Sunday, February 06, 2005

Fun with Search Engines: or, what cred does the ISCID have?




While I was waiting for folks over here to wake up, I went over to Panda's Thumb, and came across a link to the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design.

They purport to be:

a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. The society provides a forum for formulating, testing, and disseminating research on complex systems through critique, peer review, and publication. Its aim is to pursue the theoretical development, empirical application, and philosophical implications of information- and design-theoretic concepts for complex systems.


Well, with such an august body like that, they have to have some folks who've been around the IEEE Information Theory Society, right?

Well, not exactly...they do seem to have a Microwave oscillator expert...but there is not a single Information Theorist in the bunch. No published papers in Information Theory. And I can tell you this, because as an IEEE member, I can search through the peer-reviewed publications for any or all of these "authors" who claim to be mathematicians, or engineers. And that's the result, unless there is some possibility that I missed something.

So, these clowns who are studying "information" and "complexity" and "testing" "apart from materialism" don't seem to have any credentials in the field they claim to be doing research.

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