Corporations

Ancestry’s indexing experiment with firms in China

technology , , , ,

I follow genealogist Michele Lewis on TikTok. She recently found an unusual Ancestry.com transcription from the 1820 Federal Census. Check out the handwritten first name. What does it look like to you?

ancestry index outsource to china

Now, I get it that a 200-year-old handwritten scrawl can be hard to read. But how could a transcriber even consider “Elizabether” in this case?

I think I know the answer. In 2008, I worked for an online technology publication, The Industry Standard (no longer online). I interviewed Tim Sullivan, CEO of The Generations Network, which was Ancestry.com’s official corporate until 2009. The article was published on October 3, 2008, on the website of The Industry Standard (see image below).

In the interview, Sullivan noted that computers were “not even close” to being able to read handwritten records, especially those from disparate sources such as census records which have many different styles of handwriting.

So Ancestry turned to human transcriptionists. Paid transcriptionists, not volunteers like on FamilySearch. Sullivan told me:

“The vast majority of the investment we’ve made in the last 10 years is not in acquisitions costs or imaging costs, it’s in the indexing costs.”

At the time, Sullivan said Ancestry was paying $10 million per year to transcribe old records. To cut costs, Ancestry hired overseas partners in China where English was not widely spoken, but they can get census records transcribed for less money:

So how did The Generations Network import the data from millions of old census forms into its online database? Sullivan says the company spent about $75 million over 10 years to build its “content assets” including the census data, and much of that cost went into partnering with Chinese firms whose employees read the data and entered it into Ancestry.com’s database. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, he adds.

If you have ever tried to read old handwriting in an unfamiliar language, I am sure you can appreciate how difficult this task would be. But the lack of quality checks and nonsensical transcriptions is stunning. Keep in mind that Ancestry charges customers lots of money (up to 25% more as of January) but its main focus is generating profit for a string of private equity firms. Its current owner is a Wall Street PE firm, Blackstone Inc. It’s not clear if Ancestry still outsources its transcriptions to overseas firms, or if the OCR technology is good enough to hand off the task to computers.

Regardless, what’s especially frustrating is Ancestry customers have attempted to correct this particular error. The actual name is “Christopher Orr.” They’ve added the correct annotation multiple times, but Ancestry still shows the name from that 200-year-old census return as “Elizabether Orr.” Lots of people searching for this ancestor will never find him, thanks to Ancestry’s cost-cutting moves 15 years ago and lack of quality checks to correct such errors.

As Lewis notes at the end of her video, “Maybe you’re going to have the hand-search the indexes one at a time” to determine what the actual name is.

Archive of “Google stays mum on plans for public documents, Ancestry.com points to OCR hurdle.” By Ian Lamont. Published 10/3/2008, The Industry Standard.

ancestry china outsource index transcription 2008

 

The Supreme Court shifts and businesses suffer

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For more than 25 years, Internet businesses in the United States have enjoyed a big break: If a customer in another state buys something online, the company doesn’t need to collect state sales tax or file taxes in that state unless they have operations in that state such as a warehouse or branch office.

That is about to change, thanks to the recent South Dakota v. Wayfair ruling from the Supreme Court. This essay by a tax expert explains the situation and the impact pretty clearly. I draw your attention to the concluding paragraph (note: nexus is the ability of a state to require businesses to be responsible for taxes):

Many states have enacted economic nexus rules for income taxes that create a filing responsibility based on the amount of sales in a state. These amounts have generally been set at $500,000 and above. Now, states may seek to lower those thresholds to impact more sellers, and states that have not sought income tax nexus may move forward with new legislation.

I own a small business and use the Internet to sell goods to customers all over the country. The Supreme Court ruling is going to be a big headache. I don’t have a problem with paying taxes, but I do have a problem with dealing with 50+ entities (including states and territories) that have different filing requirements that will likely entail a lot of red tape. I don’t have a full-time accountant or staff that can deal with this stuff, so it falls on me to implement systems and processes to handle state taxes outside of Massachusetts.

I blogged my thoughts on this topic in As a small business owner, this is what I fear post-South Dakota vs. Wayfair, but the end result may mean not selling to customers in states whose red tape is too much of a pain … which hands even more power to big Internet businesses like Amazon.

What employers think about Harvard Extension School degrees

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For more than 10 years, I have received questions from prospective Harvard Extension School students (and some current students) about whether or not Harvard Extension School degrees will help them get a job, and what employers think about them. Here’s a typical query:

I am considering the Harvard Extension School for Management. I really want your opinion if this will be worth doing in terms of getting a job. I am an international student and have one year of business experience. Do you get an internship in summer? Does the Harvard brand help?

The short answer is “maybe.” Aside from the Harvard or Harvard Extension School brand, there are a few factors employers typically consider:

  1. It depends on the person and what else he or she brings to the table in terms of job experience, specific technical/work skills, and whether or not he or she will be a good fit for the team.
  2. It depends on the field/location/position. It will matter less in a highly competitive field in a big city compared to a less competitive market in a rural area or overseas.
  3. It depends on the person’s network.

As for the brand: It is quite good in academic circles (see Harvard Extension School success stories from the past year). However, the Harvard Extension School degree is not an automatic signal to “hire this person because he/she has ‘Harvard’ in his educational background.” But it may help you get noticed.

My ALM thesis director (a tenured professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) said the Harvard association and reputation — even for Extension School students — carries a lot of weight, and will help open doors that might otherwise be closed. He actually offered to help me find work related to my research (Chinese foreign policy analysis using computer-based research) if I was interested. I wasn’t — at the time I had a pretty good job in tech media and a young family, and becoming an analyst required moving to Washington, D.C.

Another thing that may help graduates get noticed are automated resume processing programs that search for specific keywords or phrases, which may include the name of famous universities … such as Harvard.

But when the resume gets passed to an HR screener or hiring manager, things start to get tricky for many HES grads. A lot of people do not make it clear that they attended the Extension School, and instead list “Harvard University” on their resumes, either in a misguided justification to hide the Extension School affiliation, or an outright misleading attempt to make it seem as if they graduated from Harvard College, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), or the Harvard Business School. Here are just a few examples from LinkedIn:

Harvard BiologyHarvard ALB economicsHarvard ALM digital media

Not everyone does this, of course. It’s also possible to find people who proudly list their Extension School degrees on LinkedIn:

Harvard Extension ALM nonprofits

I’ve covered the issue of how to represent your Extension School diploma in the past, and it has been debated by hundreds of people on this blog and elsewhere. You can read more at Harvard Extension School résumé guidelines are bogus.

In short, while a Harvard Extension Degree is issued by Harvard University, it is not the same degree that is issued to graduates of other schools at Harvard such as a Harvard College AB degree, a Harvard Business School MBA degree, or a Harvard GSAS AM degree. The Harvard Extension School has a rigorous process that makes students prove they can do the work before they are admitted, but the others are among the most highly selective undergraduate and graduate programs in the United States. Students are in classrooms with other high-achievers, which raises the level of discourse and focus. Yes, HES gets some high achievers as well (including graduates of Ivies and other competitive programs, and HES graduates who move onto highly selective PhD programs) but the classrooms are also filled with casual class-takers.

The curricula and graduation requirements are also completely different. The most obvious is the Extension School’s use of distance education for course credit and for many of the professional programs,  the fact that there is no requirement to take classes taught by faculty with actual teaching appointments at Harvard.

What this means is McKinsey or Bain won’t regard an HES ALB or ALM in Management grad the same way they will treat a recent Harvard College AB or HBS MBA recipient.

On the other hand, HES Management students can select courses that are taught by Harvard faculty, including HBS faculty, such as the example below.

V.G. Narayanan is the Thomas D. Casserly, Jr., Professor of Business Administration and has been teaching accounting at Harvard Business School

What HR and hiring managers think about Extension School grads

Several people involved in hiring decisions have commented how they regard HES grads compared to their counterparts from other schools. I’ll start with the positive evaluations, followed by some of the negative takes:

Josh:

I’m a hiring manager and I would hire an HES graduate any day of the week.

Paul:

As the president and founder of our company with final say in hiring/firing, the choice is clear. Being only book smart is not nearly enough to cut it as there are already too many book smart people out there to choose from. Candidate B’s qualities along with street smarts are harder to find and what the real world is looking for.

justanotheropinion:

If I had to hire one of two applicants for my accounting firm and one said hire me because I got good grades in high school and was active in the community (real Harvard applicant), and the other said I have years of experience in accounting and will work for three months to prove myself to you and if you don’t like what you see I will leave (HES applicant) I would hire the latter.

Why? Simple, the latter has shown they can complete a course of study, are working to better themselves and have decided to take on a great amount of additional responsibility.

But there are more than a few managers out there who have been burned by HES grads misrepresenting their degrees:

As somebody who has personally on-boarded somebody claiming an HES degree as a HGSAS degree, I can tell you that this is pure bullwack. What a complete waste of time and energy her fraud was. I wasted a ton of time looking into the issue. Harvard’s own standards have always made it clear to grads that their HES degree is not a Harvard College degree. Period… It’s willful ignorance on the part of HES grads that it will be overlooked. Anyone who doesn’t know how to represent an HES degree on a resume is a liar.

Another example:

It happens every few years where my firm gets an HES grad misrepresenting their degree. The latest “MA Anthropology – Harvard,” which after a little checking (we have learned to ALWAYS be suspicious), ends up being an MLA with a concentration from HES. When confronted they always plead ignorance and make the same BS argument about how they took classes on campus at Harvard taught by faculty and blah, blah, blah. Some are otherwise good candidates, but they are still committing resume fraud. I would take an honest UMass or UConn grad over HES any day. Had they listed their true HES credential on the resume and sold it in the interview, they would be fine.

As I have said many times in the past, HES grads should be proud of what they have accomplished and be proud to list “Harvard Extension School” on their resumes. If enough people do so and do as well in their careers as they did while at HES, the reputation of the Harvard Extension School will grow … making it easier for all Extension School grads to leverage ALB and ALM degrees to advance their careers.

Incorporated my publishing business

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January was a big month for my book venture. I finally incorporated. The company is called i30 Media Corporation. For now, the official website is in30minutes.com, which contains links to all of the book websites in the In 30 Minutes® guides.

Dropbox The venture began operations long before January. I published my first book ebook — a Dropbox for Dummies alternative — in July 2012. For the remainder of 2012 I operated the business as a “doing business as” entity. I used a DBA name for the publisher, but it was not a company in the sense of having liability protection, shares issued, or a distinct tax ID for revenue and banking. Even though I could have incorporated in 2012, I waited for several reasons:

  1. The venture needed to be profitable and on a growth trajectory (profitability in the second month of operations, strong growth soon after)
  2. I wanted to wind down operations of my previous venture before officially launching the new one (old company ceased operations in October, dissolved in November)
  3. I did not want to launch at the end of 2012 and deal with corporate tax returns for just a few months, as well as and other formation costs
  4. Company revenue had to be enough to cover formation costs and some other necessary post-launch fees

All of these conditions were met on January 1. I incorporated, using the very helpful guides at the Citizen’s Media Law Legal Guide (a project of the Harvard Berkman Center, which also hosts this blog!) as well as my own experience incorporating an earlier venture.

What the future holds for my publishing business

Will the venture be successful? That depends on a number of factors. But for the time being, I have created something that readers want and are willing to pay for. Now I have to deal with scaling the series while running it as a real business.

More news about the venture will be published in the coming months. Stay tuned …