> Did you post this paper [1] in the earlier discussion?
No.
> My memory isn't what it should be.
Ah, well, nor is mine. I was always a "cardboard box filing system"
kind of guy and as the years went by, rooting though the cardboard
boxes, book shelves, letter trays etc. for an elusive fact or
recollection became burdensome. With a computer and a large HD it
becomes easier. I maintain a rather simplistic database -- more like
a digital cardboard box -- of things I think it likely I won't
remember. I can never remember that word for guys who do the
propaganda for whatever ideology. "Rhetoric" always comes to mind, but
it's the wrong word. Ah, but in my idiosyncratic, easily scanned
little database I have an entry for "rhetoric" that says, "Did you
mean Polemicist?" My own little externalized mnemonic aid. I try to
add to it regularly, each time I realize I'm blundering around
looking, for the nth time, for a lost scrap of what I once knew.
> Without adequate archives science is a failure.
As long ago as the 80s, maybe earlier, I heard that in many cases it
was easier to do some piece of research over again than it was to
locate the the published papers that detailed completed studies.
The net and large, fast databases may have offset that in the last 30
years but, OTOH, there's been an exponential (? I think) increase in
published material. This problem has led to titles of papers that run
to dozens of words. How is a physiologist to find a paper on
protein conformation published by a biophysicist is relevant to his
research on vestibular diffusion rates?
Complexity catastrophe.
See:
Stuart Kauffman, 1993. The Origins of Order. New York, NY
Oxford University Press.
a difficult but enlightening book. People are applying his
analyses/models to organizational management. The problem with finding
knowledge -- e.g. existing research reports -- would, IMHO, be a
candidate for just such an application.
Easier and more entertaining than Kauffman is _A Canticle for
Liebowitz_, a classic tale of rediscovering basic science in a
post-apocalyptic not-so-terribly-remote future.
- Mike
[1] http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Papers/sfs-longevity.html
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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