March 2007 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Re: [Air-l] 988 exabytes of info created in 2010
by Bram Dov Abramson 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

> The results of commercial research firms are always so nicely > packaged and illustrated---and maybe that's one of the reasons that > actual real world decisions are based on them. (50 Rhode Islands? > That sounds like a lot, I'd better buy more ;) > > Which, of course, makes them 'important' but for reasons other than > their 'truth'. Their importance seems self-reinforcing Oh, I don't know. The latter thesis -- that, faced with different answers to a similar question, "actual real world decision" makers prefer the truthiness of name-brand commercial research -- is no doubt possible. Perhaps there are domains of activity where it is often true. But it's certainly not my experience as both a producer and user of non-academic indicators-based research, each in both commercial settings and in government. Rather, I've found that a less sneering version of the former thesis fits a lot better. But it's not just packaging and illustration: it's choice of topic matter. Any time I have seen non-academic research I produced used "out there", it's been because there were very few alternative sources for answers to the question being asked. For that matter, when there did exist alternative sources, they tended if not to converge, at least to take each other into account. In this instance, the few-alternatives thesis seems to be the case. The EMC-sponsored studies, first at Berkeley and now at IDC, have gotten a lot of press. I have not seen a lot of other comprehensive attempts to answer the "how much information" question -- a rather different proposition, obviously, then what one thinks of that question. For what it's worth, an IDC narrative of how they counted things, as opposed to a third-party nwes story about it, is at: http://www.emc.com/about/destination/digital_universe/pdf/Expanding_Digital… > research huh? Does that qualify as an 'A Journal'? ;) I wouldn't think so. Academic and other forms of research each have their own norms and control mechanisms. They differ from each other, and they differ internally. I would wager that those who place all weight on how they differ from each other, and no weight on how they differ internally, will end up with trust mechanisms that disappoint them in the long run. I have seen very careful and properly-reviewed non-academic research -- even shepherded some through reviewing myself -- and, by the same token, some very inaccurate and poorly-reviewed academic journal articles. So perhaps the journal/not-journal binary is not a good totalising lens through which to view the wide world of doing research and other words for figuring stuff out. > Is anyone aware of research that asks the question, > 'how reliable are the predictions of commercial > research firms?'. ... or that asks that question of any form of institutional research. I wonder how useful such studies would really be. In the telecom and IT sectors there have, from time to time, been scorecards in industry magazines, which would fairly up front about how they did their scoring. I suppose this could get you started. (Parenthetically: one firm, eMarketer, does something like this. More specifically, and at least the last time I checked, their business model was that, rather than undertaking primary research of their own, they bought or borrowed, etc. other primary research and conducted meta-research -- that is, showed what all the other research firms were saying, then sold that as a competing product. I suppose there are issues of shooting one's golden goose here. But that's another story.) More helpful from a moving-things-forward standpoint, I would think, would be to investigate the methodologies being used. The standard by which predictions should be judged is a bit of a moving target -- ensuring that a prediction is based on sound reasoning and data is more do-able, and probably more reasonable. cheers Bram

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baudrillard has finished burning the signs.
by jhuns＠vt.edu 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

Jean Baudrillard died, age 77. http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/06/europe/EU-GEN-France-Obit-Baudril… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard

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Re: [Air-l] Internet Governance research
by Bram Dov Abramson 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

> UNTANGLING THE NET - > Bandwidth brokerage, arbitrage and the > creation of a commodity market in packet-based bandwidth led to > financial failures partly as a result of failing to consider the > basic interconnectedness or the internet. Both of these propositions might need a bit more thought. Regarding the first proposition: it's a bit hard to know what you mean by bandwidth brokerage, arbitrage, and commodity market -- they're each descriptors for very broad classes of phenomena. If you mean that there were lots of buyers and sellers and that competition was based mostly on price then sure, that happened. But -- and especially in the domain of "packet-based bandwidth", by which it sounds like you intend "Internet bandwidth" more specifically -- if you mean that there were well-organised institutional or organisational mechanisms like bandwidth trading floors for commodities trading in the form of third-party transactions by people who neither produce nor consume Internet bandwidth, then this might need some more digging. Band-X (that piece is now part of Arbinet) and Invisible Hand Networks represent two pieces of that puzzle. But they hardly represent a very significant part of any Internet bandwidth market. As to the second proposition: commoditisation -- competing on price and not on non-price factors -- in a market with relatively few entry barriers is, indeed, a tough business. That's what has happened to market participants in long-distance. That's what has happened to market participants in Internet transit. Add mechanisms to survive at below-cost prices, like the combination of institutional investors who are nervous about missing the next big thing, underinformed about how big that thing is, and have lots of capital to ensure they don't miss it at one end, and Chapter 11 protection, at the other end, and you have something much more dramatic. I suspect that that has much more to do with financial failures, than an inability to understand the Internet's interconnectedness. Fred Goldstein's and Daniel Reingold's books are two really nice accounts of that story. I understand Om Malik's is, too, but I have not read it and can't say. In any case, there are quite a few. > Internet peering agreements provide international networks the > ability to function. I don't know. Peering has been really important, and is still kind of important. But surely most bilateral BGP relationships are ones of transit, not peering -- particularly at the international level. Quantifying the extent to which this is so would be a valuable contribution, I think. > This research proposes to examine peering agreements over x# > of years and to look at the potential for the development of > transparency in peering agreements. Don't get me wrong, though! This is one of a number of important areas to look at. I question whether it is the most significant or even an extremely significant cost driver, relative to others, in the international context in which you want to operate -- I suspect that other cost drivers, most of them related to state-sponsored chokeholds, tend to be both more determinative, and highly connected, to this issue. But there is lots to be said and lots being said on this topic, with a number of interesting approaches in recent years to try and bring transparency to this domain. Apart from the well-known efforts in the context of antitrust actions in the U.S. and in Europe and, of course, the EuISPA/APEC/ITU meme, see particularly actions at the federal level in Australia. In the Canadian context, the CRTC's Telecom Monitoring reports have addressed this issue to a very limited extent, particularly in years past (the first 3 issues), but some very important efforts in BC (BCNET's Transit Exchange model) and Alberta (via SuperNet) speak directly to this issue, and probably due in a domestic context -- as do multiple U.S. efforts at the state level, I suspect -- something similar to what I understand the World Bank has been trying to put together around the EASSy project. cheers Bram

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InternetGovernance rsrch
by Nancy Paterson 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

I'm a media artist based in Toronto Canada conducting PhD rsrch in the area of internet governance. Specifically this work is: UNTANGLING THE NET - Bandwidth brokerage, arbitrage and the creation of a commodity market in packet-based bandwidth led to financial failures partly as a result of failing to consider the basic interconnectedness or the internet. Internet peering agreements provide international networks the ability to function. At this point in time this is one of the most hidden areas of network topology. This research proposes to examine peering agreements over x# of years and to look at the potential for the development of transparency in peering agreements. I've been on the internet since Dec 1982 at utzoo (at Univ of Toronto) and my website is www.vacuumwoman.com Looking forward to any/all discussions! Nancy Paterson York University (Toronto)

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New on ICT Guides for March
by Craig Bellamy 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

Dear AOIR, I thought that I would take the opportunity to introduce ICT Guides to you, which is a new service being offered by the Arts and Humanities Data Service at King's College, London. It seeks to promote the use of ICTs in research and learning through cataloging good-practice digital arts and humanities projects, through the tools, methods, and standards they employed. It is still in the early stages, and we would be very interested in your comments. The following new projects have been added to ICT Guides in March. (Projects): http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/projects/allProjects.jsp Highlight: "PARADISEC (the Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) offers a facility for digital conservation and access for endangered materials from the Pacific region, defined broadly to include Oceania and East and Southeast Asia. Our research group has developed models to ensure that the archive can provide access to interested communities, and conforms with emerging international standards for digital archiving" See: http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/projects/project.jsp?projectId=708 List of New Projects: * A critical edition of the Acts and Monuments by John Foxe * An Epidoc Corpus of the inscriptions from Aphrodisias in Caria; the more user friendly version is 'The Inscriptions of Aphrodisias project' * Christianization and state-formation in Northern and Central Europe c.900-c.1200 * Electronic corpus of Lute music (ECOLM) II * English Monastic Archives: Access and Analysis * European Critical Heritage : The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe * Gendering Latin American Independence: Women's Political Culture and the Textual Construction of Gender 1790-1850 * John Ruskin's Teaching Collections * PARADISEC (the Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) * South Seas Project: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760-1800) * Race and Labour in the Cane Fields: Documenting Louisiana Sugar, 1844 - 1917 * Text database of narrative poetry of the Italian Renaissance * The Baltic Ceramic Market c. 1200-1600: Hanseatic Trade and Cultural Exchange (Exchange visit from the British Museum, Dr D Gaimster) * The British archaeological expedition to the ancient emporium at Vetren-Pistiros, central Bulgaria * The British Book Trade Index on the Web * The Forgotten Migrants: A Cultural History of Postwar British Migrants Who Returned 'Home' from Australia * The Medieval Palace of Westminster Research Project * The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence * The Pompey Project: the evolution, structure and legacy of the Theatre of Pompey * The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose * Urban waterfront geoarchaeology in the Netherlands and the UK: a comparison (Exchange visit to Archeologisch en Bouhistorisch Centrum, Gemeente Utrecht, Dr Huib de Groot) * Verbum: the old Latin translation of the gospel of John * Virtual Vellum Suggestions for projects most welcome. Kind Regards, Craig Bellamy -- Dr Craig Bellamy Research Associate ICT Guides, AHDS, King's College, London http://ahds.ac.uk/ictguides/ ----- 26 - 29 Drury Lane 3rd Floor King's College London LONDON, WC2B 5RL Phone: 020 7848 1976 ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________

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Re: [Air-l] research on internet adoption
by Eduardo Villanueva 07 Mar '07

07 Mar '07

Lee, are you interested in countries other than the USA? I had some interviews from 1996, from a very restricted set of users, about what draw them to the internet. The actual interviews were lost (computer stolen, long and sad story) but I have a briefing I wrote. Let me know off-list. Eduardo Villanueva Communications Department Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

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recommendations for a wiki farm?
by Pamela Rosengren 06 Mar '07

06 Mar '07

If you use Edublogs www.edublogs.org you get a wiki associated with it. You can make (editable) static pages linked from the blog also. So it is a combination of web pages, a wordpress blog and a wikispaces wiki. This is a very useful combination of tools. Pamela Rosengren Graduate Student, Internet Studies, Curtin University of Technology

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ning group
by Jeremy Hunsinger 06 Mar '07

06 Mar '07

like i've done on orkut, tribe, and just about everywhere else that allowed it... here is a ning group for people to join and play with:) http://internetresearch.ning.com/ jeremy hunsinger wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ Learning Inquiry-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series

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Multi-Modal Media/Format for Dissertation
by Samita Nandy 05 Mar '07

05 Mar '07

Re: Alternative formats for dissertation research Some of you might be interested in the link below. It is a website for a multi-modal dissertation submitted by Kathleen Vaughan, completed at York University, Canada in November 2006. http://www.akaredhanded.com/kv-dissertation.html

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Re: [Air-l] I/S Opportunities for Publication in 2006-07
by burkx006＠umn.edu 05 Mar '07

05 Mar '07

Of possible interest. DLB On Mar 5 2007, Peter M. Shane wrote: > I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society may still be > able to include 1-2 additional research articles in its 2006-07 volume. > I/S is an interdisciplinary journal of research and commentary > concentrating on the intersection of law, policy, and information and > communications technology, and would welcome manuscripts in such diverse > areas as cybersecurity policy, telecommunications policy, e-commerce, ICT > and development, e-democracy, e-government, and cyberprivacy. Because our > primary audience is policy-oriented, each manuscript should make clear to > the reader why it is potentially significant to the making of public > policy. Manuscripts should also avoid computational presentations that > are largely inaccessible to audiences outside the sciences. Full > information for prospective authors appears at > http://www.is-journal.org/prospective_authors.php. > > -- Dan L. Burk Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor University of Minnesota Law School 229 19th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455 ********************************** voice: 612-626-8726 fax: 612-625-2011

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