The person who sent me the request for research findings has further specified what he wants to know. Saddened that all respondent to date have either shown off their "cleverness" or asked for further specification. Not one even tried to answer the question. Concomittantly, I am reading _I'm Feeling Lucky_ by Douglas Edwards: an insider's ethnography of the early Google days. A repeated thought is that the developers kept moving forward with partial procedures. PS: Anyone else old enuf to have the phrase "Douglas Edwards and the News" resonate? Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________ S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _______________________________________________________________________ Barry -- Thanks...I can make the request more formal, ie the impact on mood or affect (if any) measured today of the number of internet and text messages received in the last few days, compared with the impact on affect of the number of f2f encounters during the same time frame, controlling for appropriate factors such as age, gender, education and so on. It would be nice to remove people who contacted ego both ways...there must be a way to do this without making the questions unduly cumbersome... A repeated panel of course could help to clarify issues of causality, since presumably both mood and the number of recent contacts vary over time... Experience sampling as developed by the Chicago psychologist Csikszentmihalyi might specify the matter in terms of contacts within the last hour or two and its impact on current affect. It would be nice to know if somehow has already some this or something like this.

Why would a sociologist (or any scientist) be "saddened" by a request for clarification in favor of an off-the-cuff answer to a provocative but loaded question? I responded honestly-- it was a false comparison as I understood the question. The updated request from your friend is an entirely different question, which seems to validate the request for clarification. -coye ----- Coye Cheshire Associate Professor School of Information UC Berkeley Coye@ISchool.Berkeley.edu http://ischool.berkeley.edu/~coye On Oct 16, 2011, at 6:23 PM, Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca> wrote: > Saddened that all respondent to date have either shown off their "cleverness" or asked for further specification. Not one even tried to answer the question.