just curious....

[Phil Henshaw-2]

After general systems theory, non-linear thermodynamics, catastrophy
theory, complexity, and lots of other creidble attempts to explain the
vaguries of complicated things and their surprisingly ways of suddenly
transforming into others, my approach is to sort of (conditionally)
scrap all that and start over with a rigorous method of unbiased
observation.    It doesn't stop there, but it starts there and goes
where anyone takes it.    
 
What's wrong with that?       And more particularly, why doesn't anyone
seem concerned that maintaining explosively accelerating change in our
world (by promoting continual positive feedback for multiplying
investment, our 'null hypothesis' and guiding principle for 'adapting'
to the earth) might be problematic?    Is it possibly that we're stuck
without a common model from which to refer?  
 
I don't think the issue is a matter of which point of view is right and
to scratch out all the others.   I think it's to connect the views from
all the sides of the subject into a whole picture that's actually
useful.     The six wize men will have better luck getting the idea of
'elephant' if they talk rather than fight!
 
 
Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: [phone]                
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
explorations: www.synapse9.com <http://www.synapse9.com/>  
 
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[Bill Eldridge]

Attracted to this through the claimed ability to predict the upcoming
primaries as well as answering whether one can still wear a speedo without
scaring children (well, I don't need an equation to know the second answer).
Haven't read it, but sounds intriguing - let the US residents test the
waters
first.

Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life
http://www.amazon.com/Geek-Logik-Foolproof-Equations-Everyday/dp/0761140212

[Marko Rodriguez]

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds two-year LANL project for the  
development of metrics derived from scholarly usage data.

Los Alamos, New Mexico, November 6th 2006 - The Andrew W. Mellon  
Foundation has awarded funding to Los Alamos National Laboratory  
(LANL) in support of the two-year MESUR project that will investigate  
metrics derived from the network-based usage of scholarly  
information. The Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team of the  
LANL Research Library will carry out the project. Johan Bollen is the  
Principal Investigator, Herbert Van de Sompel serves as an  
architectural consultant, and Aric Hagberg of the LANL Mathematical  
Modeling and Analysis group serves as modeling consultant. Marko A.  
Rodriguez, PhD student at the University of California Santa Cruz and  
LANL Graduate Research Assistant, supports the project's research and  
development.

The project's major objective is enriching the toolkit used for the  
assessment of the impact of scholarly communication items, and hence  
of scholars, with metrics that derive from usage data. The project  
will start with the creation of a semantic model of scholarly  
communication, and an associated large-scale semantic store that  
relates a range of scholarly bibliographic, citation and usage data  
obtained from a variety of sources. Next, an investigation into the  
definition and validation of usage-based metrics will be conducted on  
the basis of this comprehensive collection. Finally, the defined  
metrics will be cross-validated, resulting in the formulation of  
guidelines and recommendations for future applications of metrics  
derived from scholarly usage data. Projects results will be made  
public on the project's web site <http://www.mesur.org/>.

The MESUR project currently has an open position for a software  
developer; a job description is available at <http://www.mesur.org/ 
Jobs.html>.

Marko A. Rodriguez
Los Alamos National Laboratory (P362-proto)
Los Alamos, NM 87545
Phone [phone]
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~okram


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