Authority has varied meanings in every context. This piece on iFilm has Iiro Seppanen explaining his view of the matter as it relates to jumping off the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. View above, or click through to Base Concepts: Authority.
authority, base jumping, extreme sports, Iiro Seppanen, las vegas, parachuting, stratosphere, vegas

Posted May 5, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Photoblog, Politics & Controversy. Tags: authority, base jumping, extreme sports, Iiro Seppanen, las vegas, parachuting, stratosphere, vegas. 3 Comments.

The argument about Wikipedia versus Britannica continues to rage in libraryland. The questions are about authority and the likelihood of outright deception, of course, and a recent round brought up the limitations of peer review as exemplified in the 1989 cold fusion controversy, where two scientists claimed to have achieved a nuclear fusion reaction at [...]

Posted January 5, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: authority, Britannica, cold fusion, controversy, encyclopeadia britannica, encyclopedia, encyclopedia britannica, encyclopedias, wikipedia. One Comment.

Ken forwarded me this podcast of Robert Cialdini speaking on his Six Weapons of Influence, which he lists as

Reciprocation
Commitment and consistency
Social proof
Authority
Liking
Scarcity

Cialdini’s book is in its fourth edition, and has apparently been adopted as a text for more than a few classes and the concepts have worked their way into everybody’s marketing seminars. Motivation speaker [...]

Posted November 10, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: apparently, authority, commitment and consistency, directed difference, friendly thief, give and take, hobgoblins of the mind, liking, marketing, motivation speaker, patricia fripp, podcast, reciprocation, robert cialdini, rule of the few, scarcity, six weapons of influence, social proof, thief, truths are us, uncomfortable, yakyak. 27 Comments.

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.”
The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds the [...]

Posted October 12, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: authority, citation analysis, findability, google, google economy, libraries, library, library systems, quality data, research methods, search, search engine, search engines, web opac, wikipedia. 2 Comments.

Gary Wolf wrote in the June issue of Wired about how smart mobs in New York’s World Trade Center outbrained the “authorities” and enjoyed higher survival rates because of it. Wolf is talking about the NIST report on Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications (warning: PDFs). There’s also this executive summary and this looks like [...]

Posted June 2, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: authorities, authority, blackberries, civil engineers, communications, defense, disaster, disobey, egress, elevators, emergency, evacuees, question, question authority, report, review, security, smartmob. 3 Comments.