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Citations (WAS RE: W3C suckered by Microsoft?)

• To: 'Bob Foster' <bob@o...>
• Subject: Citations (WAS RE: W3C suckered by Microsoft?)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 15:21:29 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

To be fair or honest, I have to change that Subject heading.

Don't look for conspiracy where one may only find vacuity.
You did get the memo for the next meeting, right?

As a metaphor, memes are acceptable in trendy conversation, 
but 40 years ago, so were some rather unacceptable terms 
for races.  It's a rotten defense of pseudo-science.  I 
say this as a person living in a state about to legislate 
the teaching of creationism, and you can imagine how happy 
I am to see that in the science curriculum.  I am just as 
happy to see memes taught as fact instead of metaphor for 
the network effect of referencing and repetition. Memes 
are a fun topic; they are bad information science. OTOH,
Citations are a critical element of information science, 
in fact, the critical development that led to the 
WWW:  open bibliographic hypermedia systems.

A productive approach to the citation issue is to 
inquire what value is returned or denied to the overall 
information available, and who benefits given some 
particular speech act in a particular context?  

Again, this is a quality of the blog issue.  I expect 
the environment to winnow out the bad authors over long 
time scales.  I expect it to applaud today for 
those whom it is told are best applauded today. 

According to the Modern Marvels program on the History 
Channel, the seminal idea that led to the development 
of stealth aircraft was a forgotten paper by an obscure Soviet 
author on the topic of geometry of surfaces and its relationship to radar 
returns.  The good of citation was to follow the other 
papers related to it.  It wasn't that good for the 
Soviets, but for the Americans who kept these papers 
for future reference, it was a gold mine.  This isn't 
all about 'profiting by IP' but about having it and 
having the chain of citations when needed.

Long term innovation can depend on retrieval of things 
lost from short term memory.  Blogging self-selection is 
a form of short term memory.   We created markup systems 
to enable long term memory.  Blogs may not be a very good 
place to store valuable information.

XML SGML HTML SVG (To screw the filters)

len

From: Bob Foster [mailto:bob@o...]

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
 > Memes are a concept to make uncited references
 > appear to be natural.

The meme conspiracy? Do they have secret meetings?

 > Memes are voodoo, more
 > of the pseudo-science, poor scholarship and
 > marketingese over research that made the 90's the
 > decade of the gullible.

Memes are a metaphor: the viral idea. They don't explain how ideas seem 
to take over their hosts and turn them into factories for spreading 
themselves, they just make a poetic comment about it. Complaining that 
memes aren't science is like complaining about "sea of troubles" because 
problems aren't really wet and salty.

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