Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!gatech!udel!new
From: new@udel.EDU (Darren New)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: New Communicational Morality
Keywords: software, copyright, society, communication, information
Message-ID: <13120@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 14 Apr 89 19:41:08 GMT
References: <754@infovax.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de> <13060@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Sender: usenet@udel.EDU
Reply-To: new@udel.EDU (Darren New)
Organization: University of Delaware
Lines: 23

In article <13060@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> mjm@dartmouth.edu (Michael McClemen) writes:
>The major reason that I decided against a career in any of the theoretical
>disciplines I studied in college (biochemistry, physics, ai) was the realization
>that with the amount of scientific information growing at an exponential rate,
>more and more of a researcher's time is being spent simply trying to keep up
>with current advances in their field, and possibly mistakenly duplicating other
>researchers' work.  Without basic changes in the way we manage and exchange
>scientific information, I think that there is a large possibility that the
>research community will soon be literally paralyzed by success.
>
>Michael McClennen
>mjm@dartmouth.edu

Is this sort of like "Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded"?
Where is all this advance coming from if everyone is too busy keeping
up with the advances to do any advancement? And so what if a researcher
duplicates someone else's work? Admitedly, the researcher will not get
any brownie points for it, but the original clearly was unknown to
the researcher and therefore was not in any of the journals that
the researcher follows, etc. The "evil :-)" of duplicating research
always seemed sort of artificial to me, especially since in science
people WANT duplication of experiments. Why duplicate experiments
only when it works?   - Darren New   new@udel.edu