Blurts

Why should you be concerned about ad blocking? You should be concerned because it will reduce the incentive for the “little guy” to offer content. The cost and the effort to get your site “white listed” works against the participation of individuals or those without sponsers from the opportunity to compete for ad dollars. The following is an excerpt from a post (Page Fair) commenting on Google’s willingness to pay to protect the appearance of ads on its own sites.

Adblock Plus operates an “Acceptable Advertising” scheme, under which “large corporations” must pay to have permissible ad formats (such as sponsored search links) whitelisted. While Adblock Plus believes they are offering a fair compromise, most publishers have likened it to “racketeering” [MondayNote], “extortion” [Tom’s Guide], “shakedown” [Digital Trends], “blackmail” [Pando Daily] and “highway robbery” [Pro Sieben Sat1]. Most controversially, it was revealed in 2013 that Google is dealing with Adblock Plus to get its search ads whitelisted.

The finding that many social science studies fail to replicate should be an embarrassment to social scientists. I suppose any participant has an explanation. I can say after being involved in social science research for many years that there is a lot of pressure for numbers (sounds like the excuse educators used when cheating on student tests).

There were many ways to play the game. My observation recognized strategies that would not necessarily result in failure to replicate., but would boost numbers For example – questionnaire studies rather than studies based in observable behaviors, multiple authorships to boost the number of lines on the vita, short duration studies. I assume the large and expanding number of journals plays to the same motivational forces.

I always thought tenure was to allow an escape from this kind of pressure and a greater focus on quality. All systems seem to revert to variables that are easy to quantify.

Acorn, a little known (my opinion), but high quality image editing program for the Mac is available for $25 for a limited time. This app is well worth the price.

I read today that it was the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. Rolling Stone lists it as the 4th best album of all time. Fifty years is a long time and most who read what I write are far younger than this album. However, if you are willing to experience true classic music try a search on your iTunes, Google, Pandora, etc. and take a listen. Most of the songs are available via YouTube.

Steven Anderson had a recent post in which he admitted that we tend to forget about quality resources. We move on to new resources ignoring what we thought was great last year or the year before that.

Anderson’s examples were resources from CKFoundation. I also remember flexbooks and yes I thought customizable, free textbooks were cool too.

Time to use my search tool and see what else I wrote about way back then.