The Scholar’s Space

There is another contender in the “we can beat Google” line up. Cuil is the name, and it’s pronounced ‘cool’ or maybe ‘coo-il’ (2 syllables).  Claiming to be bigger than Google,  and saying that they have some nifty new methods for digging deeper into recovered pages to provide more information, Cuil people have certainly staked out some big territory. The founders are ex-Google employees who left the Mother Church for various  reasons, so they  have a more than ordinary acquaintance with what goes on inside.  I’m all for competition, and I think the newcomers should have their shot. But, judging from some of the comments on library discussion lists, the advantages of Cuil are not obvious and the company has some tweaking to do.  Cuil also displays its results in a different fashion, and that novelty may be worth something to somebody.  The desert floor is littered with the bones of Google wannabees, so it’s better not to excite oneself needlessly, and just await the outcome.

The Stasi was the East German secret police, and it took its work of “internal security” very seriously.  In fact, it so  was serious  that  it often tipped over into the absurd, but that’s another story. Most of the stuff gathered about East Germans  was  meaningless,  and, in retrospect, the surveillance effort seems both ridiculous and a colossal waste of personnel and resources. With the end of the German Democratic Republic and the disappearance of Stasi as an organization, came questions about the files gathered with such Teutonic thoroughness. Stasi bosses had started to shred a lot, but there was so much that, in desperation, they resorted to basic manual tearing-up, with the shreds stuffed into mailbags. For a while there was a kind of archeological effort underway, in which humans tried to restore the documents, but it was slow going. Along came a clever young guy who saw that if ever a project called out for IT rationalization, this was it. Bertram Nicolay of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute had some ideas on how to reconstruct the tatters into readable documents.  To make a longish story a lot shorter, Nicolay came up with a system that allows the reconstruction of eye-readable documents drawn from  tatters. It seems to be a kind of overlay system, in which the searcher chooses between stated options: white paper or blue, lined or plain, etc. Each choice narrows the field until only highly similar pieces are left, and then the chances of restoring the original go up considerably.  Some other countries with histories of similar  intrusiveness on the  part of the secret services have expressed interest in the Fraunhofer program.  Stasi relied a great deal on informers, so much of what was carefully collected was  gossip or rumor or malicious denunciation, and it makes sad reading indeed.  It’s not easy to find out after many years that your friend or kinsman or colleague was an informer, and had talked about you. It’s also depressing to find out that many people in the arts, academia, business and other areas were Stasi finks, who got on the payroll for what now seem like trifiling privileges: a little foreign travel, a small promotion. But that’s the human side. People who want to know what happened should be allowed to find out, and Nickolay’s ideas make it possible.
 The story appeared originally in Wired magazine, but you can get access to it through Arts and Letters Daily.
Stasi

Our short considerations of the style found in scientific papers gets a little background in a new book reviewed recently in Nature.  The reviewer is Steven Shapin from the History of Science section at Harvard, and his remarks add to our understanding of how scientific writing got to be the way it is.  When science was emerging as an independent way of investigating the world, its practitioners wanted to be seen as accurate and objective reporters, rather than rhetoricians, who used all sorts of literary tricks to persuade. One consequence of this was the creation of a standard, formal method of presentation, and a consequent diminishment of personal elements in the report to concentrate the reader’s attention on the actions and results described.  Some of the recent scandals about fakery in the presentation of research results suggest that there is a very, very large measure of imagination and creativity remaining in at least some scientific reports at least some of the time.  Take a look:

The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour edited by Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross, University of Chicago Press: 2007. 312 pp. $29.00 (pbk); $72.50 (hbk)
Review