Reading Summary 2017-06

It’s been a while since I ever post a reading summary never mention a new blog post. Writing is a time demanding job.

Society and Technology

Why do we manage academia so badly?

"Managers want metrics that are easy to calculate, easy to understand, and quick to yield a value … metrics with these desirable properties are almost always worse than useless."

Easy metrics are also easily “hacked” - people “hack” the metrics to make statistics look good, while deviate from the original purpose of academia: to achieve good quality research.

See also:

Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

Did Reddit’s April Fool’s gag solve the issue of online hate speech?

An interesting, anarchic style experiment on Reddit: let thousands of Redditers draw a picture all at the same time, what would possibly happen? It turned out to be surprisingly good.

Tim Berners-Lee: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

Tim Berners-Lee: The Father of the World Wide Web and Turing Award winner believes the web nowadays has serious flaws, namely the loss of control of personal privacy, rampant spreading of misinformation on the web, and manipulations from the political campaigns online. It took everyone to build the web we have today, and it takes everyone to fix it now.

More reports and readings on Tim Berners-Lee:

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