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Christos Petrou takes a look at the Guest Editor model for publishing and its recent impact on Hindawi and MDPI, as Clarivate has delisted some of their journals.
The post Guest Post – Of Special Issues and Journal Purges appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Froggie regrets. A precious ticket to a Chicago Bulls game. A conversation about AI and nature. A profile of the world’s most famous unknown writer. And to finish, a look back to last Friday and a St. Patrick’s Day tradition.
Anne Fadiman | Harper’s Magazine | February 10, 2023 | 5,816 words
“There are two kinds of pets — the ones you choose and the ones that happen to you,” Anne Fadiman writes as she considers her family’s various pets, a menagerie that included a goldfish, a hamster, guinea pigs, a dog named Typo, and Bunky, an African clawed frog that the family raised from a tadpole. In eulogizing Bunky, who looked “as if a regular frog had been bleached and then put in a panini press,” Fadiman remarks on his noble species, one that helped spawn (ahem) the first widely established pregnancy test, earned a Nobel Prize for a British biologist who used an African clawed frog to clone the first vertebrate, and helped establish that reproduction can be possible in zero gravity after a trip on the space shuttle Endeavor. All this, from a pet who was defined by not being a dog: “Bunky was the anti-Typo. An unpettable pet. Cool to the touch. Squishy, but not soft. Undeniably slimy. Impervious to education. A poor hiking companion. Not much of a companion at all, really. Couldn’t be taken out of his aquarium and placed on a lap.” Fadiman’s piece will make you laugh and make you think more carefully about your role as a pet owner. —KS
Justin Heckert | ESPN | March 7, 2023 | 5,462 words
I don’t follow the NBA, and I’m not one for memorabilia of any variety. But leave it to Justin Heckert, one of my favorite feature writers, to make me give a damn about an old, untorn ticket to a Chicago Bulls game that happened around the time I was born. Heckert spends time with Mike Cole, who as a college freshman attended Michael Jordan’s first game with the Bulls and saved the ticket because he’s the kind of guy who does that. (Cole has a plastic bin with “MIKE’S MEMORY BOX” written on the side, filled with ephemera from various sporting events). Nearly 40 years after the Bulls game, a span of time in which Jordan became one of the most celebrated athletes in history, a man with a Glock strapped to his hip came to Cole’s house in an armored car. He was there to retrieve the ticket, which Cole had agreed to sell at auction, where it was expected to bring in as much as $1 million. But the story Heckert tells isn’t about Cole getting rich (though that does happen). Really, it’s about the meaning we invest in objects and how it can change as we do, as the world does. —SD
Claire L. Evans | Grow | March 14, 2023 | 4,203 words
In this fascinating interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares their perspective on the role of AI today — “to broaden our idea of intelligence” — and a vision for a mindful, collaborative future that ultimately decenters humans and makes more space for nonhuman beings and animals. “I don’t think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence,” says Bridle. “There are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence.” Intelligence is relational; it’s not something that exists within beings of things, but rather between them. As a gardener — someone who loves feeling their hands in the soil, and working with the small organisms within it — I love their conversation on gardening, and how humans can apply that same deep awareness to technology. I appreciate, too, their thoughts on resilience and the transmission of knowledge in a time of radical change on Earth. (If you enjoy this Q&A, combine it with two previous Top 5 favorites: “The Great Forgetting,” a read on resilience and the environment, and “What Counts As Seeing,” another interview focused on the nonhuman and natural world.) —CLR
Jason Kehe | Wired | March 23, 2023 | 4,044 words
For someone who’s published countless books, and sold an enormous multiple of that countlessness, Brandon Sanderson is anything but a household name. Unless you live in a fantasy house, that is. Still, the most prolific living genre fiction writer has never been the subject of a magazine profile, which makes Jason Kehe’s treatment all the more enjoyable. A year ago, I picked Kehe’s piece about simulation theory for this roundup, and the two stories share a damn-the-torpedoes willingness to fuse exegetical acuity with a chatty, even flippant POV. What works for a philosophical essay works for a portrait; Kehe’s quest isn’t to capture Sanderson as much as it is to capture why people love Sanderson so much, and what animates his sprawling fictional worlds. That means casting away the false pieties and stannery that infect so many “celebrity” profiles and instead relishing in the man’s banalities. Yet, the barbs are tipped with love, and everyone — the voracious fans, Sanderson’s cliché-spouting characters, and Sanderson himself — shines as their truest selves. —PR
Harrison Scott Key | The Bitter Southerner | March 14, 2023 | 5,200 words
Last Friday night, I had two pints of Guinness and went home, content with a St. Patrick’s Day well celebrated. Apparently, I know nothing about how to observe the feast. Harrison Scott Key enlightened me in this delightful essay about the drunken debauchery that is the holiday’s annual parade in Savannah, Georgia. I loved his raucous account of trying to claim a spot for the parade: Akin to the Sacking of Constantinople, “insults and elbows and fits [are] thrown” until everyone settles into their position, dons a green feather boa, and makes merry. The prose is so vivid you can almost hear the noise, touch the sweaty crowds, and taste the booze. I could also feel the camaraderie — over the years of attending the parade, Scott Key finds lasting friendships. A transplant to Savannah, and initially lonely and unable to find his place in a new community, this annual tradition helps Scott Key to discover his people. After all, as he writes, “it’s easier to love people you’ve watched vomit into the hellmouth of a portable toilet at two in the morning.” —CW
Jia Tolentino | The New Yorker | March 20, 2023 | 4,772 words
This is a fascinating look at GLP-1 drugs, which, when injected, create a sense of satiety. I appreciated Tolentino’s exploration of the continual shift in our acceptance of different body shapes, as well as the impact of this particular trend. A piece that made me think about society, as much as weight. —CW
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The funding landscape remains very tough for technology startups, but there are still some pockets, and specific companies, driving a lot of interest among investors because they look like they’ll break through whatever current macroeconomic trends that are gripping the world.
Today, a startup out of Munich called IntegrityNext announced that it has raised its first-ever funding, an equity round of €100 million ($109 million), for a new twist on supply chain software: a platform that helps organizations with lots of suppliers automatically audit and monitor those companies for compliance with environmental and sustainability governance (ESG) rules, both those that companies set for themselves, as well as those coming from a growing body of regulation.
The funding is coming from a single investor, EQT Growth, and it will be used to continue building the breadth of the platform as well as the company’s go-to-market position. IntegrityNext has a growing number of customers — there are even a few would-be suppliers — across the U.S. and Europe, so the plan is to build more capabilities to meet that opportunity.
Those capabilities will stay in the area’s environmental and ethical labor commitments, and for now, there are no plans to loop in audits around, say, whether a supply chain implicates a company in the act of breaking embargoes on countries over political disputes or issues of national security.
The crux of the product is a platform that acts like a big data ingestion engine, sourcing information that is publicly available to help develop risk profiles for different markets and different companies, complemented by regular contact with businesses in the supply chain to supply details. All this is compiled into a database that then provides a warning system and audits for IntegrityNext’s customers to better understand what is going on in their supply chains.
What they do next is up to those customers, though: they can then use this to help either require their partners to change things, change the partners themselves, send in human auditors for deeper investigations, or I guess nothing at all. But ultimately, this is about building a way to manage what might be thousands of suppliers for some companies.
“You have to find an efficient way to manage that,” said Dominik Stein, a partner at EQT Growth. “You can’t go to every company and do every check yourself; it just doesn’t work.” (Stein’s joining an advisory board with this round.) From what I understand, a typical customer might pay $60,000/year for the service, but the figure could be significantly higher or lower depending on the size of the supply chain.
IntegrityNext, and this round, are part of a group of startups that have grown impressively over several years but flown under the radar. The startup has been profitable since 2004, and has been completely bootstrapped until now. On its own steam, it’s picked up a 200-strong list of enterprise customers, including Siemens Gamesa, Infineon and SwissRe, with a supply chain database that monitors close to 1 million suppliers across 190 countries.
According to CEO Martin Berr-Sorokin, who co-founded the company with Simon Jaehnig (CRO) and Nick Heine (COO), they decided to raise capital now to essentially strike while the iron is hot. The company had never taken outside funding, but it had no shortage of inbound interest, he said, and the state of the market and the fact that raising might not be as easy later swayed things.
“We wanted to have a strong partner for our next growth phase,” Berr-Sorokin said in an interview. “We were getting to the next phase, and we need support for hiring, extending our network, sales and marketing, and going into new markets in Europe and the U.S. We didn’t have to do it. It was an option, and we feel lucky to have done it.”
ESG is evolving rapidly as a market opportunity. On one hand, consumers, thanks in part to social media, have become significantly more aware of how a business’ supply chain might effectively paint that business with the tar of labor exploitation and poor environmental practices, and that is putting a lot of pressure on those businesses to do better. The businesses themselves, meanwhile, are at the end of the day run by humans. Some may be hard-nosed when it comes to getting business done at any cost, but a good number have a conscience and want to do right by that, not just for the sake of appearances.
On the other hand, there have been notable developments playing out in the regulatory realm that might make whatever “nice to have” that has swirled around ESG into more of a “must do.” In Germany, companies with more than 3,000 employees are required to provide audits and reporting to demonstrate their own ESG compliance — compliance set by regulators — lest they face fines and other penalties. That number is coming down in 2024 to 1,000 employees. In Europe, there is regulation in progress that will place similar requirements on EU companies, bringing down the number of employees even more, to 250.
And that opportunity is definitely one being spotted by others: Worldfavor and Prewave are also building platforms that automate the process of businesses auditing and monitoring suppliers. Others like Salesforce have started to put ESG supplier monitoring into their sustainability product sets, and a startup in France, Sesamm, is building AI tech to help companies with their sustainability commitments.
That’s not the whole story, though: there will be inevitable pushback on these regulations, and there is a big question mark over how all of this will play out in one of the biggest and most industrialized nations in the world, the U.S., where some legislators have floated the idea of not only staying away from any regulation of this kind, but even proactively discouraging developments on this front as counter to economic progress. Businesses are also not all on board.
“Yes, some companies complain, but others see it as a competitive advantage to be good in ESG,” said Berr-Sorokin. “Of course the regulatory regime helps us, but if it gets pushed back, we still have trends in our society and good corporate practices.”
IntegrityNext raises $109M for a platform to audit supply chains for ESG compliance by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
In this interview with Claire L. Evans, Ways of Being author James Bridle shares thought-provoking observations about the role of artificial intelligence, the awareness of living in a more-than-human world (and what gardening can teach us about building technology), and the importance of resilience and transmittal of knowledge as the world radically changes.
But I have this very strong sense that one of the broader roles of AI in the present is really just to broaden our idea of intelligence. The very existence, even the idea of artificial intelligence, is a doorway to acknowledging multiple forms of intelligence and infinite kinds of intelligence, and therefore a really quite radical decentering of the human, which has always accompanied our ideas about AI — but mostly incredibly fearfully. There’s always been this fear of another intelligence that will, in some way, overtake us, destroy us. It’s where all the horror of it comes from. And that power is completely valid, if you look at human history, the human use of technology, and the way in which it’s controlled by existing forms of power. But it doesn’t need to be read that way.
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