PLEASE NOTE:
*
CCNet 15/2001 - 29 January 2001
------------------------------
"There is no scientific insight to be gained by counting
planets.
Eight or nine, the numbers don't matter."
--Neil de Grasse Tyson, Hayden Planetarium, 27 January 2001
"Tyson is so far off base with Pluto, it's like he's in a
different
universe."
David Levy, Associated Press, 27 January 2001
"If Pluto had been discovered by a Spaniard or Austrian, I
doubt
whether American astronomers would object to reclassifying it as
a
minor planet," one astronomer privately acknowledged.
"Before he
died, Clyde Tombaugh himself said he was reconciled to the
perception
of Pluto as one of many Kuiper Belt objects -- minor denizens of
the outer
solar system."
--Michael W. Browne, The New York Times, 9 February
1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/020999sci-planet-pluto.html
(1) 20,000 FEARED DEAD: DESPERATE SEARCH FOR INDIAN QUAKE
SURVIVORS
BBC Online News, 29 January 2001
(2) PLEASE HELP INDIA'S QUAKE VICTIMS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1139000/1139932.stm
(3) ASTRONOMERS SENT INTO ORBIT BY CLAIM THAT PLUTO IS NOT A
PLANET
Associated Press, 27 January 2001
(4) WHAT IN THE WORLD?
Boston Globe, 27 January 2001
(5) PLUTO DEBATES BACK IN FULL SWING
Benny J Peiser <b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk>
(6) WARY SCIENTISTS GUIDING SPACE DEBRIS BACK TO EARTH
Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
(7) DISASTER AND DEVELOPMENT
Maureen Fordham <m.h.fordham@ANGLIA.AC.UK>
(8) AND FINALLY: THE MISSING LINKS
Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
=========
(1) 20,000 FEARED DEAD: DESPERATE SEARCH FOR INDIAN QUAKE
SURVIVORS
From the BBC Online News, 29 January 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1142000/1142168.stm
The rescue operation for survivors of the devastating earthquake
in the
Western Indian state of Gujarat is getting increasingly
desperate. Fours
days after the earthquake hit, Indian officials and foreign
relief workers
say hopes are fading of finding more survivors.
It is now feared that as many as 20,000 people may have died, and
there are
thousands of bodies still buried under collapsed buildings.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1142000/1142168.stm
=============
(2) PLEASE HELP INDIA'S QUAKE VICTIMS
FOR DONATIONS, SEE:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1139000/1139932.stm
===========
(3) ASTRONOMERS SENT INTO ORBIT BY CLAIM THAT PLUTO IS NOT A
PLANET
From 27 January 2001
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/national/plut27.shtml
By KATHERINE ROTH
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- One of the nation's leading science museums has
quietly shaken
up the universe by suggesting that Pluto is not necessarily a
planet at all
but just a lump of ice.
The startling suggestion comes from scientists at the Rose Center
for Earth
and Space, which opened last year at the American Museum of
Natural History
in New York.
There is a 9-foot-diameter model of Jupiter hanging from the
ceiling at the
center. There is Saturn with its rings, Mercury, Venus, Earth,
Mars, Neptune
and Uranus. But what about Pluto, long considered the ninth
planet in the
solar system?
A solar system display says: "Beyond the outer planets is
the Kuiper Belt of
comets, a disk of small, icy worlds including Pluto."
"There is no scientific insight to be gained by counting
planets," said Neil
de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, the
centerpiece of the
Rose Center. "Eight or nine, the numbers don't matter."
Many astronomers say the museum, the first prominent institution
to take
this position, has overstepped its bounds.
"Tyson is so far off base with Pluto, it's like he's in a
different
universe," said David Levy, author of "Clyde Tombaugh,
Discoverer of Planet
Pluto," about the Kansas farm boy who first spotted Pluto.
"The majority of
astronomers have said that unless there is definitive evidence to
the
contrary, Pluto stays a major planet."
The International Astronomical Union calls Pluto one of nine
planets in the
solar system, and a 1999 proposal to list Pluto as both a planet
and a
member of the Kuiper Belt was abandoned after it drew strong
opposition from
astronomers. Pluto has always been a little different: Its
composition is
like a comet's, and its elliptical orbit is tilted 17 degrees
from the
orbits of the other planets.
When Pluto was discovered in 1930, it was thought to be about the
same size
as Earth, but astronomers have now learned that it is only 1,413
miles wide
-- smaller than the Earth's moon.
Then, in 1992, astronomers discovered the first Kuiper Belt
object, and
since then have found hundreds of chunks of rock and ice beyond
Neptune,
including about 70 that share orbits similar to Pluto's.
The Rose Center said there is no universal definition of a planet
and
instead divides the solar system into the sun and five families
of objects.
There are terrestrial planets, or small, dense rocky objects like
Mercury,
Venus, Earth and Mars; an asteroid belt consisting of craggy
chunks of rock
and iron between Mars and Jupiter; the gas giants, which are
Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; and two reservoirs of comets, the
Oort Cloud and
the Kuiper Belt. And Pluto? "It's in the Kuiper Belt,"
Tyson said. "What's
it made of? It's mostly ice."
© 2001 The Associated Press.
============
(4) WHAT IN THE WORLD?
From the Boston Globe, 27 January 2001
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/gam/Editorials/20010127/EPLUTO.html
Pluto gets no respect. The ninth planet from the sun wasn't
discovered until
1930, and even then astronomers were looking for another planet,
a so-called
Planet X, that was supposed to be playing havoc with the orbits
of Neptune
and Uranus. Disappointed that this consolation planet was too
puny to be
influencing anyone, scientists barely paused to name it after the
Roman god
of the dead -- how's that for morbid? -- before returning to the
search for
X.
It gets worse. Some astronomers say Pluto isn't a planet at all.
They say
Pluto and its moon Charon (ferryman on the Styx -- morbid enough
yet?) are
merely large comets belonging to the Kuiper Belt, a bunch of
comets and
asteroids Pluto occasionally passes through. Humbug, we say.
Humans swim in
oceans; does that make them whales?
This scurrilous view has such currency that New York's Rose
Center for Earth
and Space, a division of the American Museum of Natural History,
has omitted
Pluto from its display of planets. As The New York Times wrote
this week,
"the museum appears to have unilaterally demoted Pluto,
reassigning it as
one of more than 300 icy bodies" orbiting in that low-rent
Kuiper Belt.
Talk about sneaky. The Rose Center didn't open until last
February, one year
after a 20-year cycle during which Pluto came closer to Earth
than Neptune.
The museum staff waited until Neptune was safely back in eighth
position, as
it will be until the year 2229, before casting aspersions on
Pluto's status.
It's obvious why: more distance, less chance of a lawsuit.
Granted, Pluto isn't much to look at. It's smaller than all the
other
planets. It's a rock in an iceball shrouded in methane snow, the
kind they
warned us against during first-grade recess. Its days are a week
longer than
ours and it takes 248 years to circle the sun, which suggests a
lack of
gumption. Like Uranus, it spins with its polar areas facing the
sun. The
other planets spin with their equators facing the sun, which is
slightly
less rude.
But is that any reason to knock Pluto off the pedestal? It's no
less a
planet than the hydrogen gasball we call Jupiter or the bodies
you need oven
mitts to touch, Mercury and Venus. As for Saturn's much-vaunted
rings,
they're nothing but sheets of circulating snowballs, and you
can't even see
them from Earth when they turn sideways, as they do every 15
years with a
predictability bordering on compulsion.
Pluto has gravitas. When Yale University professor Willie Ruff
calculated
two decades ago that the planets have their own tunes -- Venus
hums, Mercury
whistles, Uranus clicks -- Pluto was the one beating like a bass
drum. Which
may keep Neptune up nights, but that's not our problem.
And when astronomers speculated three years back about which
parts of our
solar system might harbour life, they chose Mars, Venus,
Jupiter's moon
Europa and, yes, Pluto's Charon. Demote Pluto? That's like saying
Walt
Disney's Pluto should be downgraded to a minor cartoon character
because,
unlike Mickey Mouse and Goofy, he walks on all fours and doesn't
talk.
If such sophisticated argument doesn't work against the Rose
Center, we'll
have to take our case to the truly powerful forces in society,
the ones with
a vested interest in maintaining the planet's prestige.
Plutocrats, unite!
Copyright © 2001 Globe Interactive, a division of Bell
Globemedia Publishing
Inc.
===========
(5) PLUTO DEBATES BACK IN FULL SWING
From Benny J Peiser <b.j.peiser@livjm.ac.uk>
After almost two years of silence, the notorious Pluto debate is
back in
full swing: Should Pluto's status as ninth planet of our solar
system be
revised in view of new scientific information emanating from the
Kuiper
Belt? Even after two years of some startling astronomical
discoveries, there
is still no simple answer to the thorny issue. But the bold step,
recently
taken by one of America's most distinguished institutions of
popular science
education, is not unprecedented by any standards. As Neil de
Grasse Tyson,
the director of the Hayden Planetarium, has correctly pointed
out, Ceres,
discovered in 1801, was called a planet in the early 19th century
and later
demoted to the status of asteroid. According to Saturday's AP
report,
"critics counter that Ceres, which is only 580 miles wide,
was only
considered a planet for a year, while Pluto has been a major
planet for more
than 70 years. In addition, they say, there was consensus among
astronomers
in the case of Ceres." I'm afraid these are rather silly and
flawed
arguments.
Although the discovery of Pallas one year after Ceres may have
tended to
alter the status of Ceres some, the fact remains that many
astronomical
texts were considering the first four asteroids as the eighth,
ninth, tenth
and eleventh "planets" still more than 40 years later.
It was really only
the discovery of a few more asteroids, and particularly the
discovery of
Neptune as a genuinely worthy successor to seventh-planet Uranus,
that
created the real impetus for change. What is more, this analogy
with Pluto
is even stronger in that one year after its discovery there were
already
astronomers pointing out it could not be the massive object the
Lowell
Observatory people were claiming. Admittedly, it was 60 years
before other
members of the Kuiper Belt were discovered. But it is exactly
because it
took that long that new astronomical information about this class
of
trans-Neptunian Objects emerged that Neil Tyson's pioneering move
for status
change is appropriate. Let's not forget that it is due to Tyson's
decision
and the publicity it has generated that the interested public can
thereby
acquire a genuine understanding of the way the solar system is
put together.
But what about the critics? Haven't they also a good case? My
friend David
Levy has been arguing for many years against attempts by fellow
astronomers
to reconsider Pluto's scientific classification in view of its
increasingly
obvious similarities to other Kuiper Belt Objects. While I admire
David's
work and respect his personal views on this issue, I think he
would be well
advised not to use political arguments in a debate of scientific
nature. As
historians of astronomy will apreciate, claims to the effect that
"the
majority of astronomers say....", or, even worse, "most
mainstream
astronomers believe....", are not helpful in a controversy
that has to be
settled on the basis of hard facts and scientific evidence rather
than on
current fads and fashions among astronomers (or should I say
powerful
science managers).
Nevertheless, if people are interested to know what the
"majority of
astronomers" may think about the status of Pluto, it would
be better to
consult the results of the only survey that, to my knowledge, was
ever
conducted among solar system astronomers regarding Pluto. It
turns out that
more than 60% of all those surveyed by the MPC in 1999, clearly
prefered
Brian Marsden's wise and far-sighted compromise proposal: to give
good old
Pluto dual citizenship - as a major *and* a minor planet (see:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/J99/J99C10.html).
Unfortunately, back in
1999, the IAU, despite initial sympathy to this reasonable idea,
did not
accept the compromise vote by the majority of experts who took
part in the
survey. Instead, the IAU decided to give in to a hard-line media
campaign
orchestrated by a group of U.S. planetary astronomers who
demanded a total
rejection of any changes [BTW: interested readers can find
background
information about the history of this controversy in the CCNet
archive
dating to January and February 1999).
As so often in the annals of science history, this attempt to
dictate a kind
of official dogma upon an obviously divided community was
mistaken right
from the start. It only enforced a sudden termination of an
openminded
debate. Sooner or later, the astronomical evidence emanating from
the Kuiper
Belt - and Pluto itself - will, I am sure, soften the
antagonistic attitudes
by some of the hard-line traditionalists. Such dogmatism, I
believe, has
never been helpful in the ever-changing world of science and
astronomy.
Benny J Peiser
P.S. Last but not least, we should be greatful that the Hayden
Planetarium
has re-opened the Pluto debate for another reason. After all, the
Pluto
controversy might help to highlight the U.S. American campaign to
reinstate
the Pluto Kuiper Express mission that was terminated by NASA last
September.
==============
(6) WARY SCIENTISTS GUIDING SPACE DEBRIS BACK TO EARTH
From Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
The Mercury News, 25 January 2001
[ http://www0.mercurycenter.com/partners/docs1/000231.htm
]
Thursday, Jan. 25, 2001, 10:54 p.m. PST
Derelict space station just one of many castoffs
Wary scientists guiding debris back to Earth
BY SETH BORENSTEIN, Mercury News Washington Bureau,
sborenstein@krwashington.com
WASHINGTON -- For decades, rocket scientists have concentrated on
the
herculean task of putting objects into orbit. But as more
satellites,
used-up rocket parts and space junk crowd Earth's orbit, there's
a new area
of concern: getting things down -- safely.
It's not as easy as just letting gravity take its course,
although that also
will happen to dozens of bits of artificial space debris this
year.
"What's tough is not bringing something down, but bringing
something down in
a controlled way," said former Air Force chief scientist
Daniel Hastings,
professor of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
"Bringing it down in a way that you don't run into
something."
The next big thing to fall will be the old Russian space station
Mir. At
9:30 p.m. PST today, a remote-controlled cargo ship will dock
with Mir and
start pushing it down into the atmosphere. If everything goes at
planned, on
March 6 the nearly 15-year-old station will take a fiery dive
into a remote
spot in the Pacific Ocean east of Australia. NASA says the chance
of the
286,600-pound Mir hitting anyone is virtually zero.
In the next few weeks, rocket scientists also will steer another
space
vehicle into a crash landing on a distant asteroid and watch as
at least
nine pieces of space junk careen into Earth uncontrolled.
Why all the falling junk?
Because when the sun has a stormy year in its 11-year cycle of
storm
activity, such as the period we are in now, the Earth's upper
atmosphere
warms up and expands. As the atmosphere expands into the vacuum
of space
where the space junk is orbiting, the drag on the lower objects
increases.
The increased drag pulls the objects toward Earth, said Nicholas
Johnson,
the program manager and chief scientist for NASA's orbital-debris
program.
On Feb. 12, the NASA exploratory spaceship NEAR-Shoemaker will
finish its
examination of the asteroid Eros in what mission manager Bob
Farquhar called
"a blaze of glory." The ship will be steered into the
bone-shaped space rock
for a slow-motion crash. Close-up photos of the crash are
expected to be
transmitted -- and then NEAR-Shoemaker, now more than 192 million
miles from
Earth, will join the space boneyard.
Satellites, rocket parts and other space junk usually fall
uncontrolled back
to Earth. Most burn up on the way down. But in addition to Mir's
plummet
into the Pacific, at least nine other artificial space objects
will tumble
back to the planet, NASA predicts.
Saturday, the remnant of a Delta rocket launched in 1977 should
fall back to
Earth, according to NASA's space-object "decay
forecast." On Feb. 24, the
4,761-pound Russian Coronas I cosmic-ray-observing satellite,
launched in
March 1994, is expected to fall back to Earth. Some of the
satellite will
hit the ground, NASA predicts, because it's too big to burn up
entirely on
re-entry.
But scientists say it's highly unlikely that anyone will get
hurt.
Since the Space Age dawned in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik,
26,643
artificial objects -- from rocket parts to the International
Space Station
-- have gone into orbit around Earth. So far, 17,681 of those
have come back
down. Not one person has been hit or hurt.
When Skylab fell on Australia in 1979, the only damage was to
NASA's budget.
It got a ticket for littering from an Australian city council.
The closest call was last April, when two 100-pound metal
canisters, debris
from a 1996 Delta rocket launch, fell near some workers in South
Africa.
"Earth's a big place," Johnson said. For every inch of
space where there is
a human, there is many thousands of times more unoccupied space.
"Eventually, statistics say someone's going to get
hit," Johnson conceded.
"There's no doubt about that."
As for the falling and failing Mir, Russian officials have had
problems with
communications and stability for the now-empty space station. The
plan is to
control the station's descent through two engine firings on the
cargo ship,
dropping the station to lower orbits until it comes through the
atmosphere
in one large piece.
"We should do everything possible to ensure a safe descent
of Mir," Yuri
Semyonov, head of the Russian rocket firm Energiya, said this
week.
So what are the odds of an individual getting hit by an object
from space?
Johnson said NASA hasn't really calculated that figure because
it's too
complicated. Instead, NASA focuses on particular falling objects
and
calculates the odds of them hitting a person. NASA's goal is to
keep the
odds at 1 in 10,000, or greater.
Because there are 6 billion people in the world, that means an
individual's
chances of getting hit by each falling object are 1 in 60
trillion -- if
NASA's goal is met for every falling object.
That means getting clobbered by space junk is much less likely
than other
catastrophes that could befall a person.
For example, based on annual causes of death in America, the
National Safety
Council figures that over a lifetime an American has a 1 in 4,762
chance of
dying from something falling on him or her, such as a tree blown
over by
wind.
In 1995, with Earth's orbit becoming a little more crowded, the
United
States and most of the world's other space-traveling countries
agreed to a
plan that would require space objects to return to Earth 25 years
after they
ran out of fuel.
"It seems like 'Armageddon' and Bruce Willis, but the fact
is that we have a
pretty good understanding of where these objects are going to
go," said
American University astronomer Richard Berendzen. "The
physics does become a
tad tricky when you are dealing with drag" and when the
satellite
disintegrates.
"I think this is a little bit of a merger of exact science
and art at this
stage," Berendzen said.
For NASA's calculations on what space debris will come down in
the next six
months or to see a list of objects in space, go to Web site
http://oig1.gsfc.nasa.gov/scripts/foxweb.exe/app01?
Click on the "OIG Main Page" link, then on the
"Reports" link.
To find out where Mir is, go to
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/temp/mir_loc.html
For the NEAR-Shoemaker mission, go to
http://near.jhuapl.edu/NEAR
© 2001 The Mercury News.
============
(7) DISASTER AND DEVELOPMENT
From Maureen Fordham <m.h.fordham@ANGLIA.AC.UK>
I enclose below a late call for papers. 'Disaster and
Development' is an
area of critical interest now when El Salvador and India - as
just the two
most topical examples - will be looking
to rebuild and reconstruct. Without bringing together disaster
AND
development knowledge and initiatives, the danger is that they
(as so many
others have, so often before) will rebuild vulnerability to
future disasters
into the very building structures. However, what in many ways is
more
dangerous, is the creation and reinforcing of, largely unseen,
inequitable
social structures which contribute to (as Ken Hewitt has
formulated it) the
'social geography of harm'.
If you would like to contribute a paper on this theme, please
contact me.
Maureen
SUPPLEMENTARY CALL FOR PAPERS OF THE "DISASTER AND SOCIAL
CRISIS RESEARCH
NETWORK" FOR THE 5TH EUROPEAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
CONFERENCE - VISIONS
AND DIVISIONS. HELSINKI, FINLAND, 28 August - 1 September 2001.
(http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/esa/helsinki.htm)
"Session VI. Disaster and Development: Bringing
Together Divided
Disciplines, Theory and Practice"
Dear colleagues,
The Disaster and Social Crisis Research Network has circulated a
call of
papers for five sessions since last June 2000. In the meantime,
some
colleagues have expressed an interest in organizing a sixth
session on
"Disaster and Development: Bringing Together Divided
Disciplines, Theory
and Practice". The content and aims of the sixth session are
as follows:
Disaster and development are separate traditions within both
professional
practice and academic disciplines. Workers and researchers only
rarely
transfer knowledge between them and yet each group could
contribute much to
the others.
The aim of this session is to seek to break down this division
and broaden
our understanding of what hazard and disaster management should
encompass in
order to function effectively and sustainably in both the
developed North
and the developing South. 'Development' here includes the
academic
discipline of development studies and the practice of development
initiatives and projects - usually undertaken in and on
developing
countries; and the incorporation of long-term socio-economic
development
initiatives into disaster management within a developed world
context. In
doing this we intend to explore (a) the contribution that
development
studies and practice which focus on the developing world
can make to
disaster management in a developed world context (b) the possible
benefits
from reversing the dominant direction of information flow from
the North to
the South and (c) examples of best practice in sustainable
disaster
management that can be transferable across social and spatial
boundaries.
Colleagues interested in participating in the new session are
urged to send
electronically an abstract of not more than 250 words to
m.h.fordham@anglia.ac.uk
with a copy to N. Petropoulos (erc@otenet.gr),
if
possible, by January 31, 2001. Prospective participants are also
required to
submit their abstract to the Conference Secretariat using
the the official
abstract form (www.valt.helsinki.fi/esa/
).
=============
(8) AND FINALLY: THE MISSING LINKS
From Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
News Service
Cornell University
Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Office: 607-255-3290
E-Mail: bpf2@cornell.edu
FOR RELEASE: Dec. 15, 2000
The missing links: Many term-paper citations of Internet sources
no longer
exist, according to Cornell library study
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Since the mid-1990s, the wiring of the U.S.
college campus
has had a dramatic effect on how students search for information.
Much of
the research that once was done in libraries now can be done in
computer
labs or on dorm room PCs. The result is that students
increasingly cite
popular Internet sites in their class papers instead of sources
found in the
library.
Now a study by Cornell University librarians shows that many
World Wide Web
addresses, known as Uniform Resource Locators (or URLs), cited in
student
term-paper bibliographies often are incorrect or refer to
documents that no
longer exist.
"The likelihood that web citations would lead to the correct
Internet
document has decreased significantly," says Philip M. Davis,
life sciences
librarian at Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library. "A URL that
doesn't work
means the professor has no way to check the original document for
plagiarism."
Davis and Suzanne A. Cohen, reference service coordinator with
the
university's Martin P. Catherwood Library, studied the citation
behavior of
undergraduates in a large, multi-college class, Introduction to
Microeconomics (Economics 101), taught by John M. Abowd, Cornell
professor
of labor economics in the university's School of Industrial and
Labor
Relations. Their research, "The Effect of the Web on
Undergraduate Citation
Behavior 1996-1999," has been reviewed and accepted for
publication in a
forthcoming issue of theJournal of the American Society for
Information
Science (JASIS). A preprint of the article is available at
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/pmd8/
.
The study, using term papers between 1996 and 1999, found that
after four
years, the URL reference cited in a term paper stood an 80
percent chance of
no longer existing. URL references stood more than a 50 percent
chance of
not existing after only six months.
The researchers also discovered a significant decrease in the
frequency of
scholarly resources cited. Book references dropped from 30
percent to 19
percent. Newspaper citations increased from 7 percent to 19
percent, and web
citations increased from 9 percent to 21 percent.
"We are seeing a dramatic move from the use of credible,
peer-reviewed
materials to popular and unfiltered information," says
Davis.
Universities with large library collections -- often a measure by
which
research universities are compared -- should be concerned if
students are no
longer taking the opportunity to use them, says Davis. Professors
should be
concerned that they are not exposing their students to academic
literature
in their field, he says.
The researchers noted that electronic access to information is
more
convenient for students, and this might be especially true for
those who
work on their papers the night before they are due. The
researchers say that
the Cornell library system, like many college libraries, has
increased the
number of scholarly electronic resources available to the
students and
faculty.
As a result of this study, Abowd requires at least one
professional journal
citation in a research paper's bibliography, and if an Internet
link is
used, the link must be checked. But from a professor's
perspective, can web
citations undermine academic integrity?
"This is a very hard problem -- certifying the timeliness
and accuracy of
Internet citations. I do not expect my Economics 101 students to
bullet-proof all of their citations," says Abowd.
"Rather, I hope that they
will be able to learn from the experience of having their
citations checked
and from my expectation that they use certified professional
journals."
Davis and Cohen suggest that professors set guidelines for
acceptable
citations in course assignments. Also, they believe that
collegiate
libraries should create and maintain scholarly portals for
authoritative web
sites with a commitment to long-term access and instruct students
on how to
critically evaluate resources.
"In the world of academic scholarship, references form a
link to original
works, give credit to original ideas and form a network of
connections to
related documents," says Davis. "A viable link --
whether in print or
electronic form -- is absolutely necessary in order to preserve
scholarly
communication. Without citations that pass the test of time, we
have no way
to proceed forward because we can no longer see the past."
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