Another example of how journalists can learn from other disciplines comes to the surface in the form of an LA Press Club meeting Nov. 9.



“Digging deep: What reporters can learn from and about private investigators,” is the topic, and the panel of speakers, though large, seems rich with potential.

Here at the IAJ we also value the well done blog, “PI News Link,” run by Tamara Thompson.  Check it out; enter it in your blog harvester.

We're all awash in data, so finding the significant bits and bytes that can lead to information is a maddening process.



Jon Burke, writing in the
November 2, 2005 edition of
MIT's Technology Review, presents some web-based technological options.  See “Finding Signals in the Noise.”






We were impressed by a new product/site called “Memeorandum,” but Burke points out a handful of alternatives.



Excerpt:

“Few would dispute that we live in an age of
information overload. In the last few years alone, blogs have increased
the torrent of information each day to unmanageable levels.  This
would explain, then, why a corresponding torrent of startups has
surfaced recently to help us filter, manage, and control this flood of
information. Some rely on insightful algorithms that understand
popularity to filter the news, while others rely on the preferences of
readers.

For example, Digg
is a San Francisco startup that ranks news items by letting people
choose which stories they like. It just landed $2.8 million in venture
capital from Omidyar Network, former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen,
and Greylock Partners. We also understand that a comparable site — Memeorandum — may close a round of financing shortly.

The concept of making users prioritize or create hierarchies for news is not new — Slashdot
has been doing it since 1997. But the latest generation of sites like
Digg and Memeorandum are showing that user-prioritized news is, indeed,
a powerful and easy way to drive traffic — in some cases to a site
created by a single employee with a lone server.”

Simulation
modeling is one of the four cornerstone areas of interest to the
IAJ.  It's a relatively new, and largely unknown, field that can
be of great advantage to journalists if we can take the time to learn
how it works and then how we can apply it to our field.  The best
resource to date for journalists is the J-Lab, (http://www.j-lab.org/) at the University of Maryland.

=============================================
The
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
(http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk) published issue 4 of Volume 8 on 31
October 2005.



JASSS is an electronic, refereed journal devoted
to the exploration and understanding of social processes by means of
computer simulation.   It is freely available, with no
subscription.

=================



This issue is our largest
ever, with 12 peer-reviewed articles, eight of them forming a special
section on Epistemological Perspectives, edited by Ulrich Frank and
Klaus Troitzsch.



If you would like to volunteer as a referee and have
published at least one refereed article in the academic literature, you
may do so by completing the form at http://www.epress.ac.uk/JASSS/webforms/new_referee.php