With respect to these folks if they are legitimate academics, my sense is this likely is spam to AOIR-L....and all of us who respond or discuss probably will have our e-mail addresses captured for any number of nefarious purposes. :( Time to tune up my procmail and Spam Assassin rules, I guess. To wit: 1. There's been a sudden spike in SK-based message traffic recently. 2. Most of the content is commercial-related solicitations. 3. These messages all tease for folks to respond but don't provide adequate information to build even the most basic sense of trust or believability IMO....a few of these notes say the writer is a university student, but fails to say what University -- I have yet to encounter ANY student who wouldn't post their affiliation when asking for information in a public forum, particularly one that's full of academics! 4. While I've not done a detailed analysis of the message headers (no time!) I bet there's a ton of indicators that these are spam ---various different relay servers, etc. If this is legitimate content, my sincere apologies for appearing to marginalize you and your messages. But if you're spammers looking to troll, good riddance. Cheers, -Rick (PhD Candidate, Curtin University of Technology for those unaware)