Information Research Weblog

Happy New Year, everyone. No doubt the old Earth will continue on its path for at least one more year.

Signs of the times: before going out to buy the newspaper this morning I checked that the Guardian was published today - but, when I got to the newsagent, they'd sold out, the nearby supermarket had no newspapers, another five minutes in the opposite direction the newsagent in the hospital was closed and so was the small newsagent nearby! Can't blame them for being closed on New Year's Day, but why do I buy a newspaper any longer with all the news that's on the Web? So, it will be half an hour with the Guardian online today.

Free Conversant has a feature that enables me to prevent a long message from being posted on the e-mail list. I hope I've managed to implement it - if so, you will not have received a message about the hits on papers in Information Research. If you would like to see the message, go to http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/798

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Like many others I occasionally take advantage of the 'Readers Offers' in the Guardian newspaper. Never again!

On the 18th August I ordered the ION usb turntable for converting my vinyl to CDs via the PC - the promised delivery was 7 to 21 days. 25 days later I called to find out where it was. 'Oh, it was out of stock, and we are just getting them in this week. You'll be a priority delivery.'

'You have my e-mail address and my phone number, why did no one call to tell me this?'

'I'm sorry, someone ought to have let you know.'

Small satisfaction

Today, I called again, to cancel and was told, 'I can't cancel it because it is on the pick list [only on the pick list 5 days after my last call!] and it could go out today.'

The annoying thing about all this is that I could have ordered from three or four other suppliers at the same price and on the same terms on the 18th August and have had the turntable by the 20th August - at the latest!

So - never again!

For some time now I've had a volunteer proof-reader, RaeAnn Hughes from Seattle. However, Rae has been very ill and my last messages were returned by her e-mail service saying, No such user - I fear the worst.

Which leaves me looking for a replacement (or even two to share the load)

I need, as the subject line suggests, a pedantic nit-picker: someone who can work in English rather than American, who has a sense of good writing style, knows the intricacies of APA 5th ed. for citations and references and who can work to deadlines. And - if this wasn't enough, can do it without pay, since all work done for Information Research is voluntary, as the income is zero!

Also needed, a volunteer html-tidier: although we have a template and pretty good instructions on preparing papers, many authors don't get it exactly right. It takes me between half a day and a day per paper to sort out the code. A volunteer to help with this would be welcome: anyone who enjoys boring, tedious work would be a natural for the job.

All offers (I'm sure I'll be inundated!) to wilsontd@gmail.com

Dr. Wallace Koehler notes:

Interesting...as it confirms observations made in the US. Ironically,
Americans with IQs below the specified values are required to paste
univeristy decals on SUV windows and bumpers. The truly challenged
must fly college penants from their vehicles.

All of the above must yell and yell it frequently "GO BIG [pick a color,
any color]" The prefered color where I come from is ORANGE.

Wally

Information behaviour: an interdisciplinary perspective has been on my site for some years now, but recently a correspondent drew attention to the fact that the diagrams in Chapter 2 were pretty unreadable. So - no sooner the word - it's been redesigned and the figures made legible.

According to Google Scholar (or Scholar Google, or whatever we're supposed to call it) it hasn't had much in the way of citation, but, on the other hand, the paper in Information Processing and Management that was based on the report has had 124 cites, so perhaps people prefer to cite the journal source. Pity, really, since there's more in the report!

A quote from today's Washington Post story on Prime Minister Sharon's illness:

His pullout efforts also angered Israel's religious-nationalist movement, whose members he once encouraged to settle in the territories envisioned by Palestinians as part of their state.

'envisioned by Palestinians' - the occupied territories are not 'envisioned' by Palestinians as part of their state, they ARE part of their state - even though they are prevented from forming one.

When as renowned a newspaper as the Washington Post becomes as meally-mouthed as this, what hope is there?

For another take on 'The death of freedom' see John Pilger's article in today's New Statesman

I was checking on the e-mail address of an old friend in the USA - Dan Carter, at the University of South Carolina, and I followed a link to a lecture he'd given. I recommend the whole of it, but this paragraph struck me as very relevant in the UK, where higher education is becoming more and more a factory system and where the question has to be, To what end?

At the same time, even as we make the argument that higher education can help in raising the standard of living in this state, we should not lose sight of the notion that education is more than simply an avenue to making money and competing economically. We hear much about the value of creating a skilled and technologically proficient pool of workers for the new economy and that is certainly true. In an educational system that works as it should, students will learn how to engage in rigorous analysis, to think logically and sequentially, to speak articulately and to write good prose. Those skills undoubtedly make them good workers. But the inescapable reality is that-in the not too distant technocratic future-we will need only so many people to run the information economy; many of the rest will be marginalized and sidelined in the "service" sector with little need for highly specialized technical education. If we concentrate entirely on the utilitarian value of learning we open the way to creating a society in which there is little purpose to educate this half of the population.

Read the whole piece here

I caught part of Melvin Bragg's 'In our time' programme on Radio 4 this morning. This is an often fascinating series on philosophy, science, history, culture, etc., etc., which is available for download from the BBC site. Today's piece was on American Pragmatism and the work of William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce.

It is interesting for information scientists because of the focus of pragmatism on aligning 'truth' with 'what works' and also for its identification of truth with social interaction and, overall, the general implications for the nature of scientific inquiry and research methods. The contributors on these programmes, chaired by Bragg, are always experts in their field. On this occasion, the discussion involved A C Grayling, Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine; and Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London

Given the period of the pragmatists, a good deal of material is on the Web: for example, for William James, the site at Emory University has much of his work; for John Dewey, there's a copy of his 'Democracy and education' on the Project Gutenberg site and more at the Brock University site; while for Peirce, the Erratic Impact site is useful.

I was involved in an interesting event on Saturday afternoon, when I received an honorary degree (Filosofie Hedersdoktor) from Gothenburg University. The ceremony, covering a number of other 'hedersdoktorna' (including a roller-coaster designer and a Swedish poet, playwright and actor) and all new doctorates of the University, was held in the convention hall of the Svenska Mässen - the main exhibition hall in Gothenburg and lasted for three hours, with musical interludes of a variety of kinds from Scottish Gaelic 'mouth music' to a jazz trio and Thelonius Monk's 'Blue Monk'. At a rough guess there were close to 100 graduates and about 1,000 people in the audience.

In case you are wondering :-) - the cited reason for giving me an hon. doc. was that I have been visiting Sweden for the past 25 years, giving lectures on research, running workshops, etc., etc. and for the past few years I've been Visiting Professor at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, which is a joint institution of the Gothenburg University and the Högskolan i Borås

Why can't Microsoft do decent conversion from Word to xhtml? Their conversion programs are rubbish and don't even take note of properly formatted Word documents using different levels of heading - everything is converted into mindless tags with lots of mso (Microsoft specific) tags. Even the so-called 'filtered' version is crap.

For example, I had a paper recently which had used MSoft conversion: one table had 10,542 characters whereas my 'clean' version had 1,545. I know that file storage is supposed not to be an issue these days, but a ten-fold increase in file sizes would quickly cause problems. One shudders to think what MSoft's implementation of xml in its next version of Office is going to do!

It is probably not of much relevance to the wider world, but this week the Guardian newspaper adopted a new, 'Berliner', format. Fine - but in the course of doing so, the editors decided to drop the Doonesbury comic strip, which has shared space with the 'If' strip, drawn and written by Steve Bell. Both are highly political and often complement one another nicely.

As anyone could have predicted, all Hell broke loose - telephone calls, e-mails, letters, all hit the Guardian from Day 1 (including one from me). As a result a shame-faced Ian Katz admits in today's issue that this was a bad idea and the strip will be re-instated on Monday. Victory for good taste! :-)

There are all kinds of games you can play with Google, including the well-known 'Googlewhacking'. I don't know whether I've invented this one, which I discovered accidentally.

It is very simple: just hit a few keys haphazardly, for example, "l;kd" in the search box of Yahoo and see what turns up. The aim is to put in something that returns nothing - which is surprisingly difficult! That combination, for example, turned up more than one and half million hits! Even entered as a phrase, it produced almost 20,000.

The string ";we[kear'k" resulted in 34 hits, largely as a result of the existence of an author called "K. Kear". However, as a phrase, it produced zero - so it can be done. Remember, however, that they entry of symbols should be haphazard, just let your fingers do the choosing.

I have just finished reading a brilliant book - a wonderful work of imagination, 'The piano tuner' by Daniel Mason. Quite apart from its literary quality, the book has an interesting 'sub-text' on the nature of official information. In the following, the speakers are, first, Dr. Carroll, Surgeon-Major in the Shan States of Burma towards the end of the 19th century, the second is the piano tuner, Edgar Drake:

'I know what the reports say.' He lit the cigar. 'If you read closely, you would know that the Indian Opium Act of 1878 prohibited the growing of opium in Burma proper; at the time we did not control the Shan States. This doesn't mean that there isn't pressure to stop. There is much more fuss about it in England than here, which is probably why so many of... us... who write the reports, are selective in what they say.'

'That makes me worry about everything else I have read.'

'I wouldn't. Most of what is written is true, although you will have to get used to the subtleties, to the differences between what you read in England and what you see here, especially anything to do with politics.'

Many years ago I read John Johnson's PhD thesis, 'The social construction of official information', and frequently thereafter recommended it to students as an example of what qualitative research can achieve when it is done well. It is necessary for all of us to remember that no official information, of any kind, is value free, or free from subjectivism, and when we read official reports on such things as the recent flooding of New Orleans, it will be wise to look for what isn't reported, as well as what is.

I had an interesting morning, this morning (apart from traffic problems). I'd been invited to participate at a debate at an internal research conference at Leeds Metropolitan University, so I tooled up the motorway (hence the traffic problems) to participate in a debate on 'knowledge management' with Frank Land (Professor Emeritus, London School of Economics) and Tony Bryant (Professor of Information Management, Leeds M.U.). I was there simply to restate my 'nonsense of km' position, while Frank was more concerned with the ethical issues of km, although proposing that, while km was a somewhat dubious concept, we could think of the historical 'management of knowledge' as something with a greater validity. My objection to that was that this is fine when debating the issues with lay persons and 'knowledge' practitioners, but that the information systems discipline needs firmer definition of its concepts. I think we played a draw, and at least the audience seemed to enjoy it. :-)

The idea of the debate arose out of an invitation to me from Frank to participate in a session at the HICSS Conference in Hawaii - unfortunately, much as I would like to revisit the Big Island, I lack the institutional support necessary to get me there. (LSE is rather more generous to its Emeriti than the U of Sheffield!) So, as a substitute, the debate was video-filmed and will be shown before the relevant session at HICSS - those of you who are attending can watch out for me :-)

I'm very pleased to announce that we have a new member of the Editorial Board of Information Research, Professor Shunsaku Tamura of the School of Library and Information Science at Keio University. He is member of the Board of Trustees of the Japan Society of Library and Information Science and former member of the Board of Trustees of Japan Library Association. He has research interests in information behaviour of ordinary citizen; literacy and reading research; and management and evaluation of information and reference services, especially in public libraries. His publications include Information seeking and information use (2001, editor, text in Japanese) and various articles. He is currently working on a funded research project on the effects of information service to business in public libraries.

The trip to Japan ended some time ago - 4th April, to be precise - but my time has been occupied with getting the latest issue of the journal out (see http://InformationR.net/ir/10-3/infres103.html if you haven't seen it yet) and various other things that built up.

I was amused by a very gung-ho article on technology in Japan that appeared while I was there. It gave the impression that technology was king, that everyone was using mobiles for all kinds of purposes, etc., etc.

In fact, I saw fewer people on the street in Tokyo using mobile phones than I do in Sheffield. I was travelling around with a group of four or five Japanese colleagues and I think that only once did I see anyone using a mobile. On a couple of 'bullet train' trips, only one person in the same compartment left to use his mobile on receipt of a call.

As for Internet connection; only one of the four hotels I was in had Internet connection to the rooms - the other three didn't have it at all. I was told of only three Internet cafes in the Ginza area of Tokyo and their paucity was explained to me as being the result of the high telecomms costs.

However, I wasn't there for the technology, and found the visit fascinating, partly because of discovering more about the nature of LIS education and research in the country, partly for the nature of society itself, and partly because of the mixture of ancient and modern in the cities.

If you get an opportunity to go - take it!

The Weblog will be more than usually dormant for a little while, as I am off to Japan in the morning, returning on 3rd April, and I don't know how much Internet access I'll manage to get. I'm giving lectures in Tokyo and Kyoto and hope to have a little time for bird-watching, as well as a little technology-watching :-)

I'll tell you all about it when I get back.

I see that the Financial Times, yesterday, was reporting a 20% rise in online shopping over the Christmas period in the UK, so I thought I'd report on my contribution and experience.

First, of course, one has to survey all of the price comparison sites, since most of them only include the stores that pay them. I discovered this a couple of months ago when I was looking for an iRiver mp3 player - it turned out the ShopGenie was the only one that included the high street store, Richer Sounds - and, as the local store is just five minutes walk away, it was actually more convenient to buy the device there. Actually, 'high street' is a bit of a misnomer - the company generally leases properties in cheaper parts of town, presumably this helps to keep its costs down.

However, I was also looking for a new scanner and online reviews persuaded me that instead of going for a Canon (my cameras and my printer are all Canon products) I should replace my old Epson scanner with a new one - the Epson Perfection 4870 Photo. This one draws plaudits for delivering near professional quality output at retail prices, and my reason for switching was to have a scanner that would help me reduce the decades of slides to digital storage. It turned out that Amazon.co.uk had the best price and immediate delivery - so I set it up yesterday and, although I have got to the slides yet, I am very pleased with its performance on, for example, OCR and copying prints. So - stars to Amazon for fast (and free!) delivery, and to Epson for a good product.

Of course, with more CDs to convert to mp3 (or, rather the .ogg standard in my case) and slides to convert, I'm obviously going to need more storage space, so the next thing on the list was a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB 7200rpm external hard drive. According to one or other of the shopping sites Dabs.co.uk had the best offer, but was out of stock. So, I had an e-mail conversation - or, rather, I tried to have an e-mail conversation, only to end up being told that the only information the company had about possible delivery dates was on their Website - the only problem was that, for this particular product, there was no information. Sorry, Dabs, but your customer relations policy is crap - you're off my list for ever. I then moved on the the next best deal at Technoworld and got all the way through to the point of ordering, when some database glitch sent me an error message - a totally unintelligible error message, of course. Again, an e-mail conversation ensued - this time they really were trying to be helpful, but the error message happened again, so I said goodbye to Technoworld - it you are going to sell online, get some software that works.

Back to the shopping sites and I discover that Komplett actually has a better deal than Technoworld - the order goes through without a hitch and now I'm sitting waiting - not for long, I hope. Interestingly, Komplett is a European company, based in Norway, operating in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK with a turnover in 2003 of 1,732,000,000 Norwegian Kroner (that's £148,207,359 at today's rate, or $277,310,790 - no doubt 2004 showed an improvement on that.

Finally, blank DVDs - back to Amazon, which turned out to have best price, instead of a number of other places recommended on various discussion groups - delivery is promised for Monday or Tuesday.

From a buyer's point of view is that Amazon has the best interface once one gets to the point of ordering and I have no doubt that its software must have been pretty pricey to develop. Other places I suspect of relying upon off-the-shelf packages of one kind of another and they may be letting the company down. If that interface is not easy to use and glitch-free, the consumer experiences a big turn-off.

I thought a little non-serious questionnaire analysis might amuse you - I'm in the process of a rough and ready analysis of the questionnaires returned by readers of Information Research and three of the questions generated some interesting responses. Well, actually, they are all interesting, otherwise I wouldn't have asked them, would I?

However, the three I have in mind tonight are those that asked for the 'most interesting paper', the paper that had been 'most useful recently', and which paper would get 'the best paper award'.

Naturally, there is just about as much variety as there are responses, and the first thing to note is that, in general, people didn't respond to these questions: 39 non-respondents to the first, 45 to the second, and 60 to the third—out of about 90 analysed to date.

Of those selected as 'the most interesting', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Brooks-Web search: how the Web has changed information-paper 154
• Heinstrom-Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour-paper 165
• Wilson-The Nonsense of Knowledge Management-paper 144

Of those selected as 'the most useful', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Dervin-Human studies and user studies-paper166
• Franklin and Plum-Library usage patterns in the electronic information environment-paper 187
• Heinstrom-Five personality dimensions-paper165
• Jarvelin and Ingwersen-Information seeking research needs extension-paper 212

Of those selected for the 'best paper award', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Miller-I=0-paper140
• Wilson-The Nonsense of Knowledge Management-paper144

What does it all mean? Well, I guess there's some correlation between the number of hits a paper gets and the probability of it being selected, and that choice will be dictated by current concerns and interests. But, looking at the list, I think that they are all pretty good papers :-)

IDC reports that for the first time in four years, Sweden has slipped from top position in its ranking of countries on an Information Society Index for 2003.

	Country	ISI Score
1.	Denmark	963
2.	Sweden	958
3.	United States	938
4.	Switzerland	929
5.	Canada	925
6.	Netherlands	919
7.	Finland	911
8.	Korea	904
9.	Norway	899
10.	United Kingdom	870
Source: IDC Information Society Index, 2004

So Tony Thatcher's (oops, Freudian slip, I meant, of course, Blair's) much vaunted drive for Britain to be the leading state seems to be going nowhere very fast.

And with the dismal news of a probable Bush victory in the US election (how can more than 50% of the American electorate not realise what a disaster this is?), I assume that the monkey will be intent on dragging the US back to some stone age condition. After all, the Information Society isn't in the Old Testament, is it?

This, apparently, is what eBay considers to be good customer relations.

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Dear valued customer [Really? After what follows you want me to believe this?]

We regret to inform you that your eBay account could be suspended if you don't re-update your account information. To resolve this problems please click here and re-enter your account information. If your problems could not be resolved your account will be suspended for a period of 3-4 days, after this period your account will be terminated.

For the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.

Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This includes the registering of a new account. Please note that this suspension does not relieve you of your agreed-upon obligation to pay any fees you may owe to eBay.

Regards, [!!!???] Safeharbor Department eBay, Inc

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Actually, I have never bought anything through eBay, and, after this lovely morsel, I never shall!

24,550 science and engineering doctorates looks like quite a sizable number, but it is worrying the Americans – that figure is for 2002 and it was well down from the peak of 27,300 in 1998. Of course, the numbers need interpretation: How many were from the Ivy League institutions? How many were from institutions where the standards are open to question? Still, it seems a fair number.

The reason for the concern is that part of the problem is that US students are opting out of science and engineering for the more lucrative fields of business and law, and that fewer make the necessary grades for acceptance into science programmes. That seems to mirror the situation in the UK, where the decline has been noticed for much longer.

I wonder how long it would take either government to opt for one of the suggested solutions?

Weinstein would boost wages for graduate students and scientists funded by national research institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation--positions that are likely to be protected from the shift of tech work overseas.
'Pay scientists the six-figure salaries the market is demanding', Weinstein said, 'and you will watch people come out of the woodwork in droves'.

The solution seized upon by the universities is the same as in the UK—import foreign students—but for different reasons. In the US, the driver is the need to keep the labs going, while in the UK it is the need to keep the institution solvent as successive governments have starved the universities of resources. In UK universities the proportion of foreign students in post-graduate courses and doctroal programmes is so high that, if the market collapsed tomorrow, even more universities would be bankrupt than at present (and a significant number are already technically bankrupt - that is, they lack the resources to pay off their debts, even if they were to close down and sell all their property, etc.

The item that stimulated this can be found at ZDNet

Hello everyone - you've probably wondering where I've been this past month. Well - three weeks of it was holiday in sunny Italy - continuous sunshine and mid-30s temperatures for three weeks is difficult to come by in the UK! The other week has simply been catching up with things, three days at Leeds University Business School - my current UK employer - and one day of interviewing on a project on the provision of broadband access for disadvantaged groups in the community.

I had pretty well decided to draw a line under the Weblog, since it isn't really fulfilling the original intention of providing a forum for the discussion of the papers published in Information Research - instead, I've simply been drawing attention to things that might be of interest to the IR readership. Keeping that up, however, is more trouble than it's worth, since it rarely evokes any response.

The interesting question is, 'Why do discussion groups in the information science, information management, information systems area rarely provoke discussion of substantive issues?' The mailings in lists like LIS-BAILER, ASIS-L, KNOW-ORG and others consist generally of announcements of conferences, occasional calls for help with a project, student e-mail questionnaires, and the like. But how often does anyone address research issues? Pretty well never is the answer - take a look at the archives:

• ASIS-L
• LIS-BAILER
• KNOW-ORG

Is it that people are simply too busy? Or is that the research is generally solitary, with little in the way of a team approach, or has the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise in the UK provoked such paranoia that people are unwilling to share ideas any longer?

Whatever the answer, it's not really worth trying to provoke interest, since the interest seems not to be there to provoke.

I'll keep the Weblog going, but, in future, I shan't be trying to make regular postings, but simply post something when it seems more than marginally interesting.

I imagine that most readers of the log are aware of the World list of departments etc., in the information field that I maintain. It is a continuous problem to update the links and I use Xenu's Link Sleuth to check them once or twice a year, as well as occasionally putting out a mailing to remind people to check their links and let me know if they need updating.

Academic institutions, that one might hope would do better, appear to be just as bad as everyone else in changing URLs - all it needs is a new Vice-Chancellor, Rector, or Principal to arrive on the scene and, inevitably, there is some (usually pointless) 'reorganization', as a result of which the URLs are thrown in the air and come down we know not where. My favourite hate is the database-driven list of courses that is structured first by date, then by subject - with the result that the URLs change every year.

It's easy to avoid this: all one needs is a 'redirect' instruction in a meta-tag and the user can be transferred from the old URL to the new one painlessly and I can find out when this has happened by using Link Sleuth. Given the number of Web-based directories that are not well-maintained this would result in thousands of hits resulting in satisfied instead of frustrated users.

In some places (nameless to protect them from shame) the public relations department has taken over the Website completely, producing a structure that is supposed to be geared to the needs of different kinds of potential users, but often ends up satisfying none of them.

The silly thing is that it isn't too difficult to produce an architecture for a university site - they all have more or less the same structure of faculties and department, with separate research institutes in some case, and other, fairly arbitrary elements tacked on. External users generally want to find a department, a course, a research group, a person, the library, and possibly the Vice-Chancellor's (Rector's, etc.) office - but the number of sites that make it difficult to find some of these is legion. Finding the University Library on the Sheffield site, for example, used to be a serious problem until (presumably because of numerous objections) a 'quick link' was put on the top page. Individual departmental sub-sites reveal the same kind of problem - sometimes there are links to the staff list, sometimes not.

And why do US universities (and those elsewhere influenced by them) use the term "Academics" to mean the organizational structure - click on Academics on any of these sites and you can get an entire mish-mash of topic headings from the simple 'Schools and departments' to a strange list (in another nameless institution), which includes guides, resources, and journals. According to the good old OED, the use of 'academics' in this way in the USA is a relatively recent coinage (1974) - the rest of the world uses 'academics' as the plural of 'academic', a noun meaning a person employed to teach or research in a university.

There's been quite a gap between the last posting and this one - but no one seems to have complained :-)

I've been in Barcelona for the past week - part Spring break, part participating in a meeting. In this case, the meeting of the European Association of Science Editors, where I was invited to speak on 'Information seeking behaviour and the digital information world'. I found it rather difficult to put something together for a different kind of audience.

The programme was an interesting one, with, in addition to my own, papers on 'Beyond electrification: innovative models of scientific publication' by Stefan Gradmann of the University of Hamburg; 'New models for publishing and academic initiatives from a librarian´s point of view' by Ingegerd Rabow of Lund University Libraries; 'The Virtual Health Library, an Approach to the Access and Dissemination of Scientific Information from Latin America and Spain', by Jorge Veiga de Cabo of the Biblioteca Nacional de Ciencias de la Salud. Madrid; 'Open Access Publishing: All Use is Fair Use', by Jan Velterop of BioMed Central and 'Long-term access and humanities scholarship' by Yola de Lusenet of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

It's anticipated that the papers will be published in the Association's journal, European Science Editing, which is, itself, openly available, nine months after publication of the paper copy, so keep an eye peeled for it.

ISIC 2004 - is the leading conference in the field of information seeking behaviour and its April 30th early registration deadline is fast approaching.

If you would like to avail yourself of the 400 euro early registration rate, please log into our web site as soon as possible. Please note that payment must also be received by April 30th to complete your registration.

For a different perspective on information systems I recommend an article in this week's New Statesman (immediate access if you are a subscriber, otherwise £1.00 for 24 hours access). It's not about information systems directly, but about the problems of a shortly-tob-be-released prisoner. To get accommodation, he needs his National Insurance Number, but to get that - yes, you've guessed it - he needs an address. As he points out - he's in prison, under his real name, his fingerprints and DNA on file - why can't the prison authorities simply confirm his existence and allow his number to be delivered to the prison? The prisons are run by the Home Office, the National Insurance system by a branch of the Treasury - joined up government? Given the regular failure of IT projects in government, I guess we'll have to wait a long time before anything is joined up.

Of course, joined up action is problematical when we have politicians who can't do joined up thinking. Comedy show of the week was Tony Blair trying to justify his actions on Iraq - he seems to have a very selective memory. It seems that the famous "WMD" and the "immediate threat" to Britain that convinced the credulous MPs in the House of Commons (but no one else that I've ever met) were not the real cause - for Tony the real cause is now the removal of the oppressor. If this was his main attempt to regain voter trust, I don't think he's made it. It's positively embarassing to have such a hypocrite at the helm - and one who seems to think that the electorate is made up of unthinking idiots.

And now for something completely different: anyone interested in words will enjoy the Collect Britain site's feature on dialects. People are often astonished by the variation in accent in the UK, but remember the waves of invaders - Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Norman French - all leaving traces behind. Plus internal migration, of course - the Scots who moved to Ireland ended up with an accent that is neither Irish nor Scots, but Ulster!

Everyone is interested to some degree in food, so discovery (via The Scout Report) of the Epicurious (sic) site interested me, especially as it is suggested that this is the world's biggest source of recipes - 16,000 pages. Being in Oporto at present and, on Monday night having sampled a very nice dish of 'cabrito no forno' with a red Vinho Verde Espumante (which I didn't even know existed), I thought I would check on recipes. However, 'cabrito' as a search term returns nothing, 'kid' returns nothing, and 'goat' only returns recipes using goat cheese. Now some may have an aversion to eating goat, but the young animal is as popular as lamb in some parts of Europe - especially Southern Europe and I'm a little surprised that the publishers of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines have no recipes on file. Incidentally, the goat was delicious!