The Smartphone Market IS Boring!

What I've been saying! Nearly any contemporary smartphone will get the job done; the hardwares have converged in terms of features and capabilities, and the several mobile OSes and app ecosystems are very close to identical.

What's important to me at the moment is the size of the screen --

• smartphone, for use any- and everywhere;
• tablet, hanging around the house, traveling, and certain work settings;
• laptop, traveling and certain work settings;
• laptop connected to huge monitor, office and home office.

Every device is connected to the network. all data lives on the network and is synchronized across devices (Google, Dropbox), and the core apps -- Gmail, Evernote, etc. -- function pretty much the same on every device.

Charles Cooper on CNET: "Apple's iPhone 5S, 5C debut: We live in boring times"

Marketers will do their best to convince you otherwise, but smartphones now belong to a maturing industry with little sizzle.

September 11, 2013

Apple is a tough act to follow, especially when you're Apple. And especially when almost every detail of your big unveiling had already been picked apart and reported on by the press.

After announcing on Tuesday what arguably was one of the most significant product refreshes in years, Apple shares still sagged a little more than 2 percent -- the equivalent of a Wall Street shrug. Besides, the stock had been running up, playing to the saying, buy on the rumor, sell on the news. None of that means that the new products and technologies Apple showed off were necessarily wanting or somehow disappointing.

Article continues at link. 

Beloit College's Mindset List

Part 1: Beloit College has published its annual "Mindset List," which describes the ". . . cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall." The sixty-item list is here, and starts with 

1. Eminem and LL Cool J could show up at parents’ weekend.
2. They are the sharing generation, having shown tendencies to share everything, including possessions, no matter how personal.
3. GM means food that is Genetically Modified.
4. As they started to crawl, so did the news across the bottom of the television screen.
5. “Dude” has never had a negative tone.
6. As their parents held them as infants, they may have wondered whether it was the baby or Windows 95 that had them more excited.
7. As kids they may well have seen Chicken Run but probably never got chicken pox.
8. Having a chat has seldom involved talking. 
9. Gaga has never been baby talk.
10. They could always get rid of their outdated toys on eBay.
11. They have known only two presidents.

 Part 2: the list has finally generated a mockery site. From Inside Higher Ed: 

Beloit releases annual 'mindset' list -- and two professors try to kill it

Submitted by Scott Jaschik on August 20, 2013 - 3:00am

Beloit College's "Mindset List" has become a rite of fall. Each list (such as the one being released today) offers examples of things that an 18-year-old arriving on campus would and would not have experienced. Names of some people who were significant to their parents' generation (this year Dean Martin and Jerry Garcia, among others) have "always been dead." In theory, professors and administrators get a reminder not to assume that the new students on campus share their cultural and historic signposts.

For Beloit, the list has been public relations gold, resulting in countless articles (including on this website every year), a book, even, and imitators as far away as Australia. There have also been grumbles from academics who have tired of the format (or PR people who admit to being jealous that Beloit thought of this idea first).

Some bloggers have challenged the list. An Inside Higher Ed blogger, Kenneth C. Green, wondered in 2010 whether the list contributes to the sense of many faculty members that today's students somehow know less than did previous generations, a common -- if not necessarily verified -- lament whose reinforcement may not be a good thing for anyone.

This year two anonymous professors -- one from a large public university and the other from a community college -- have declared their intent to destroy the list, which has been going strong since 1998. They are unveiling a site -- Beloit Mindlessness -- that is "dedicated to the mockery and eventual destruction of the Beloit mindset list."

See the full story at list. 

Myself, I find it an interesting enough list, and more a reminder of the increasingly wide delta between students' ages and mine than anything else. . . 

Communicating *Science*

Kent Anderson in the Society for Scholarly Publishing's blog, The Scholarly Kitchen, writes quite passionately about how publishers (and librarians!), in focusing on the practice of scholarly publishing, may be neglecting its purpose. 

Have We Forgotten Readers in Our Worries Over Access?

POSTED BY KENT ANDERSON ⋅ AUG 13, 2013

I’ve been reading surveys of physicians and attending focus groups filled with physicians for more than 20 years. If there’s one clear trend, it’s that science is becoming less important in the daily lives of practicing physicians. It seems to me that they are less likely to be aspiring scientists and seem more attuned to merely surviving the daily grind — paperwork, administrative duties, and patients. They don’t even bother to posture about their academic aspirations anymore. Everyone seems to be feeling burned out and hustled.

Physicians have always struck me as the great translators of science into practice — biomedicine in action — so it’s a bit alarming to observe the persistent erosion of their identification with science.
They do still pay attention to the scientific literature, but increasingly through the smaller eyepiece of the major journal brands — the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Lancet, and maybe one major specialist journal. Beyond this, the impression one gets is that science has become unapproachable for them.

... 

Perhaps it’s merely a coincidence, but three trends have occurred coincident with the bifurcation of physician practice and physician science, at least as I hypothesize it:

• open access (OA) and its emphasis on the article economy
• the replacement of personal subscriptions with institutional access
• the disappearance of print

Each of these has contributed to an overall gestalt — science has become abstracted away from practitioners. It has disappeared from the tangible world as journals have disappeared from tables, desks, and waiting rooms. It now lives in the cloud, where it is unmanageable except through search engines, maybe. It has disappeared from professional economies, as library budgets have superseded department, group, or individual spending. And it has become a producer-side commodity, something less helpful to readers even as it has become more tractable for authors.

It’s fascinating to watch physicians talk about how science is less and less important to their daily lives. This is going on while we constantly debate how to publish more science. After all, more papers without a paywall after publication should increase interest in science, right?

We tend to forget that water can be fatal in too high a dose. There is “too much” of anything.

We’re so fixated on citations, OA, APCs, embargoes, and all the other ephemera we debate too long and too often that it’s easy to forget the purpose. It’s not to strut our stuff, it’s not show how morally superior one faction is against another, and it’s not to win some sort of Pyrrhic intramural victory. We have readers, and while it’s convenient and even easier to serve authors, ultimately we serve readers. Even our authors agree on that fact.

Full post at link; I encourage you to read it. 

Managing Your Email

[See also the tag Email on this blog for other tips on managing email.] 

This piece by Jeff Weiner via Lifehacker -- I wholeheartedly agree with this approach! Do these seven things to make email work for you, versus the other way around. 

Seven Ways to Manage Email So It Doesn't Manage You

I'm always struck by the number of people who complain about the amount of email they receive and how much they despise their inbox—not because their complaints aren't valid but because my own view couldn't be more different.

By design, my inbox has essentially become the central hub of my workflow—it's the way I routinely communicate and exchange information with our 4,300+ employees operating in 26 cities around the world. That's not to say I've always been a fan of email, or that I haven't had my own Sisyphean inbox experiences. However, over the years I've developed several practical guidelines that have enabled me to manage my inbox effectively and ensure it's not managing me.

See the link for the full list. 

1. Send less email to start with. 
2. Triage your inbox and tag/star/etc. messages for attention. 
3. Establish a routine. I think this is the most important tactic for manging your email. 
4. Be precise with your words. 
5. Be precise and intentional with your To: and Cc:
6. Acknowledge receipt. 
7. Take combustible stuff offline. 

Teens Not Abandoning Facebook

There have been lots of media reports lately to the effect that teens are abandoning Facebook. This isn't true -- or, at least, is a sufficient enough misrepresentation of the source Pew Internet & American Life Project report that that organization felt compelled to issue a comment yesterday. 

Teens Haven’t Abandoned Facebook (Yet)

When we released our “Teens, Social Media and Privacy” report in May, one thread of news
coverage focused on teens’ “waning enthusiasm” for Facebook. This theme surfaced during
our focus group discussions with teens and stood in contrast to the excitement that was
associated with newer platforms like Instagram and Twitter. We were not the first to suggest that teens were starting to diversify their social media portfolio, and as such, our report became part of a larger meme that swiftly declared Facebook’s imminent demise.

But sampling other items at the social media buffet is not the same as swearing off salad
forever. As recent coverage has noted, our national survey data did not indicate a decrease
in the total number of Facebook-using teens, even though the focus group findings suggest
that teens’ relationship with Facebook is complicated and may be evolving.

While some of our teen focus group participants reported positive feelings about their use of Facebook, many spoke negatively about an increasing adult presence, the high stakes of managing self-presentation on the site, the burden of negative social interactions (“drama”), or feeling overwhelmed by friends who share too much. One teen told us that he started using Twitter because “everyone’s saying Facebook’s dead,” while another one explained that once you create a Twitter and an Instagram account, “then you'll just kind of forget about Facebook.”

However, few of the teens we spoke with had actually abandoned the biggest social media site altogether. As we noted in the report, “there were no indications in either the national survey or the focus groups of a mass exodus from Facebook.”

Comment continues at link.