Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 2, 2010
The news broke around 1 p.m. with a few sketchy details. Gunman. Shots. Hostages. Discovery building.
Within minutes, there were photos, including an astonishing one of a man clad in shorts, carrying a rifle and stalking through what looked like an office courtyard.
The news of a gunman at the Discovery Channel's headquarters in Silver Spring indeed traveled fast on Wednesday, but none of it came through radio, TV or newspaper Web sites, at least not at first. As it has with other breaking news events — the landing of a jet on the Hudson River in 2009, the 2008 massacre in Mumbai — the story unfolded first in hiccupping fits and starts on Twitter, the much-hyped micro-blogging service that has turned millions of people into worldwide gossips, opinion-mongers and amateur news reporters.
In a move that emphasizes the increasing importance of realtime search, Google has just given their realtime search function a kick in the pants, moving it from the lowly “Updates” sidebar on regular Google search to it’s own URL http://google.com/realtime, which was broken this morning but now seems to be redirecting to http://www.google.com/realtime?esrch=RealtimeLaunch::Experiment.
Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is… an online gaming community.
Phi Beta Iota: Most serious analysts now understand Citation Analytics 101. It's time to move to Citation Analytics 202, and there is no better way to introduce the art of the possible than by pointing to Kevin W. Boyack, Katy Borner, and Richard Klavans (2007), “Mapping the Structure and Evolution of Chemistry Research (11th International Conference of Scientometrics and Infometrics, pp. 112-123.
Full Article with Color GraphicsGraphic as Printable Single Page PPT
There are several take-aways from this article, which is more or less the “coming out” of the Klavens-inspired infometrics field now that he has won his law-suit and has unchallenged access to all Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) access [this was one of the sources we used to win the Burundi Exercise before the Aspin-Brown Commission in 1995].
UPDATE of 22 Aug 2010 to add Viral Video (John Pourdehnad) that started the dialog.
Ackoff Virtual Inqiry Center (AVIC)
There is a discussion underway at Systems Community of Inquiry focused on developing the concepts for a network of Ackoff Virtual Inqiry Centers (AVIC) located around the world. Early on, the original vision for AVIC, offered by Dr. John Pourdehnad, was that AVIC serve as a nervous system for the Systems and Design Community in Dr. Russell Ackoff’s name. With this belief, Dr. Pourdehnad also made clear the need for AVIC to be designed Ideally and created by the stakeholders themselves. The concept is being extended by Gene Bellinger and Kent Myers. The work of Clay Shirky is most helpful:
