Scientology vs. the Internet pt. 2

You can hardly hide from Tom Cruise these days. The famous actor's couch-jumping enthusiasm for his new fiancee, his vociferous hatred of psychiatry and especially his fanatical devotion to his religion, Scientology, have made him a prime candidate for Internet satire. But, would-be satirizers are learning that when you mess with Tom, you mess with the entire organization that's behind him, and Scientology isn't an organization that has much of a tolerance for satire.

In a previous NN article (all the way back in 2002), I reported on some of the Internet-related run-ins Scientology has had with its detractors, everything from a conflict with Google over the placement of the church's official web site in Google results lists (Scientology was mad because an anti-Scientology site would often come up at the top of the list, rather than the organization's official site), to conflicts over the posting of Scientology-copyrighted scripture on unauthorized websites. At one point, Scientology even required its adherents to use special web filters so that they wouldn't encounter any of the many anti-Scientology sites out there.

This latest episode in Scientology vs. the Web involves a web site called ScienTOMogy.info. This New-Zealand based site reports on Cruise's latest doings as a way of "EXPOSING TOM CRUISE'S MORONIC CRUSADE TO PROMOTE THE CULT, CHURCH OF $CIENTOLOGY" (screaming caps, satiric cross-out, and dollar sign in the original). The site is loaded with disclaimers and is so ugly and amateurish looking (perhaps on purpose) that no one could mistake it for the real Scientlogy official site, yet Scientology's lawyers claim that the domain name is confusingly similar to ones that they've registered. The ScienTOMogy people are calling Scientology's lawsuit bluff and say they'll see 'em in court.

Read more on this developing controversy here.

Meanwhile, for those who enjoy celebrity train wrecks, there's a lot of TomKat material out there that's better done than ScientTOMogy, anyway. For example, try www.tomcruiseisnuts.com .

UPDATE (3/11/06): It's not clear exactly what happened, but the scientomology web site has changed its name to passionofcruise.info. Looks like for all the tough talk, the scientomology people backed down.

Citation Muddle

Please note: this article is a little off-topic for NN, since it doesn't really deal with the internet. But it does deal with the world of information, and for that reason (and because the topic is interesting), I am including it anyway:

You probably haven't thought about "citation indexes" since library school, and maybe you didn't think about them too much even back then. Depending on when you graduated, maybe you didn't even use them. But, do remember the big multi-volume sets with ISI in big letters on their spines? They had titles like "Science Citation Index" and "Arts and Humanities Citation Index" and their purpose was to show you which scholarly journals cited which articles. You may even remember being told that citation patterns are a big part of the study of information dissemination, and that they even play a role in deciding who gets tenure at universities. Citation journal listings are also used in the computation of journal "impact factors" which determines which journals are "the best" (i.e. most prestigious to publish one's work in).

Well, even though we don't see much of them at public libraries, citation indexes are still around, and they are still playing a big role in the major life decisions of colleges and their faculties. Impact factors have become so important in academic life that reportedly scientists decide what studies to conduct, committees award grants, and as mentioned, tenure gets bestowed based on these numbers. The logic is that if your work is any good, it will be published in the "best" journals; conversely, if your journal is any good, it will publish only the "best" articles by the "best" researchers. Critics say that over-reliance on impact factors is "statistically dimwitted," but their warnings so far haven't decreased the impact factor's pervasive influence, according to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education..

The impact of "impact numbers," as CHE reports, is not limited to U.S. academic life. For example, in China, scientists get cash bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, and graduate students in physics at some universities must publish at least two articles in journals with a combined impact factor of 4 to get their Ph.D.'s (the higher the impact number, the better; the highest score is the ultraprestigious Nature with 32.128, and more than half of all science journals have an impact score of less than 1).

All this impact does lead some individuals and journals to try to beat the system. Some researchers repeatedly cite their own previous works . Some academic publishers try to boost their publications' impact scores by requiring potential authors to cite articles that appeared in their journals.

You can read all about the many and varied implications of the "cult of the impact factor" in the CHE article cited above.