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012005-01
010105Google
Enters Scholarly Search for history and
Soulfind
December 27, 2004 / With its Scholar
research software, the Web giant hopes to tap into
a new source of traffic -- and revenue. After
raking in billions of dollars helping the masses
search the Web, Google Inc. is targeting academics
like Daniel Branton.
-----The Harvard University biology
professor has used Google for years to locate
sensors and other laboratory equipment. But it
wasn't very good at finding peer-reviewed research
papers and other academic
publications.
-----That changed with the recent release of
Google Scholar. The specialized search engine
uncovers papers better than Google.com, Branton
said, and is simpler to use than the expensive
databases in Harvard's vaunted
libraries.
-----"I found that I could find, in a much
more rapid fashion, what I was looking for by just
putting in a few keywords," he said. "Even if it
had a bit of advertising, I wouldn't
mind."
-----That's exactly what Google was hoping
the professor would say. Google Scholar doesn't
feature ads, but one day it just
might.
-----Along with rivals Yahoo Inc. and
Amazon.com Inc., Google is in hot pursuit of the
egghead crowd as a new source of traffic -- and
revenue. They all see opportunity in scholarly
information, a $12-billion business long dominated
by publishers such as Reed Elsevier and Thomson
Corp.
-----The Web companies are aiming to snag
scholars before they head to subscription services
to do research. To do that, the companies have to
equip their search engines to scour some of the
billions of pages locked away in subscription
sites, hidden corners of the Web and
books.
-----"The search engine market is very
competitive," said Ed Pentz, executive director of
CrossRef, a nonprofit organization in Lynnfield,
Mass., that works to make scholarly papers
available to the public. "This is the next stage,
and it's prestigious, high-quality content. It
expands the range of what they can offer
users."
-----It also gives search engine companies
more pages on which to place ads. Google generates
nearly $3 billion a year serving up targeted ads
tied to keywords, and the Mountain View, Calif.,
company says it could sell even more if it could
just find relevant pages to put them
on.
-----If it does, advertisers will probably
pay extra to deliver their highly targeted messages
directly to potential customers such as Branton,
said Chuck Richard, a vice president with market
research firm Outsell
Inc.
-----When the Harvard professor uses Google
Scholar to find papers on his specialty, nanotube
biology, companies that sell the $6,000 humidity
sensors he favors might be willing to pay a pretty
penny to have their ads appear on his computer
screen.
-----"They're not trying to get the average
person," Richard said. "One of the strengths is it
calls the right people to
it."
-----Google Scholar relies on the same index
of websites as Google's mainstream search engine
but ranks those websites
differently.
-----The regular search engine uses a system
called PageRank, which turns the Internet into a
huge popularity contest. When a user enters a query
into Google, Web pages are ranked in large part
according to the number of times they are linked to
by other websites.
-----That approach presents problems when it
comes to specialized research, because the most
relevant papers may not be the most popular.
Studies that would be useful to scientists may live
in obscurity on the Web, buried beneath hundreds of
sites that command more
links.
-----So Google Scholar doesn't rely on how
many websites link to a particular paper or book.
Instead, it examines who wrote it, who published it
and how many other scholarly works cited it. Based
on those sorts of criteria, dissertations,
peer-reviewed papers and other scholarly literature
can float to the top of search
results.
-----The newest Google search engine has
received mixed reviews. Branton and others complain
that, unlike nearly all other scholarly databases,
Google won't disclose what sources it draws from,
so academics can't know what they're
missing.
-----It also appears to be incomplete. In an
online review, Peter Jacso of the University of
Hawaii at Manoa's library and information science
program wrote that a search for all records from
the medical research database PubMed returned only
879,000. The database actually contains 15 million
records.
-----"Like its popular counterpart,
searching Google Scholar is easy," he wrote.
"Finding the gems is
difficult."
-----Anurag Acharya, a former computer
science professor at UC Santa Barbara who created
Google Scholar, said the 1-month-old program would
improve as Google got feedback from
users.
-----Google is working to collect more
scholarly information by expanding its Google Print
program to digitize some or all of the books in
five research libraries, including those at
Harvard. The task will take years. But when it's
finished, Google says, millions of books will be
available for academics -- and others -- to
search.
That
mirrors efforts at other big Internet
companies.
-----Amazon has scanned more than 200,000
books in the last year as part of its Search Inside
the Book program. Last month the Seattle-based
online retailer capitalized on that investment by
quietly introducing Amazon.com Citations to help
drive sales of scholarly
texts.
-----Now, when Amazon provides descriptive
information about a book, it includes a list of
other books that are mentioned in the text,
footnotes or bibliography. If the book is cited in
other texts, those are mentioned as
well.
-----"It's yet another way for people to
find related books," said Bill Carr, Amazon's
director of digital media. Carr declined to say
whether sales have grown as a
result.
-----As for Yahoo, it's enlarging its
searchable index to include more Web pages from
sources such as the National Science Foundation and
the Smithsonian Institution. Among other items, the
Sunnyvale, Calif., company's 9-month-old Content
Acquisition Program has netted nearly 100,000
digital documents about ancient Babylon from UCLA's
Cuneiform Digital Library
Initiative.
-----"There's no question that we are
getting much wider publicity as a result of it,"
said Bob Englund, a professor of Assyriology and
director of the cuneiform
library.
-----In addition, Yahoo has recalibrated its
system for gauging the importance of a website to
raise the visibility of academic papers and
documents. Because they tend to deal with esoteric
subjects, few other sites link to them -- a
situation that would normally relegate an online
document to obscurity. Instead, Yahoo relies on
publishers like Englund to identify the keywords
and other descriptors that will boost their obscure
material in search
results.
-----Google, analysts say, has been the most
aggressive in its efforts to tap into the academic
market. "It's very shrewd," said John Tinker, an
analyst with ThinkEquity Partners. "It keeps
differentiating them from Microsoft, and it keeps
them intellectually ahead of
Yahoo."
-----Both Google and Yahoo were founded by
computer science graduate students from Stanford
University. While Yahoo has evolved into an online
media company -- its chief executive, Terry Semel,
ran the Warner Bros. studio before going to Silicon
Valley -- Google has stuck close to its roots. Its
fevered courtship of engineers, scientists and
mathematicians has made for a workforce attuned to
the needs of the academic
market.
-----"This is one way we give back to the
community," said Acharya, the
professor-turned-Google
engineer.
-----The scholarly search engine could pave
the way for similar services targeting other
research-heavy professions, analysts say. Logical
candidates include Google Doctor and Google
Lawyer.
-----"I see it as an opening that can be
further developed," said David Garrity, an analyst
with investment firm Caris & Co. "Google can
certainly hold itself out as being the site where
people can go to gain not only breadth but depth of
information."
///
020105
Payoffs
and Graft Paid to Officials in Vietnam - is it
OK?
It is, if it's a political contribution for the
betterment of
government!
-----December 27, 2004 / Corrupt officials
have been embarrassing Hanoi's Communist
authorities The arrests this month of Vietnamese
civil servants suspected of smuggling crude oil out
of the country may help solve the riddle of fuel
consumption in neighboring Cambodia. Official
petrol imports there, which are subject to high
duties, have declined by 20% in the last decade,
even as the number of passenger cars on the roads
has risen by 50%.
-----The arrests also signal an increasingly
vigorous drive to weed out a reportedly growing
number of corrupt officials, who are embarrassing
Hanoi's Communist authorities with their brazen
demands for bribes and highly visible, opulent
lifestyles.
-----Eight senior executives of Vietnam
Airlines' petroleum trading subsidiary, Vinapco,
were arrested on suspicion of illegally exporting
oil to private traders in
Cambodia.
-----The executives, including Vinapco's
director, chief finance officer and chief trade
officer, stand accused of taking as much as $1.3
million in bribes.
-----Just days later, an investigation into
Vietnam's trade ministry reached its climax as Mai
Van Dau, the 62-year-old deputy trade minister, was
arrested on charges of "abuse of power," for
allegedly selling export quotas for garment
manufacturers sending textiles to the
U.S.
-----The "cash-for-quotas" racket has
claimed four other senior trade ministry officials,
including Dau's son.
-----Vietnamese government officials have
long used their positions and their vast
discretionary powers to make money. But with the
economy expanding more than 7% a year, and popular
aspirations growing, the graft appears more brazen.
The number of state officials seeking handouts and
the sums demanded are said to be
increasing.
-----Officials have also been accused of
using their authority to evade taxes, secure
contracts for family companies and illegally sell
state property, as well as engage in other forms of
profiteering.
-----At its highest echelons, Vietnam's
Communist Party now fears that public servants'
increasingly visible opulence is eroding the
legitimacy and effectiveness of its authoritarian,
one-party rule.
-----"Since 1996, corruption has been public
enemy No. 1, but the drive to uproot it has become
much more vigorous in the last 12 months," said
John Shrimpton, director of Dragon Capital,
Vietnam's largest fund
manager.
-----The clean-up effort has so far exacted
its heaviest toll at Petrovietnam, the state-owned
oil and gas behemoth, where the general director
and his deputy were dismissed in May last year for
misconduct in tendering for Vietnam's first oil
refinery. Authorities subsequently uncovered
rampant corruption and arrested numerous
Petrovietnam employees and others, including a
senior construction ministry
official.
-----The widening anticorruption net has
also ensnared powerful local officials suspected of
land speculation on the island of Phu Quoc; an
executive from the state-owned shipping company,
Vinalines; the head of the state coffee company,
Vinacafe; and the agricultural minister, who was
forced to resign this
year.
-----Skeptics have suggested that the
dismissals and arrests may stem from internal party
rivalries, but many foreign observers in Vietnam
are convinced they are a serious attempt to deter
corrupt officials.
-----"Greed is running amok, and the arrests
seem designed as a signal to slow things down,"
said Frederick Burke, an attorney at Baker &
McKenzie in Ho Chi Minh
City.
-----But curbing graft in Vietnam will
require Communist authorities to make far-reaching
changes, including reducing officials'
discretionary power and increasing the transparency
of government decision-making and the
accountability of public officials.
///
Center
Page /
TIMELINE:
Top Stories To Start The Week With:
012005
030105
India
Like China is Pursuing Oil Sources in
Africa
-----The country is stepping up a rivalry
with China in seeking oil and gas in Sudan, NEW
DELHI -- Pick almost any unstable part of the world
and you'll find China and India competing head to
head for the rights to explore for oil and gas. But
though China has been pursuing overseas energy
sources for years, India's emergence is
recent.
-----During the next few months, India's Oil
& Natural Gas Corp., or ONGC, the country's
biggest company, will step up its investments in
Russia, Sudan, Angola, Vietnam, Myanmar, West
Africa and elsewhere.
-----Its expansion reflects a restless quest
for national energy security that will increasingly
shape India's diplomacy.
-----ONGC has invested $3.5 billion in
overseas exploration and development since 2000.
This is still much smaller than the estimated $40
billion spent by China National Petroleum
Corp.
-----But it is a taste of what is growing
into a titanic competition between two of the
world's most rapidly growing
economies.
-----"Energy security is of critical
importance to India," Manmohan Singh, India's prime
minister, said in a recent interview. "It is second
only in our scheme of things to food
security."
-----Unlike the situation with food, of
which India is now a net exporter, the energy
deficit has worsened sharply since May, when Singh
became prime minister. Oil prices have eased in the
last three weeks, but India imports more than
two-thirds of its consumption, and its demand is
expected to triple in the next two
decades.
-----"Whichever way you look at it, India
could not possibly meet its energy needs through
domestic production," said Subir Raha, chairman of
ONGC. "Our only choice is to do what France did in
the 1950s or China is doing now, which is to secure
our energy sources
overseas."
-----India, with just over 1 billion people,
has 16% of the world's population and just 0.4% of
global oil reserves. With average economic growth
projected at a minimum of 6% a year in the next two
decades, plugging the energy gap is increasingly
urgent.
-----Much of India's small but growing
overseas aid budget has been spent on African
countries, where ONGC and China National Petroleum
are in competition for exploration rights. Securing
"equity oil" in such areas enables ONGC to import
it at cost, about $8 to $10 a barrel after
royalties and license fees, compared with
open-market prices of $40 a barrel or
more.
-----But the biggest diplomatic challenge is
in India's backyard -- in the temptations offered
by big natural gas reserves in Iran, Myanmar and
Bangladesh.
-----Vijay Kelkar, a leading energy
strategist in India, says New Delhi will have to
look closely at building a gas pipeline from Iran
that would cross neighboring Pakistan. Until
recently, that option was unthinkable. But Singh's
government has indicated a willingness to discuss
it with Islamabad, despite the obvious insurance
risks.
-----"All through the worst stages of the
cold war, France's pipeline from Siberia was never
threatened," Kelkar said. "Energy cooperation can
transcend diplomatic
problems."
-----Given such backing, ONGC shows no
hesitation in bidding for exploration blocks in
parts of the world that Western energy firms would
not touch, such as Sudan, where it is investing
$1.5 billion. India is also looking at a gas
pipeline from Myanmar.
-----"At every level of government,
especially in the diplomatic corps, there is a
sense of urgency and an awareness that this is a
strategic priority," Raha
said.
-----At the same time, there is an
intensified search for domestic sources, in the Bay
of Bengal on India's east coast and the Bay of
Cambay on its west coast. Activity is increasing in
India's northern onshore basins, in an arc from the
deserts of Rajasthan across the Gangetic plains to
the foothills of the
Himalayas.
-----"India is the most exciting part of the
world in our view and one of the least explored,"
said Bill Gammell, chief executive of Cairn Energy,
an exploration company based in Edinburgh,
Scotland.
///
ByLines:
Editors Note
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Trump
Bylines
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///
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