I agree with the central tenet of this article that academics should be seeking a wider audience for their thoughts. We need people thinking and explaining things and giving a variety of views.

However a problem with "everyone" blogging is having the time to read the blogs.

The advantages of traditional academic journals is that they force individuals to think hard and long before writing, they also force upon the publisher some effort to ensure that what is written is worth reading. The disadvantage is that their audience is restricted and to the currency of the information.

Most of us have access to far too much information and not enough time to read let alone understand it. We need someone to point us to topics of interest and to items worth reading.

Onlineopinion is an excellent example of how we can get the thoughts of not only academics but everyone into the public domain quickly and where the articles have been read and edited.

I use Google news updates on particular topics and get an email each day pointing me to any news items on a given area defined by a set of key words.

I subscribe to Crikey.com.au to give me a daily summary of Australian news.

I subscribe to other industry specific newsletters and to traditional media offerings like the Economist summaries.

In 1996 I started what would now be called a blog which evolved from being my thoughts about a subject to being a summary of websites (and hence other people's thoughts) about a subject - in our case on topics related to education and technology. Each fortnight we summarise websites that cover the chosen topic. This week's is on "Sharing photographs and Imagery" with an emphasis on education uses. Find us at http://m.fasfind.com/wwwtools.

The point of this comment is that it gives examples of how to reduce information overload and to help us find blog entries that might be of interest.

I would be most interested in hearing other ways that people have found to reduce the noise and increase the information.

Part One

Ev, thanks for the compliments, as well as informing what Blogs are all about. As a matter of fact, I have accused our Onliners of sniping at each other too much, without really helping to solve the really critical socio-political situations we have today in our world. By social I mean because there is so much political and media spin these days, it seems much of what we learn in good study books might be being spoilt by blogging.

Though still a liberal Christian, I must say I often go back to Socrates, dwelling on his phrase - “Out with the Gods and in with the Good”, which helps to mean we should take a good look at our religous faiths and find where they have broken down, both churches and government schools searching and teaching accordingly.

For example, one part which is only read in university libaries, deals with the life of St Thomas Aquinas, especially with the period when he accepted the teachings of the French monk Peter Abelard, who had after accepting certain Aristotelian readings from Arab scholars, had drawn up his “Search for Enquiry” which put him on the outer with the Holy Church - because to enquire or to reason, especially as regards Christianity, was an offence against Holy Scripture or faith.

It moved me so greatly, that St Thomas Aquinas did become intensely interested in something pagan, having the insight to realise
as Socrates and later Aristotle comprehended that in this earthly world, even the deepest faith needs to be tempered with reason

It is so interesting that hundreds of years later, Immanuel Kant, concluded the above also, although still believing deeply in Christianity when he wrote the Path to Perpetual Peace, which certainly has been abused in more modern times by humanity’s natural greed, which even Adam Smith had written about when he said that because his idea of the free market relied on competition, or on human greed to get along, there always had to be areas of government on the watch to preserve what we might now call a fair deal.

Finally, though it may be historical researchers going too far, there have been reports that those Middle Age travelling Muslim scholars not only helped Christianity lift itself out of the Dark Ages, but also helped set the scene for modernity and democracy as we know it. Indeed, some researchers go on to say that unfortunately, Islam is going through its own Dark Ages, possibly needing to look back to its own interest in Greek or Socratic philosophy, when many of those whom Mahomet converted to Islam, had been greatly influenced by the campaigns of Alexander the Great, who himself had been a student of Aristotle.

Hope I haven’t bored you, Ev, but the above studies have hung in my aged mind ever since I learnt them, encouraged by the Murdoch School of Humanities, while taking classes in philosophical topics with the Mandurah University of the Third Age in WA.

George C, WA - Bushbre

A race to the bottom. Whenever academic mentions other academics Ivory Towers it generally means he/she is unable to sustain the augment with his/her peers. So they try the new technic which is to try sway public opinion. This methodology is used by Global warming deniers, creationist and other fringe groups. Oh and Lawyers of course but no one notices that anymore because lawyers opinions are bought and sold. As long as you’ve got money to pay you’ll finder a lawyer willing to press your agument no matter what it is..

As yet another freelancer in medico-scientific arenas, the possibility that academics with interesting, in the popular sense, research awaiting journal publication could let fly in a blog prior is exciting. Spilling the beans before the learned journal has cost me a bit in threatened writs believe me, so the thought that you could use a bloggers defence is intriguing. I wonder how the defamation lawyers would regard that? Or would it mean a bit of a retreat on the part of the researcher. Learned journals don't like the idea of their author 'publishing' elsewhere after all.

Bushbred,

I find that topic interesting. Sorry I'm only replying quickly here. Here's an excerpt from a book that might interest you, by one of the world's leading Fuzzy Logic experts, Bart Kosko. (His homepage at the University of Southern California: http://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/)

From the first chapter of Part 1 - 'The Fuzzy Princple':

'This faith in the black and white, this Bivalence, reaches back in the West at least to the ancient Greeks. Democritus reduced the universe to atoms and void. Plato filled his world with the pure forms of redness and rightness and triangularity. Aristotle took time off from training his pupil Alexander the Great to write down what he felt were the black-and-white laws of logic, laws that scientists and mathemeticians still use to describe the 'grey' universe.

Aristotle's binary logic came down to one law: A or not-A. Either this or not this. The sky is blue or not blue. It can't be both blue and not blue. It can't be A AND not-A. Aristotle's 'law' defined what was philosophically correct for over two thousand years.

The binary faith has always faced doubt. It has always led to it's own critical response, a sort of logical and philosophical underground. The Buddha lived in India five centuries before Jesus and almost two centuries before Aristotle. The first step in his belief system was to break through the black-and-white world of words, pierce the bivalent veil and see the world as it is, see it filled with 'contradictions', with things and not-things, with roses that are both red and not red, with A and not-A.

You find this fuzzy or grey theme in Eastern belief systems old and new, from Lao-tze's Taoism to the modern Zen in Japan. Either-or versus contradiction. A OR not-A versus A AND not-A. Aristotle versus the Buddha.'

To read the first 3 pages of Chapter 1 - 'Shades of Grey', click on this link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/078688021X/ref=sib_fs_top/102-2207782-6797740?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00O&checkSum=LCJM3DMi11FsExV%2Baojqou3NmL2jeKztaUliLpDalQQ%3D#reader-page

Also George, you may send me an email if you wish to discuss any topics in more detail:

quasar3c279@yahoo.com

Regards,

Ev.