More disturbing to me is that Google is rapidly becoming the accepted repository of all knowledge - want to know something? Type it into google and accept the results as fact. It's on the internet, so it must be true!
This is becoming evident in a number of fields - but two I'm familiar with are academic research and journalism.
An academic looking for research papers is more than likely to do an online search. There is evidence that papers available online receive more attention. The quality of online research can also be questionable - papers are put online as prepress papers, before they have been through the review process required for publication in most journals.
As for journalists, I have read countless pieces in print that have been clearly researched on the internet alone. Although these are mostly features or fluff pieces, I see it in news stories too, where background material has clearly been garnered by spending a half hour with google.
Think of any contentious current affairs or political issue, and think of who is going to put the time and effort into puting material online about that issue -it's not going to be some altruistic, unbiased observer.
They may not have everything, but they're pretty close.
And so they should be - information about books in print isn't hard to get. No publisher is going to sell books nobody knows about, hence there are publishers catalogues and databases like Bowker's Books In Print. And of course there is the library of Congress.
Any decent bookshop will have access to all this information and I would assume Amazon and other online stores use it too.
So apart from a load of subjective reviews (presumably skeded heavily towards fantasy/sci-fi), what does this site intend to add?
Unless you're really after ultra-secret proprietry algorithms, you're time would probably be much better spent looking at some of the recent research literature down yer local Uni library. You won't get full implementations, but you will get explanations, and it'll be easier to understand than pages upon pages of disassembly.
Slashdot Mirror
More disturbing to me is that Google is rapidly becoming the accepted repository of all knowledge - want to know something? Type it into google and accept the results as fact. It's on the internet, so it must be true!
This is becoming evident in a number of fields - but two I'm familiar with are academic research and journalism.
An academic looking for research papers is more than likely to do an online search. There is evidence that papers available online receive more attention. The quality of online research can also be questionable - papers are put online as prepress papers, before they have been through the review process required for publication in most journals.
As for journalists, I have read countless pieces in print that have been clearly researched on the internet alone. Although these are mostly features or fluff pieces, I see it in news stories too, where background material has clearly been garnered by spending a half hour with google.
Think of any contentious current affairs or political issue, and think of who is going to put the time and effort into puting material online about that issue -it's not going to be some altruistic, unbiased observer.
And so they should be - information about books in print isn't hard to get. No publisher is going to sell books nobody knows about, hence there are publishers catalogues and databases like Bowker's Books In Print. And of course there is the library of Congress.
Any decent bookshop will have access to all this information and I would assume Amazon and other online stores use it too.
So apart from a load of subjective reviews (presumably skeded heavily towards fantasy/sci-fi), what does this site intend to add?
Unless you're really after ultra-secret proprietry algorithms, you're time would probably be much better spent looking at some of the recent research literature down yer local Uni library. You won't get full implementations, but you will get explanations, and it'll be easier to understand than pages upon pages of disassembly.