Information Research - ideas and debate

News on e-books

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 16:37:00 +0000

I didn't imagine last year, when I started a Flipboard 'magazine', News on e-books, that a year later it would have more than 30,000 readers - but that is the state of things today! If you don't have an iPad or an Android reader to access Flipboard, you can get access to the magazine here: https://flipboard.com/section/news-on-e-books-btm8Im Thanks to support from Elena Maceviciute, we now cover most Western and East European languages - something that no doubt helps to gather readers!

Problems with the Information Research site

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 10:05:00 +0000

The site has been down since last Friday, when some server reassignments were put into effect at Lund and the DNS connection for the journal was lost. It is possible, however, to access the site by using a different url: http://www.informationr.net/ir/ Normally, we don't use "www" in the url and why this works, I have no idea!

Server problems with Information Research

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 11:56:00 +0000

Some time over the weekend both Information Research and the journal management site went down. The folk at Lund are now aware of this and exploring what the problem may be. Apologies for the inconvenience this may cause - we'll be back up and running as soon as possible.

Abstracts for a conference on publishing, Pula, Croatia, December 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 13:19:00 +0000

Three members of the research team in Boras have been asked to give papers at this conference in December. You can find the abstracts on the Project blog or, if you favour Flipboard, you'll find them copied to the 'News on e-books' magazine.

Open Access in the UK reviewed again

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 10:29:00 +0000

In the UK, Parliament's Business, Innovation and Skill Committee has published its report on the state of OA in the UK. In doing so they come the conclusion that the policy advocated by the Finch Committee that the route to take was the Gold route of "OA journals" (i.e., more money in the pockets of publishers) was mistaken and that more should be done to promote the Green route of depositories. So far, so good, and it gets better: not only are the publishers hammered for their excess profits, but the Committee recommends that author payments should be made only to "true" OA journals (like Information Research) and not to the "hybrid" OA journals, i.e., those that make author charges, but also charge subscriptions. It also recommends that the government should work to lower the VAT charge on e-journals (print journals in the UK are not subject to VAT at all). All in all, this seems like an excellent piece of parliamentary committee work. I haven't yet read it in its entirety, but look forward to discovering what those who submitted evidence had to say. The Finch Committee was stacked in favour of the publishers, since three or four of is members were publishers. It is interesting to see when a less biased group of people consider the situation!

How to write badly :-)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 14:54:00 +0000

I'm reading, for review in Information Research, Michael Billig's "Learn to write badly: how to succeed in the social sciences" - which I guess will offend many of his fellow social scientists, but which I find an absolute joy. If you want to know what is wrong with academic writing, read this book - and reform your ways :-)
Here's just one of many, many quotable pieces:

Certainly the big words can provide the means to academic success in the social sciences, for it is professionally advantageous to be an expert in a particular ization or ification - and better still to be known as the inventor of an ization or ification. Yet, like cigarettes and alcohol, these big words should come with warnings. If one looks closely at them - more closely than most social scientists normally do, especially those who are regular users - they can flatter to deceive. Often our social scientific izations or ifications provide only the appearance of technical advance and precision. We should remember that all that glitters is not the product of aurification.

Information science is not immune to the creeping izations and ifications, nor to another of Billig's themes - the nounification of the world - removing people from sentences, along with the verbs. We're familiar with the kind of noun phrase that Billig point to like the Umpire Decision Referral System he mentions - which, of course, gets abbreviated to UDRS. No verbs, you notice - and no real meaning. You have to either know about cricket, or get someone to help you to understand what it is. If it is a system for referring the decisions made by umpires, what are those decisions referred to? Nounification does not make things precise, but more obscure. I could probably find many examples in the information science literature if I tried!

Further thoughts on e-book publishing

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 09:16:00 +0000

Having now seen all versions of "Theory in information behaviour research" I can confirm that the best version to buy is that available through the Apple iBookstore. This is hardly surprising, since the book was designed with iBook Author and intended for publication through Apple. The problem with the Smashwords conversions is that the formatting varies from version to version and figures, in particular, cause problems of location relative to the text - sometimes the figure caption appears on a different page from the figure itself, for example. All of this varies with the device or app on which the book is read and if you have an IOS device, buy the iBookstore version, not the EPUB version available through Smashwords.

Publishing an e-book

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Thu, 18 Jul 2013 19:55:00 +0000

I have recently been engaged in publishing an e-book. A couple of years ago I got an idea for a book, collected a number of colleagues to write chapters, and approached a publisher. Interest was expressed and things were going nicely until a new person was appointed to the liaison role - she wanted some changes, to which I was not prepared to agree, and so we parted company. I suggested to my colleagues that we should go ahead with an electronic publication, and they agreed. By May this year the text was ready - all chapters had been submitted and reviewed in a kind of peer review by everyone. I had been exploring Apple's iBooks Author for some time and decided to use it to convert the Word documents - not automatically, but by cutting and pasting! Ultimately, everything was ready and submitted to the Apple iBookstore by the end of May. How things proceeded can be found in a post in our e-books research project blog. I also began to explore how to deliver the book to other platforms and decided to use Smashwords. This involved converting the .iba file back to a properly formatted Word .doc file according to the Smashwords' style manual - a non-trivial task. The process of working with Smashwords is also the subject of a blog entry. The book, "Theory in information behaviour research", edited by myself and with chapters on Activity Theory, Critical Theory, Personal Construct Theory, Personality Theory, Practice Theory, Social Cognitive Theory, Social Phenomenology, and Theoretical approaches in Russia and Eastern Europe, is now available both in the Apple iBookstore and, for non-Apple devices and apps, in the Smashwords store. It is priced at a modest $9.99 - less than the cost of a paperback book, in the hopes that students will find it not only of interest, but affordable, and all royalties go to support the publication of Information Research.

The "News on e-books" Flipboard magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:52:00 +0000

Those who have signed up to this Flipboard magazine (for iPad, iPhone and Android devices) will have seen that it has quickly developed a large reader-base - 5,620 readers just a moment ago. My colleague Elena Maceviciute has become a contributor, bringing her knowledge of other languages. I had already started "flipping" stories in German, French, Swedish, Portuguese and Spanish (Danish and Norwegian also pop up from time to time) - now Elena can add Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, and, at a pinch, one or two other eastern European languages, as well as doing a better job with the Scandinavian languages. I can't provide a link to a Website for this, since Flipboard is not available for desktop machines (yet) - but, if you have an appropriate device you can easily check it out - simply put "News on e-books" in the Flipboard search box and one of the first things on the list will be the magazine.

The problem of plagiarism

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:40:00 +0000

One of the most difficult things an journal editor has to deal with is plagiarism, which is often difficult to spot in a casual read-through – which is why, in Information Research, we specifically ask reviewers to check for plagiarism. I receive an alert from Google Scholar giving information on papers that cite my publications. One of these was a paper published in the DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology – “Information Seeking and Searching Behaviour of Dental Science Professionals in Karnataka, by U. Umesha and M. Chandrashekara Here I found two paragraphs where my words had been used without being placed within inverted commas, to indicate that they were in fact quotations. When this is done, the assumption is that the words are those of the authors themselves and, when they are not, the result is referred to as plagiarism. One of the offending pieces reads:

Information Searching Behaviour [3] is the ‘micro-level’ behaviour employed by the searcher in interacting with information systems of all kinds, it may be a human computer interaction (use of the mouse and clicks on links) or at the intellectual level (adopting a Boolean search strategy or determining the criteria for deciding relevant one) involve mental acts, such as judging the relevance of data or information retrieved. Information use behaviour, consists of the physical and mental acts involved in incorporating the information found into the person's existing knowledge base. It may involve, therefore, physical acts such as marking sections in a text to note their importance or significance, as well as mental acts that involve, for example, comparison of new information with existing knowledge [3].

These are entirely my words found in the paper referenced, which appeared in Informing Science. Consequently, to avoid the charge of plagiarism, the authors needed to make this clear by the use of quotation marks, as follows:

"Information Searching Behaviour is the ‘micro-level’ behaviour employed by the searcher... comparison of new information with existing knowledge" [3].

Why is this small distinction (the use of the inverted commas) important? Simply because anyone reading this paper and citing it may use part of the text in a paper of their own and attribute the words to the authors, rather than to the originator. I would not have raised this issue publicly but for the fact that I wrote to the editor, in a friendly way, acknowledging that it was difficult for an editor to spot these kinds of offences, and suggesting that, as the journal is electronic, it is an easy matter to make the correction and to notify the authors that this has been done. The editor failed to respond, and also failed to respond to a follow-up message a few weeks later.

Waste

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:06:00 +0000

Receiving, as I do, books for review, I'm often staggered by the amount of packing provided for a single book. An example arrived today: the book (a slim paperback of 186 pages) weighs 302 grams, the packaging 122 grams. The picture shows that one could get about six such books into the available space in the box! I wonder how much the publisher is charged for post and packing by the agency sending it out. (That agency is itself a subsidiary of the Hachette company.) Clearly the notion of protecting the environment hasn't yet hit the publishing industry.

Bogus organizations?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:24:00 +0000

Two of my colleagues on the journal have received a rather odd e-mail from someone claiming to represent the "American Society of Science and Engineering" - an organization of which I have never previously heard. As the e-mail address bore no relationship to those on the Society's Website, but used the domain "163.com", I contacted the Society to advise them that their identity might have been stolen. (The 163.com Website is entirely in Chinese, which made me even more suspicious!). The message stated: "The purpose of this email is to inquiry about the possibility of cooperation with your journal… In the mutual-beneficial cooperative relationship, we can do publicity, promotion and collect papers for your journal, and we can guarantee the quantity and quality of the papers we provide. Moreover, we will also pay the publication fee if any. I wonder if we can sign a publication agreement upon the cooperation." This sounds very much like one of the new, bogus, open access, "scholarly journal" scams and I was therefore rather surprised to get a response from the Society stating: "Thank you for your reminding and cooperation! Actually, ASSE has some cooperation with some Chinese orgnizations, for example, the information below stated, and you could contact with them if possible!" Which now makes me even more suspicious about this Society! Not only is the message grammatically illiterate, it gives me no information about the nature of the relationship it has with the Chinese organization, nor why that organization is contacting my Associate Editors. Is the American Society of Science and Engineering a bona fide organization, or is it, too, bogus?

The impact of social media

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:40:00 +0000

As readers of Information Research may have noticed, I have started to use links to Facebook, Twitter and various bookmark sharing services at the bottom of each paper in the journal. The service, from AddThis.com, provides information on the number of clicks these links receive and the resulting 'clicks-back' to the relevant paper. The number of resulting hits, divided by the original clicks provides a measure of what they call "viral lift", i.e., the additional hits resulting from the social media links. This provides some kind of measure of the 'popularity' of a paper, which the usual citation indexes cannot. A citation can mean many things: agreement with the propositions in a paper, refutation of those propositions, mere token acknowledgement of its place in the literature, or whatever. A social media link presumably means: "I've read this and you might find it interesting". What one cannot know, of course, is how many of those referred to a paper from a Facebook or Twitter link would have found the paper without such help. However, over time, we may be able to contrast the hits on the site before the introduction of this feature with the situation afterwards.

The results, since the publication of volume 18 number 1, on the 15th March 2013, for the top ten listed items are as follows:

Factores para la adopción de linked data e...
219 Clicks 30 Shares 730% Viral Lift

Visitors and residents: what motivates engagement wi...
169 Clicks 57 Shares 296% Viral Lift

Multi-dimensional analysis of dynamic human informat...
136 Clicks 16 Shares 850% Viral Lift

In Web search we trust? Articulation of the cognitiv...
125 Clicks 9 Shares 1,389% Viral Lift

The nature and constitution of informal carers' info...
71 Clicks 9 Shares 789% Viral Lift

Big-data in cloud computing: a taxonomy of risks
39 Clicks 23 Shares 170% Viral Lift

Exploring design-fits for the strategic alignment of...
29 Clicks 15 Shares 193% Viral Lift

Search behaviour in electronic document and records...
23 Clicks 7 Shares 329% Viral Lift

Managing collaborative information sharing: bridging...
17 Clicks 13 Shares 131% Viral Lift

Workplace information practices among human resource...
16 Clicks 9 Shares 178% Viral Lift

Emerald embargo on open access

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:42:00 +0000

You may have read that, in response to the UK government's policy on open access (which is hardly totally enlightened) Emerald, which publishes the Journal of Documentation, is to have a two-year embargo on papers being deposited in repositories. This, of course, makes nonsense of the idea of "open" access - two years is far too long a period for such an embargo. However, there may be good news in this: perhaps authors will be persuaded that publication in a genuinely open access journal like Information Research is to be preferred. After all, not only are all papers openly available to all from the moment of publication, but copyright rests entirely with the author who can then do anything he or she wishes with the paper: generate as many copies as necessary for a class handbook, put in the institutional repository, or whatever. I don't exactly look forward to an increase in submissions to Information Research, since we get just about as much as we can cope with now, but it will be interesting to keep an eye on things.

Can Google Alerts be trusted?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 19:33:00 +0000

The notion of trusting Google becomes more and more unlikely. I've been using the Alert service since December 2011 to monitor the news on e-books, in the expectation that we might get some funding for research on the subject. However,when I started to analyse the data recently, I discovered that there appears to be a maximum count of 45 items in any one Alert - in fact in 36 out of 59 days examined so far this was the case - and no day exceeded 45 items.

Using the service to try to discover trends in news reporting, therefore, is made impossible, since one will never know the "true" number of items published, or even discovered by Google's spiders. As far as I can discover, there is no information on the Alerts site about any such limitation. When one couples this problem with the further difficulty that Google covers much more of the US news than anywhere else in the world it become difficult to treat the service seriously.

The U.S. election

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 14:10:00 +0000

It would be comforting to believe that the American people could not be so stupid as to elect yet another right-wing millionaire bent on destroying what is left of the public sphere, but, sadly, history teaches us otherwise. After Reagen's disastrous handling of the economy (and his abandonment of the 'balance' rule in the media, which allows Fox News to pour out its poisonous rubbish), which saw only the rich getting richer, Clinton managed to turn things around and actually leave an economy in credit. All that was swept away by Bush, whose sole political aim seemed to be to keep his rich friends happy. Obama has had Congress stacked against him, preventing the implementation of perfectly sensible strategies for dealing with the mess left by Bush, and now it seems that half of the voters in the USA want to trust the management of the country to another Republican. From outside the USA this seems unbelievable, but it seems that memories are short in the USA - this guy didn't manage to do enough to get us back on track, so let another muffin-headed playboy have a go! What has all this to do with a foreigner, you might ask? Well, Bush's mis-management of the economy and de-regulation of the financial service industry brought about the collapse than now sees a number of European countries on the rack - do you imagine that they want another Bush?

Worried about the US election?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:47:00 +0000

You should be: http://www.newstatesman.com/star-spangled-staggers/2012/10/mitt-romney-candidate-2012-zombie-apocalypse

Information Research - reader survey

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:10:00 +0000

I've been conducting a survey of Information Research readers. For various reasons the respondents are largely self-selected, so no thorough statistical analysis is possible. However, 58 persons report having published in Information Research and one of the things I was interested to learn about was the extent to which authors are being pressured in their institutions into submitting only to certain 'high quality' (i.e., high Impact Factor) journals.

Twenty-six of the respondents said that they were subject to such pressure (51% of those responding to the question) and, of these, twenty-one, or 81%) said that Information Research was on the list of recommended journals.

I am fundamentally opposed to the idea that only high Impact Factor journals publish 'high quality' papers, but, given the trend, it is good to know that the quality of contributions to the journal is recognized. Perhaps the availability of this kind of information will provide a lever to exert some pressure on those institutions that do not at present recognize the quality of the journal.

The Apple Maps disaster

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 11:15:00 +0000

What on earth possessed Apple to dump Google Maps in favour of its own system, which they appear to have bought from a Canadian company without any due diligence? If any quality testing had been done it would have revealed the numerous problems that people have already experienced. Apparently, if you live in New York, or San Francisco, it's fine. Anywhere else and you are likely to find that noted local landmarks don't exist, or have moved 20 miles down the road. I'm no apologist for Google and there is always the problem, as we have seen with iGoogle, that the company can pull a service without any regard for how many people depend upon it, so perhaps Apple is right to find an alternative. But finding an alternative without adequate testing is so sloppy as to make one wonder whose decision it was. As an example of the problems: the city of Boras in Sweden is about the 7th biggest in the country and yet Apple Maps can't locate the public library - although it does so without difficulty in other parts of the country, and it does locate the art gallery, which is in the same building. (It has to be said, however, that Google Maps locates it about a kilometer away in a temporary location it moved from a year ago.) The restaurants and cafes shown are out of date and the university is shown in three locations, one of which is completely wrong - the location of one of its schools, the Textilhogskolan is not shown at all, although it is the leading textile school in Sweden and is in a separate location. In other words, if you live in New York - fine; if you live pretty well anywhere else in the world, go back to Google Maps in your browser and wait until they have their own app for the iPad.

Information Research and browsers

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 07:52:00 +0000

Not being an Internet Explorer user it has taken me some time to discover that this browser doesn't render the Information Research pages correctly. It seems that IE is not fully compatible with HTML5. I use a Mac and find that the pages are fine with Firefox, Safari and Chrome - but I can't account for what happens with IE . Both Firefox and Chrome are OK in Windows, so get yourselves a better browser if you find problems with IE :-) Given Google's attitude towards its iGoogle users, I can't recommend Chrome, but Firefox is fine. Unfortunately, Safari 6 is not supported for Windows and it seems that Apple is not going to produce a Windows version - a pity, I find it a very good browser for the Mac and use it in preference to anything else.

Why isn't everyone using genuine open access?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:45:00 +0000

I have just been writing the editorial for the new issue of Information Research, to be published on Thursday. In the course of doing this I decided to take a look at the Google Analytics data for the site and I find that the top page of the site (http://informationr.net) had almost half-a-million hits in the past twelve months, while the top page of the journal (http://informationr.net/ir/) had close to 800,000. The most hit issue was volume 8 number 1, with more than 50,000 hits, and the most hit paper was one by Chun Wei Choo, on environmental scanning - more than 31,000 hits. According to the counter on the page, the paper has had a total of 190,345 hits and Google Scholar tells me that it has 158 citations, giving a cites/hits ratio of a little more than 1,200. Some day I must do a thorough study of this relationship :-)

However, what is the point of this? Well, in total, Information Research and its individual papers, plus the book reviews (which aren't counted in the process) must be totalling more than two million hits a year. Individual papers are getting thousands of hits and in some cases tens of thousands of hits and, if we can generalise (which we can't!) from the Choo case, for every 1200 hits you are getting a citation. And you can check on this with the counter information and the link to Google Scholar provided on the site.

Can any other journal in the field boast this kind of exposure? If not, why aren't you and other academics demanding the genuinely free and open mode of access that I call platinum! No author charges and no subscription charges give you maximum exposure of your work to a world-wide audience - and yet you continue to publish in commercially managed journals that close off your work from the world at large unless you pay for it to be open. Is this crazy economics or what?

E-books

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 13:37:00 +0000

When I was teaching (it seems aeons ago!) I used to share with students the little conceit that photocopying was an alternative to reading. I proposed that some osmotic process meant that when a photocopy was put in a bag or a briefcase to be "read at home", something strange happened. Although the photocopy was never actually read, the information content leaked into the bag, and migrated through the handle up into one's brain.

The same thing may be happening with e-books: it is so easy to download all those books you feel you ought to have read, from the Gutenberg Project site. There they nestle (if that's what the zeros and ones can be thought of doing) in the memory of your iPad or e-readers and, because you know that they are immediately available for reading, you never actually read them. But you know them, because you've read about them. Somehow, also, there's an information leakage from the device into your brain and before long you find yourself deleting them because you no longer need to read them.

Giving up on Google

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 13:28:00 +0000

Google's abandonment of the millions of users of its home page feature, iGoogle, is a wake up call. The company motto of 'do no evil', is clearly a sham, as it's adventures in China and other matters have indicated. This event, which has angered thousands of people who have taken to the online forums to express their dismay has resulted in not a single response from the company, telling us, loud and clear, that it is just another corporate giant that can't be trusted to continue to deliver what we've come to rely upon. So, what is it like to do without Google? As it happens, not bad.

I have now switched almost entirely: instead of iGoogle, I now use Protopage and I find that I like it more and more - it makes iGoogle seem rather old fashioned and clunky.

I'm also in the process of switching from Gmail to Outlook.com - at least I know that Microsoft is just as likely to screw me as is Google, but when it is expected, I can live with it.

I have been using Chrome as my primary browser, but, now that Safari has the same kind of "omni-bar" (address and search box in one), I no longer use Chrome and have switched permanently to Safari.

And for a search engine, Duckduckgo is proving to be perfectly satisfactory (in spite of its silly name). I like the uncluttered presentation of results and, again, this makes it look rather more sophisticated than Google. And Microsoftk's Academic Search, serves as a reasonable alternative to Scholar.Google.

So, now is the time to switch, folks: let's give Google a kick in the pants to remind it of its commitment, still standing proud on its company page:

#1: Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.

How's that for irony!

Thoughts on open access - again

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:58:00 +0000

The BOAI forum has had a number of posts regarding the RCUK decision on funding open access through author charges. Today's Independent, in an article on the UK Health (!) Secretary caving in to the fast food industry, has a comment from Professor Simon Capewell, who served on the Health Secretary's Public Health Commission when the Tories were in opposition:

It is breathtaking that when deciding on public health policy in relation to food you should be sitting around the table with the very people who make large amounts of money from selling this stuff.

Does that remind anyone of anything?

"Do no evil"?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Wilson) — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 10:18:00 +0000

There were a couple of bits of news the other day that relate directly and indirectly to Google (which is currently taking a lot of flack for its decision to abandon iGoogle, used by millions of people as their home page). First, there was the announcement:

Google is to pay a record $22.5m (£14.4m) fine to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US after it tracked users of Apple's iPhone, iPad and Mac computers by circumventing privacy protections on the Safari web browser for several months at the end of 2011 and into 2012.
The fine is the largest paid by one company to the FTC, which imposed a 20-year privacy order on Google in March 2010 after concerns about the launch of its ill-fated Buzz social network.

and the other:

A petition demanding that Google pays its “fair share” of tax has attracted nearly 40,000 signatures in just two days as anger over the internet giant’s avoidance of tax in the UK grows.
The petition began as a direct reaction to revelations which emerged this week showing that Google paid the Exchequer £6m on a turnover of £395m last year.

This suggests that Google's aim to "do no evil" is nothing but a marketing slogan and, like most such slogans has no real effect on what is just another big corporation intent on maximising profits at the expense of others. And among those who suffer from the tax avoidance of the bankers and major corporations (Amazon is another that manages to pay less tax in the UK than it ought to, by channelling sales through an offshore company) are children. How about these statistics, Larry (Page) and Jeffrey (Bezos):

The proportion of children living in poverty grew from 1 in 10 in 1979 to 1 in 3 in 1998.
Today, 30 per cent of children in Britain are living in poverty.
The UK has one of the worst rates of child poverty in the industrialised world

This is what your tax avoidance contributes to.