[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 53, Issue 27

Wed Dec 31 21:30:57 PST 2008

Hi Murray

You raise a critical issue about government "memory". We were contacted several years after we did a report for the USEPA. A consulting firm had a contract to do what we did as a separate publication under a broader contract. We gave the caller the document number in the EPA publications list and never heard from them again. 

A parallel experience happens in The Academy when professors assign research papers. Now with analysis programs, many of these plagerized papers are spotted. But, still, it is clear that:

a) that there is a lot of duplication, including papers in scholarly journals by academics who should know better
b) with the proliferation of materials in all media, good searching is hard to do even if the searchers wanted to take the time to plumb the depth of what is out "there". I was once booted off a listserv on ICT's for pointing out both the insufficient searching for materials and the trivial nature of much of the published works. In the past, one would collect and verify before publishing. With pressure to pub/perish today, the publication of a data point and the further publishing of a second point or a deepeer analysis would count as two papers while the past lies buried waiting for some archivist to uncover. In fact it was specifically pointed out that a new journal was needed because the academics needed the space. It is estimated that there are over 20,000 academic type journals extant. Open access databases are now also expanding.

This becomes critical for internet researchers given the increasing ability for "bots" or intelligent search engines to scour the entire literature, both formal and informal, mainstream and fugitive which sits outside the traditional search stream. This changes the roll of the researcher. It should also change the form and substance of an academic publication since it is no longer necessary to have documents which have less than 10% new material. All should only need a hot link to the past history. This should reduce a publication to a single page, reducing the literature and turning most publications into a "note". The problem is that The Academy doesn't know how to deal with pub/perish for promo and tenure without the default to a count of annual publications, many of which could be footnotes in the scheme of the universe.

tom

tom abeles, editor
On the Horizon
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm

> Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2009 01:06:01 +0100
> From: murray.turoff at gmail.com
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 53, Issue 27
> 
> Thanks William, it has been some time since we talked and it is good to hear
> from you.
> Groups in EMASARI was very weak, and it was really EIES the electronic
> Information Exchange System that had groups as a fully integrated structure
> including group messaging as in 1976 we had to buil EIES with its own
> internal message system.  As an R&D system we could tailor individual
> interfaces wiht unique cababilites for each user group.   We could transfer
> prividledges or access rights by distributing them to teh group.
> Any content could be references in any communication with a type of html we
> had in the system to provide hypertext linkages that could either be
> displayed wihtin the text or left to be triggered by teh user.  It also had
> a full chat cabablity as did EMIASARI in 1971.
> 
> The Network nation was reprinted in 1993 by MIT press and is still available
> from MIT press or Amazon.
> 
> We established in the past few years on the NJIT libaray an archive for all
> our early research reports including controlled expeirments and field trails
> evaluations as well as user manuals for the many altenraive subsystems we
> built.  A complete EMISARI manual is there too.  This will get you there
> 
> http://library.njit.edu/archives/cccc-materials/    if you dont record this
> go to the library at njit and lookd at service and collections and one of
> them will be the archive of the Computer Conferencing and Communications
> Center from 1975 though 1999
> 
> if you look at some of the evaluation studies these reports contain all the
> scales used and the procedures and represent some interesting resources for
> phd students.
> 
> Besides the scientific networks that used eies there were a lot of social
> network type things going on at the same time between teh different
> communties.   Things like poetry writing conferences, collaborative story
> writing using eies pen names, and discussions of a lot of popular
> subjects.   The first real public social sysetms which evolved from EIES by
> Staurt Brand who wrote teh whole earth software catablog using groups on
> eies to collaborate on material, was the Well which he developed
> commerically and had the many social network groups inlcuding a number of
> bands and their follers like the Grateful Dead.   The Well still exists i
> believe.
> 
> Since 2003 i have been going back to my EMISARI work and doing Emergency
> Management Information Systems.   The government has no organizational
> memory about what it once could do very well and how it was done back in OEP
> in the 60s and early 70s.   The paper on DERMIS on my website (in JITTA
> also) tells why i went back to this area to try and show what can be done
> with the right approach the emergency management problem.
> 
> On my website is a recent report roxanne and i did for NLM on the
> information overload that the emergency management community is facing on
> the Web.  That full report of 169 pages (a one round delphi) is on my
> website and make interesting reading for some of you i am sure.   We could
> not suggest solutions in the report as that was not allowed by the sponosors
> but I just gave a paper at WEB2008 during the ICIS meeting in paris and it
> has a suggested solutions in terms of user controlled recommender systems of
> a specific nature.  If anyone is interested I will send it to you.  Springer
> is publishing it in teh near future.
> A group of us started a professional community of practice in this area
> called ISCRAM, check out iscram.org
> for four years of proceedings and it is now an affilated AIS conference as
> well.
> 
> Roxanne and i are sort of amazed about how little many current researchers
> know about anyof this early work and many findings that are still relevant
> for current reserach issues.
> 
> 
> Message: 3
> > Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:55:30 +0000
> > From: William Dutton <william.dutton at oii.ox.ac.uk>
> > Subject: Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others
> > To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> > Message-ID: <153BFE27-DF1F-439F-A488-B03EBC11794C at oii.ox.ac.uk>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
> >
> > I think Murray Turoff is referring to the system that he pioneered,
> > called the Emergency Management Information Systems And Reference
> > Index (EMISARI). See: Hiltz and Turoff, (1978), The Network Nation:
> > Human Communication via Computer (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley),
> > also see: http://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm  Murray
> > Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz had a vision that was decades ahead of the
> > times.
> >
> > Bill
> >
> > Distinguished Professor Emeritus
> Information Systems, NJIT
> homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff
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