IT Improves Productivity!

In The Productivity Paradox David Rotman writes:

Productivity growth in most of the world’s rich countries has been dismal since around 2004. Especially vexing is the sluggish pace of what economists call total factor productivity—the part that accounts for the contributions of innovation and technology. In a time of Facebook, smartphones, self-driving cars, and computers that can beat a person at just about any board game, how can the key economic measure of technological progress be so pathetic? Economists have tagged this the “productivity paradox.”

Some argue that it’s because today’s technologies are not nearly as impressive as we think. The leading proponent of that view, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, contends that compared with breakthroughs like indoor plumbing and the electric motor, today’s advances are small and of limited economic benefit. Others think productivity is in fact increasing but we simply don’t know how to measure things like the value delivered by Google and Facebook, particularly when many of the benefits are “free.”

My view is that IT is only one of the factors driving the decrease of productivity in the general economy, but that there are some areas of the economy in which IT is greatly increasing productivity. An explanation is below the fold.

Cloud For Preservation

Imagine you're responsible for preserving the long-established digital collection at a large research or national library. It is currently preserved in home-grown software, or off-the-shelf software that's been extensively customized, that you are responsible for running on hardware run by your institution's IT department. You are probably not a large customer of theirs. They are probably laying down the law, saying "cloud first", especially as you are looking at a looming hardware refresh. Below the fold, I examine a set of issues that need to be clarified in the decision-making process.

The Economics Of Bitcoin Transactions

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Izabella Kaminska's BIS trolls bitcoin reports on analysis of the economics of Bitcoin transactions from Raphael Auer at the Bank for International Settlements. She starts:

Bitcoin aspires to take over the world. But as we all know (according to poorly sourced conspiracy forums), the world is currently run by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the central bank to central banks. That means Bitcoin needs to displace the BIS in the near future if it is to get anywhere.

But it takes one to know one.

So here's the dominant global payments system calling out the aspiring global payments system in an excellent piece of professional trolling this week

Auer's is indeed an excellent piece of work. Follow me below the fold for some details.

Facebook's Catch-22

John Herrman's How Secrecy Fuels Facebook Paranoia takes the long way round to come to a very simple conclusion. My shorter version of Herrman's conclusion is this. In order to make money Facebook needs to:

1. Convince advertisers that it is an effective means of manipulating the behavior of the mass of the population.
2. Avoid regulation by convincing governments that it is not an effective means of manipulating the behavior of the mass of the population.

The dilemma is even worse because among the advertisers Facebook needs to believe in its effectiveness are individual politicians and political parties, both big advertisers! This Catch-22 is the source of Facebook's continuing PR problems, listed by Ryan Mac. Follow me below the fold for details.

Blockchain Video and Podcast

CNI has now posted the video of my 20-minute talk Blockchain: What's Not To Like? to YouTube and Vimeo. Here is the YouTube version:



Gerry Bayne interviewed me at the Fall CNI meeting for CNI's podcast series. The 20-minute conversation is a companion piece to the talk. The podcast is on the Educause SoundCloud channel.

I made one, easily spotted, mistake in the interview when I said $3,000 instead of $300,000. But other than that I'm happy with both the video and the podcast.

Trump's Shutdown Impacts Information Access

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Government shutdown causing information access problems by James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs is important. It documents the effect of the Trump government shutdown on access to globally important information:

Twitter and newspapers are buzzing with complaints about widespread problems with access to government information and data (see for example, Wall Street Journal (paywall 😐 ), ZDNet News, Pew Center, Washington Post, Scientific American, TheVerge, and FedScoop to name but a few).

Maybe when/if the government opens again, we should scrape the NIST and CSRC websites, put all those publications somewhere public. It’s worrying that *every single US cryptography standard* is now unavailable to practitioners.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) January 12, 2019

Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said “It’s worrying that every single US cryptography standard is now unavailable to practitioners.” He was responding to the fact that he could not get the documents he needed from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) or its branch, the Computer Security Resource Center (CSRC). The government shutdown is the direct cause of these problems.

They point out how this illustrates the importance of libraries collecting and preserving web-published information:

Regardless of who you (or your user communities) blame for the shutdown itself, this loss of access was entirely foreseeable and avoidable. It was foreseeable because it has happened before. It was avoidable because libraries can select, acquire, organize, and preserve these documents and provide access to them and services for them whether the government is open or shut-down.

Go read the whole thing, and weep for the way libraries have abandoned their centuries-long mission of safeguarding information for future readers.

Digital Preservation Network Is No More

In Why Is the Digital Preservation Network Disbanding? Roger Schonfeld examines the demise of the Digital Preservation Network which was announced last month:

An initial announcement said directly that "After careful analysis of the Digital Preservation Network's membership, operating model, and finances, the Board of Trustees of DPN passed a resolution to affect an orderly wind-down of DPN," including committing to consultations with each member to ensure that content would not be lost in the wind-down. Shortly thereafter, messages came out from DPN's hubs, both individually including HathiTrust, and collectively, characterizing their operating and financial strength and ability to provide for an orderly transition. Because DPN was not itself directly preserving anything but rather a broker for preservation services by underlying repositories, it does not appear that any content will be put at risk.

Below the fold, I look at various views of the lessons to be learned.