E-Book Versus The More Traditional Publishing Methods.
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When you run a web search on a topic you dont know well, how can you tell when you get authentic information and when you get ideology, superstition, pseudo-science, or even parody? Even though Harrison-Keyes wants to jump diretly into the e-book scene, they have not established a strategy or end state goal. Sometimes you cant, especially if youre downloading pages in a language that isnt your native tongue, in a discipline you havent mastered, from a culture with a very different sense of humor. One immediate importance for Harrison-Keyes may be to train employees such as Mark Evans in the aspects of globalization (Susan Gibbons, Librarians e-book 2005).
When reporters Anthony Loyd and John Simpson walked through the abandoned rooms of an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul, they found half-burned documents showing that al-Queda had been trying to build a nuclear bomb. When they held some of the pages up to a BBC camera, they found that a clear case of plagiarism
was in the works. As well, people Daily Rotten (an adversary company), recognized once as a copy of a 1979 spoof of bomb-building from the Journal of Irreproducible Results. One clue to the parody was the source, a humor journal that hosts its own longer term subject Noble Prizes awards. Other clues were scattered through the article itself. It cites the previous months column on building a time-machine. It instructs the reader to buy 50 jpounds of weapons grade plutonimu “at you local supplier” and those who dont have one should contact their “local terriorist organization, or perhaps the Junior Achievement in your neighborhood”. The completed bomb makes “a great ice-breaker at parties”. For next months column it promises to teach “how to clone you neighbors wife in six easy steps” with nothing but kitchen utensils.
Al-Qaeda didnt have sufficient understanding of physics, English or geek humor to catch this piece in their filters. (As many in the Harrison-Keyes scenario do not seem to have either, globalization at this time may require extensive training for some employees. Before any attempts toward company globalization attempts made could be considered successful, it has been thought that a native command of English and a good general education would be enough to catch the parody. But it isnt. Anthony Loyd was also taken in–or else this London Times reporter was playing dumb when he described the parody as abstruse and confusing. This small incident wouldnt be worth more than a sentence if it didnt illustrate a problem already common and likely to become more common as FOS and drek continue to grow in juxtaposition on the internet. Every searxh presupposes unpredictably many variables for discriminating judjment. Without antecedent knowledge, inquireres cannot reliably distinguish new knowledge from error or deception. As Socrates said to Meno: searching for truth is pointless if Ill either find what I already know or be unable to recognize it as truth when I stumble across it. (Plato,Meno, 80.d.).
Two recent stories show how scholars can be chilled in their free speech rights, in one case by a government that treats criticism as terrorism and in the other by university administrators who treat criticism as defamation.
In the first, the government of Turkey has charged Noam Chomskys Turkish publisher with violating counter-terrorist legislation that prohibits the incitement of separatist violence. Chomsky recently published a book of essays in which he criticizes Turkeys treatment of the Kurds. Chomskys Turkish publisher faces a year in prison. (Susan Gilbert, Librarians ebook).
In the second story, a federal court in Louisiana has given a California ISP until February 8, 2008 to identify the anonymous professor from the University of Louisiana at Monroe who used a web site hosted by the ISP to criticize university administrators.