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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@objfac.com]
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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