Reference Extract, a project of OCLC and the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington, is an effort to provide more credibility in searching.

According to the econtentmag article: Users will enter a search term and receive results weighted toward sites most often used by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress, the University of Washington, the State Library of Maryland, and over 2,000 other libraries worldwide.

At Syracuse, it is part of the Credibility Commons project, which seems to concentrate more on belief and opinion than on attention and more basic neuropsychological responses.

US Patent & Trademark Office’s experiment in crowdsourcing:  a noble idea (or political cover by the USPTO) but the number of applications examined is minuscule.

[Something else for the neural net modelers to analyze for us: collaboration is based on trust, and trust starts with credibility . . . although this post is related to the Wikipedia post in this Main category so it's here and not in Collaboration and social neuroscience.]

See BBC news story, and Parallel story in PC World.

The father of the World Wide Web is calling for a system of ratings to help people distinguish truth and untruth online.  The story was carried by Slashdot, and accrued the tag, “goodluckwiththat.”

For discerning or guaranteeing truth of the Web, you have several alternatives to do it by brute force:

• Clamp down and moderate (or restrict “write” access to) everything (also catalog the Web while you’re at it)
• Set up a committee to draw up guidelines
  • There is now Berners-Lee’s new creation, the World Wide Web Foundation (not to be confused with the World Wide Web Consortium which is concerned with more technical matters such as interoperability and accessibility by people with disabilities).
• Invent software to detect and stop gaming (e.g., Google protecting against link farms)

Or you can let the market sort it out

• Educate users to make good choices (or let the underinformed sink or swim on their own)
• Rely somehow on the wisdom of crowds (see gaming, below; or, if you’re lucky, you’re within a self-policing community such as arXiv.org)

Openness has at least two “enemies” (actually destructive elements within):  Wrong or low-quality information misleading or wasting readers’ time;  and gaming the system, i.e., deliberate manipulation.  Can these two be handled the same way?

BUT . . . there is the time-honored technique of considering the source, in this case.  Berners-Lee (at least shortly after the conferral of his knighthood, he discouraged the appellation “Sir Tim” although it’s too fun to resist) is the same one who advocated the Semantic Web (at least at the ASIS&T 2004 annual meeting), which seems a naïve application of META tags.  The original vision of the Web as a communitarian connection of geeks cannot be sustained in its original form any more—Berners-Lee’s ideas seem to be the thoughts of someone grounded in a less-content-oriented, more-technically-oriented experience.  Computer programmers tend to get content nuances right about 80% of the time (think of the balance between domain knowledge and task knowledge following the 80-20 rule), and these ideas may fall into the other 20%, at least for the present time.

[This is the beginning of a thought.]

Colleges (including Middlebury early on, and departments at the University of Texas at Arlington eventually) ban its use for citations.

Our category for encyclopedias (or other traditional reference materials) is that of reliability and no need to question.  Perhaps the name, with that “paideia” root, is the problem–which we might not have if it had been called Askyourneighbor.com or “the wall” in one of the social networking sites.

Wikipedia achieves accuracy the way peer review works:  there’s no absolute standard to measure new discoveries (by definition–they’ve never been known before), so we just run them by a lot of people (granted, different communities may function in different ways) and approach the truth iteratively.

Thus, Wikipedia must be used appropriately.  The problem is not the object, but the process of using it.  It should be used as a journal, not a book.  A book is the culmination of expertise gathering and review.  A journal is a snapshot along the way to a finished more definitive work, i.e., a book.  Everything in Wikipedia is an iteration.

[Thought to be developed, possibly with supporting examples and other rhetorically convincing features.  Finding a true tie-in to neuropsychology would be nice, too--maybe something about the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of certainty?]

One section of MIT’s Open CourseWare is “Brain and cognitive science.”

You have important questions to research. Why let those loudmouth gregarious go-getter types snag all your potential subjects? The StudyResponse Project will distribute your call for participants to its list of pre-screened adult volunteers, for mere pennies per participant (minimum $79 charge–see their rate calculation on the Researcher Registration page.) It’s run out of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. As you contemplate mental images of homogeneous populaces of upstate white people, remember not only that the university is as diverse as any major university, but also that Syracuse has been a favorite “average North American” city for market researchers for a couple of generations.

You need evidence of institutional review board (human subject research) approval, and they’re set up to take your grant money. :-{)}

The bleeding edge can be ragged and messy sometimes. Two ways to advance cognitive science have been taking fMRI images of brains doing various things, and brain-based education. The former is a popular activity almost everywhere, including at my university. How much has it turned up? Still not much detailing complex cognition—the whole brain lights up for a lot of tasks, or the phenomena studied are emotions. A promising area, though: social psychology of agreeableness, consensus, and collaboration (the opposite of conflict, which is, of course, a major topic of psychological study). See the work of Jared Kenworthy, for example. Now if we could only get them to study people’s agreement about concepts, instead of more primal urges.

Brain-based education still has a ways to go, too. A look through the databases suggests the idea ran out of steam by 2005.

A visit to the miniature model circus at the Ringling museum evokes questions about evocation and representation of mental representations. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) This is a long post, but doesn’t fit into any one category. (That’s the central ideal of the blog, so maybe it is time for a new category structure?)

First of all, to get vocabulary (schemata, mental models) out of the way, there are two lecture notes, one from Clark Quinn at University of Colorado and one from Ruth Byrne at Trinity College Dublin.

At the estate of John and Mable Ringling (home to their art collection and circus museum) is the Tibbals Learning Center housing Howard Tibbals’s creation, the Howard Brothers Circus, a miniature model of an entire circus arriving and setting up in a town. It takes up 3,800ft² (353m²). The figures, apparently carved from wood with fabric clothing and metal implements added, are extremely detailed–most of the 1,300 human miniatures show all ten fingers. The entire project took decades to complete, starting in 1956. The installation (behind glass, with captions) is in a building with a sound system playing circus music, and displays of actual circus equipment and costumes.

As a side note, it is interesting that the inspiration was catalyzed (Tibbals had been interested in circuses since the age of 3) by an article on the logistics of circus setup, “Here comes the circus,” in a 1952 issue of Popular mechanics. What an interesting psychobibliometric study it would be to trace the timelines and spans or reaches (geographic, disciplinary) of the projects born from reading that magazine, a North American boyhood pastime in the earlier part of the last century.

Nowadays, we would construct a virtual reality. Virtual realities are cheaper than physical spaces to maintain, and don’t require replenishment of materials. Yet their development can be at least as painstaking, even if not as physically demanding. Tibbals made 15,000 rail plates, 33,000 railroad spikes, and 2,164 individually turned wooden tent stakes 3 inches [7.6cm] in length (real-world tent stakes are 4 feet [1.2m] long). Virtual images can be made once and cloned repeatedly, which saves “tedious” labor (ignoring the value of tiny individual variations, assuming those can’t be built into the image editor), but the original creation involves careful observation and whatever else it takes to create a mathematical model of each curve, angle, and texture. Fortunately, many templates are available for copying and importing into one’s project. Building on the shoulders of others is one form of collaborative knowledge work. Of course, if the found model doesn’t suit one’s particular needs exactly, there is still the work of searching further for a better model, or modifying one and fitting it into the project. How does all this compare to the experience and manual dexterity of handcraft? How similar are the demands on visualization and spatial perception centers in the brain?

This installation stimulates several of the senses (visual display, verbal captions, music, realia nearby in the building). In what ways are miniature wood carvings surrogates? How different are they, in detail level, from avatars? How much do the carvings rely on the viewer’s general knowledge and (what we now call, fuzzily) context? How much, in each case, do we supply to construct a mental representation–an engram in working memory, so to speak–of that they represent? How much overlap is there between cues for constructing a mental representation and cues for believability, or cues for agreement with the claim of accuracy?

Cognitive neuroscience references may be helpful to draw from Episodic Model Imprinting Theory (EMI) by Peter J. Patsula (“Jakob Nielsen’s evil twin”), although it focuses on episodic representations in working memory, and learning.

Information science references may be inferred, with some stretching, from the work of Shelly Turkle. The first work that came to mind while considering the above questions was Life on the screen: Identity in the Internet (1995), but her other publications look even more interesting. She received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Her latest book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With and Objects in Mind: Falling for Science, Technology, and Design,is about to be released, but her recent work emphasizes robotics; so it may be more about evocation in a higher, less neurophysiological, sense.

The 2006 annual meeting of ASIST, the American Society for Information Science & Technology, featured several sessions on information visualization, interaction interfaces (nonverbal), and information behavior which had, or could have, neuropsychological elaboration or explanation. More detail as soon as time permits.