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

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 room temperature. Randy Souther, from the University of San Francisco, asked us to look more carefully:

FYI, cold fusion in 1989 was a media fiasco, but not a fraud. The research is still controversial, but continues today with publications in more than 50 peer-reviewed journals. But you would never realize this by reading Britannica’s one-paragraph article, which is stuck in 1989; Wikipedia’s gives a reasonable overview, and is up-to-date.

So I looked. Here’s the 175 words the Encyclopeadia Britannica Online used to cover the matter:

The fusion of two atomic nuclei at cool temperatures is referred to as cold fusion. Nuclear fusion has been an important area of study in nuclear physics since the 1940s, and from that time, researchers have pursued the possibility of harnessing fusion, which can produce huge amounts of energy from mere hydrogen with minimal radioactive waste, for the generation of electricity. The main obstacle to practical applications of nuclear fusion is that atoms must be heated to tens of millions of degrees Celsius in order to combine at sufficiently high rates. In 1989, however, chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have fused atoms of deuterium, which is also called heavy hydrogen because its mass is twice that of ordinary hydrogen, in a simple electric cell at room temperature. The experiment generated great excitement in the scientific community, but other scientists were unable to duplicate Pons and Fleischmann’s results, and their findings were ultimately discredited. Despite skepticism among most nuclear fusion experts, some researchers continue to study the possibility of cold fusion.

And here’s just the introduction to the Wikipedia article:

Cold fusion is the name for a nuclear fusion reaction that occurs well below the temperature required for thermonuclear reactions (millions of degrees Celsius). Such reactions may occur near room temperature and atmospheric pressure, and even in a relatively small (table top) experiment. In a narrower sense, “cold fusion” also refers to a particular type of fusion supposedly occurring in electrolytic cells.

The term “cold fusion” was coined by Dr Paul Palmer of Brigham Young University in 1986 in an investigation of “geo-fusion”, or the possible existence of fusion in a planetary core. It was brought into popular consciousness by the controversy surrounding the Fleischmann-Pons experiment in March of 1989. A number of other scientists have reported replication of their experimental observation of anomalous heat generation in electrolytic cells, but in a non-predictable way, and most scientists believe that there is no proof of cold fusion in these experiments. A majority of scientists consider this research to be pseudoscience, while proponents argue that they are conducting valid experiments in a protoscience that challenges mainstream thinking.

The subject has been of scientific interest since nuclear fusion was first understood. Hot nuclear fusion using deuterium yields large amounts of energy, uses an abundant fuel source, and produces only small amounts of manageable waste; thus a cheap and simple process of nuclear fusion would have great economic impact. Unfortunately, no “cold” fusion experiments that gave an otherwise unexplainable net release of energy have so far been reproducible.

Wordcounts don’t measure quality, but Wikipedia’s 247 word introduction seems much more useful than Britannica’s entire article. More importantly, I like this article as an example of how Wikipedia handles controversy. We’ve seen controversy in articles about charged political or social issues, but I think it’s much easier for most readers to look at this one without feeling for the issue at hand.

Separately… They’re both online, but which one is easier to read? Which one best takes advantage of the medium?

And for those who are interested in cold fusion, Randy (who’s Joyce Carol Oats website rocks) suggested two books on the matter for further reading:

• The Rebirth of Cold Fusion: Real Science, Real Hope, Real Energy
• Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed

controversy, authority, wikipedia, encyclopedia britannica, encyclopeadia britannica, britannica, encyclopedia, encyclopedias, cold fusion

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 and marketing yakyak Patricia Fripp summarizes those six weapons like this:

• The Old Give and Take–and Take
• Hobgoblins of the Mind
• Truths Are Us
• The Friendly Thief
• Directed Deference
• The Rule of the Few

Academics often feel uncomfortable mixing marketing in their fields, but isn’t it worth a look?

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

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 gardens of our mind. Argument is good. Here’s my side.

It’s important that we understand how modern search engines work. On the web, each link is a citation, and citation analysis is an important component among the many algorithms used to rank search results. Highly ranked content appears at the top because it is frequently cited (linked). This is obvious to many, but what is harder to fathom is that we (those who publish web content, anyway), not the search engines are responsible for identifying value on the web. Each link is a value statement about the resource we link to.

Think about that in the context of this comment:

Just because a document is findable, this does not mean that its contents are *better* or more truthful than a document that is not findable.

My point is that findability is in fact a measure of value. A perhaps incomplete and indirect measure, but one that has shown a remarkable ability to deliver valuable and useful information on demand.

Unfortunately, not all content is available online, and not all online content is linkable. Sadly, many web OPAC pages are not linkable, as is true of most every A&I and full-text database (or the content is linkable but inaccessible behind an authwall).

So now this quote:

As librarians, we are supposed to be experts on helping people find and retrieve quality information.

And I have to follow this with the following question: How better to help our patrons find high quality, accurate, and authoritative information than to take advantage of the search engines that already answer hundreds of millions of questions each day?

As stewards of knowledge, we need to understand the Google Economy. We need to build applications that embrace it. We need to invest the value that librarians bring to the search for knowledge in our online services.

Feh, libraries are full of people smarter than me. Hopefully they’ll forgive me for speaking out of turn.

tags: authority, citation analysis, findability, google, google economy, libraries, library, library systems, quality data, research methods, search, search engine, search engines, web opac, wikipedia

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 a mind numbing PowerPoint presentation (also PDF). So, what about it?

For nearly four years – steadily, seriously, and with the unsentimental rigor for which we love them – civil engineers have been studying the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, sifting the tragedy for its lessons. And it turns out that one of the lessons is: Disobey authority. In a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do.

Wolf talks about news coming in via cell phone and Blackberry, people making informed decisions that contradicted the authorities, and doing so calmly and efficiently.

We know that US borders are porous, that major targets are largely undefended, and that the multicolor threat alert scheme known affectionately as “the rainbow of doom” is a national joke. Anybody who has been paying attention probably suspects that if we rely on orders from above to protect us, we’ll be in terrible shape. But in a networked era, we have increasing opportunities to help ourselves. This is the real source of homeland security: not authoritarian schemes of surveillance and punishment, but multichannel networks of advice, information, and mutual aid.

As wolf says, “question authorities.”

Thanks to DefenseTech for the link.

Technorati Tags: authorities, authority, blackberries, civil engineers, communications, defense, disaster, disobey, egress, elevators, emergency, evacuees, question, question authority, report, review, security, smartmob