Liz Liddy, dean at Syracuse, has just announced that Bob Taylor passed away on New Year’s Day at the age of 90. He was the first working theorist I’d ever met, back in 1976 when I came to the School of Information Studies as a master’s student, and he changed my life in a number of ways.
Years later, in my dissertation, I observed:
“Theories are a theorist’s legacy to the future, as they can continue to work long after the theorist cannot.”
I believe that is the single sentence most likely to be considered “true” in the entire 300 pages, as I had him in mind when I wrote it. There is no question that the information environment has received innumerable value-added processes and products by library and information science professionals through his work.
I think I’d call this ABDs gone wild….. and I’m so grateful that it didn’t exist when I was finishing my dissertation, as I’m afraid I would have spent a whole lo[lca]t of time here too….
Via Allan Cho’s blog: do computing power and massive datasets spell the end of the scientific method as this article in Wired suggests? The Google guy’s twist on George Box’s aphorism (“All models are wrong, but some models are useful”) is clever, but I’m quite sure that no “Big Blue” “cloud” of computers is ever going to make the maxim “Correlation is not causation” obsolete. (Read the 60+ comments at the end of the Wired piece for some rather trenchant remarks concerning all of this, as well as a more measured response from John Zimmer at Ars Technica.)
Taking a moment to recognize the passing of a MIT meteorologist who became a major chaos theorist, Edward Lorenz, most associated with the so-called “butterfly effect.”
J’adore the fact that this NY Times op-ed piece by Stanley Fish on the publication of French Theory by Francois Cusset has already attracted 550+ comments pro and con Derrida and deconstruction. This book is a translation of the French original published back in 2003…. and the book’s thesis (that what “came over” as “French Theory” back in the 1970′s was heavily mediated by the American academics who brought it to Cornell, Yale, etc.) certainly looks reinforced by the fact that none of those 550 comments seem to address the content of the book itself: just what Stanley Fish says about it. Nice coup by the University of Minnesota Press, too Cornell and Yale were definitely caught napping on this one, hein?
Hmm, the well-known ASK (anomalous state of knowledge) model with its depiction of iterative retrieval requests by a human being to “the” information system in order to solve a badly-understood problem by supplying underspecified resources
[see Belkin N, Oddy R, Brooks H (1982) ASK for information retrieval: I. Journal of Documentation 38(2):61-71]
works just a little too well with this view from The Church of Google. What on earth would Paul Kantor say if it turned out that ASK were actually a metaphysical theory?
Well, I’ve always enjoyed a little light metaphysics, such as the “brains in vats” puzzle, and am delighted that the idea has been “reincarnated” (pun intended) in cosmology as described in this piece in The New York Times. If we are Boltzmann brains, however, how is it that we spend so much time worrying about whether we’d look better with Botox?
Thinking about so-called collective intelligence earlier has now reminded me of Cornell scientist Thomas Seeley’s work on decision-making by bees and his terrific book The Wisdom of the Hive. Which in turn, reminds me that there are multiple theories, but no good news anywhere, about colony collapse disorder, not even here in Oklahoma.
If this were a science fiction film, some of us would no doubt be catching on to the metaphor right about now, wouldn’t we? Let’s just hope that someone in our swarm is clever enough to make the right decisions here.
In tribute to Dorothea Orem, the nursing theorist whose influential work on self-care deficit I am studying this summer:
SAVANNAH- Dorothea Elizabeth Orem, 92, died Friday, June 22, 2007 at her residence on Skidaway Island. She was a native of Baltimore, Maryland and resident of Washington DC before moving to Savannah 20 years ago. She was a Professor with the Catholic University in the School of Nursing. She was an author of books on the theory of nursing and for the past 25 years she was an independent consultant and scholar. She is survived by her life long friend, Walene Shields of Savannah and her cousin Martin Conover of Minneapolis, MN. . . . A Mass of Christian burial will be Monday, June 25, 2007 at 2 p.m. at St. James Catholic Church with burial in the Catholic Cemetery. Savannah Morning News June 24, 2007
Is it just me, or is this a bit of hype from Carnegie Mellon? After all, Polya’s classic book How to Solve It has been available since 1945. However, since Luciano Floridi has just enthusiatically recommended Paul Humphrey’s book Extending Ourselves, which is certainly related to Wing’s and Polya’s work, perhaps I need a bit more data on this issue!
