Register: You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work. “Everyday AI has the approximate intelligence of an earthworm, according to Janelle Shane, a research scientist at the University of Colorado but better known as an AI blogger. Since AI is both complicated and massively hyped, and therefore widely misunderstood, her new book is a useful corrective.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0

May 10, 2019

Washington Post: Our devices steal our attention. We need to take it back.

Washington Post: Our devices steal our attention. We need to take it back.. “To explain why we should refocus our attention, [Jenny] Odell notes the tension between being connected online and disconnected in the real world. We tend to stay online too much, she suggests, because digital platforms are structured to keep us connected for their own profit. It is necessary to escape to engage in sensitive, actual human interaction. Though these are not necessarily new observations, it’s worthwhile to reiterate that, for all the social unity and disunity social media sites promote, the profit motive is the reason most of them exist.”

Research & Opinion 0

April 2, 2019

Quartzy: In Praise Of Invisibility In The Age Of Ceaseless Self-promotion

Quartzy: In Praise Of Invisibility In The Age Of Ceaseless Self-promotion. “Transcendentalist writers will tell you that a quiet walk through a forest can upend your universe. It happened recently to Akiko Busch, author of How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, a survival manifesto for the social media age disguised as a collection of personal essays.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0

March 4, 2019

Hitting the Books: The Second Kind of Impossible (Engadget)

Engadget: Hitting the Books: The Second Kind of Impossible. “Welcome, dear readers, to Engadget’s new series, Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we’ve done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.”

Useful Stuff 0

October 15, 2018

Washington Post: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

Washington Post: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day. “Rereading a favorite book is a pleasure and skill, one of many that neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf fears we might be losing in this era of screen immersion. In ‘Reader, Come Home,’ she recounts an experiment she did on herself: She tried to reread Hermann Hesse’s ‘Magister Ludi,’ a novel she calls ‘one of the most influential books of my earlier years.’”

Research & Opinion 0

June 6, 2018

Techdirt: Has Facebook Merely Been Exploited By Our Enemies? Or Is Facebook Itself The Real Enemy?

Techdirt: Has Facebook Merely Been Exploited By Our Enemies? Or Is Facebook Itself The Real Enemy?. “Two recent books written in the aftermath of recent revelations about mischievous and malicious exploitation of social-media platforms—especially Facebook and Twitter—exemplify this zeitgeist in different ways. And although both of these books are filled with valuable information and insights, they also yield (in different ways) to the temptation to see social media as the source of more harm than good. Which leaves me wanting very much both to praise what’s great in these two books (which I read back-to-back) and to criticize them where I think they’ve gone too far over to the Dark Side.”

Research & Opinion 0

July 23, 2017

Ars Technica: New book explores how protesters—and governments—use Internet tactics

Ars Technica: New book explores how protesters—and governments—use Internet tactics. “In February 2003, the largest demonstration in Britain’s history saw two million people march across London to protest the approaching Iraq War. Dozens of other cities across the world saw similar events, and yet. Why did politicians feel safe ignoring the millions who participated in those marches—yet stand down after the protests against the proposed intellectual property laws SOPA and PIPA? Why did Occupy apparently vanish while the Tea Party has embedded itself into US national electoral politics? How much did Facebook really have to do with the Arab Spring? How—and this is the central question technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki considers in her new book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest—do digital media change the reality and effectiveness of social protest?”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0

Book Review: Legal Protection for Traditional Knowledge: Towards A New Law for Indigenous Intellectual Property by Anindya Bhukta (London School of Economics)

The Bookseller: London Review of Books rounds off 40th anniversary

JSTOR Daily: An Epidemic of Retractions

Books+Publishing: NZ Review of Books Pukapuka Aotearoa to close

Washington Post: Our devices steal our attention. We need to take it back.

Hitting the Books: The Second Kind of Impossible (Engadget)

Washington Post: What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day

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