Turukawa's comments

Turukawa | 2 years ago | on: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common

The researchers in this paper use an astonishingly biased "fake paper detector", requiring only two conditions to be met for any paper to be considered "fake":

1. Use a non-institutional email address, or have a hospital affiliation, 2. Have no international co-authors.

And they acknowledge 86% sensitivity and 44% specificity. It's a coin-toss which biases massively against research from outside the US and Western Europe.

This "paper" is bigoted nonsense.

https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/110357278154604907

Turukawa | 5 years ago | on: I won’t buy ebooks anymore

Both metadata in the uploaded book, and seeing the transaction reversed a few weeks later.

Publishers announce the books they'll be releasing a year in advance,and - seriously, this is a rabbit hole I knew nothing about when I started - people were offering bounties to pirate my book before it was available. I have a Google alert for my books so I can read reviews, so all this chatter was turning up. These are people who had no intention of paying for the work, no matter what, but also seemed to be going out of their way to make sure no-one would have to pay.

You can talk about DRM and clunky websites, but that comes across as post-hoc justification. The pirates seem simply to hate the idea that creators might earn anything, no matter how little.

Turukawa | 5 years ago | on: I won’t buy ebooks anymore

The economics of mid-list writing don't really make this feasible ... very few writers get to do more than buy coffee off their work. Creating a whole dummy book just to mess with pirates isn't worth it. Not when I'm going to spend a year writing a new novel in the first place. Then, once that's done, I've somehow got to get back into industry so I can earn a living and recover the money lost while writing ... this isn't something you do because you expect to earn anything from it. Making a few dozen extra sales from pirates?

Turukawa | 5 years ago | on: I won’t buy ebooks anymore

Sure :) The biggest barrier is micro-payments. If I could charge as a streaming service, but without having to go through a major platform (I don't want Spotify-for-books), then that would be perfect. I actually pitched this to GrantForTheWeb using their Web Monetization toolkit.

Turukawa | 5 years ago | on: I won’t buy ebooks anymore

I'm a mid-list author formally published by one of the world's largest publishing houses. Deliberately seeding pirate sites with my novel would place me in breach of contract. It's an interesting idea if I were entirely self-published, but not realistic for me.

Turukawa | 5 years ago | on: I won’t buy ebooks anymore

I've written two novels, formally published in the UK, self-published in the US. Books available on Amazon, and DRM-free on my website https://gavinchait.com.

Both novels were stolen and uploaded to ZLib within the first week of release: https://b-ok.cc/s/gavin%20chait

Here's how I - as author - experienced it:

- Within the first week someone buys the book via Amazon using a stolen credit card;

- Book is uploaded to ZLib;

- I complained to Amazon, raising both the issue of the stolen work and the stolen credit card;

- No response from Amazon, although they were quick to reverse the charge (I'm assuming as soon as the card is reported stolen);

- I complained to ZLib using their DMCA reporting tool;

- ZLib care about as much as Amazon, and my novels are still up.

I made it as easy as possible to read my work on my website and pay me direct. I released it as a DRM-free epub for use on any device or platform. You can even buy anonymously. Still doesn't matter. Folks like the OP won't support writers.

And, while this won't stop me writing, it makes it impossible to afford to write as often as I'd like. Two years after my second, I'm still trying to save up enough to afford to write my third.

Thanks OP.

Turukawa | 6 years ago | on: WeWork Gets Tax Rebate Meant for Its Small-Business Tenants

They also have to check what's happening in other authorities. From experience, there is no standardisation of anything, not of definitions, data structure, methods of data management. Government data systems are archaic, so doing those cross-authority tests to see whether business qualify for reliefs is real slow.

I'd love to see a standard schema for rates data, but that's unlikely.

Turukawa | 6 years ago | on: WeWork Gets Tax Rebate Meant for Its Small-Business Tenants

I've been assembling commercial ratepayer data across the UK quarterly for the last three years. While WeWork is certainly not alone, what is remarkable is the explosion in micro-hereditaments over the past year. We're talking median office sizes at 4-6m2,where some of the more established services are significantly larger. And the approach of fragmenting offices into ever-tinier spaces is accelerating.
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