Samuel Bradford

Dear Sam,

Here's a comment I made today about search functions inside our network . Please have a look. It might help explain, in part, why we see so little activity within the Research Cooperative, despite all my attempts to provide channels for communication between all our members.

Dear Sam,

We should be out of our depth, if we want to discover new things.

My son is trying to be a yogi tonight, starting with balancing on a ball, and then moving on ball, rolling it with his feet. Now he is levitating with his legs crossed.
I took away his computer today, and this is the result!

Here is a question you could consider as a writing topic: Is it possible to recognise unseen gaping holes in knowledge by looking for negative search results in Google?

This is deep water.

If you restrict this to the New Zealand context, what kinds of knowledge would you consider important, for any reason, and can you find any gaping holes?

This is relatively shallow water.

Today I revisited a paper in which an anthropologist discussed how anthropology may be able to recognise important areas of economics that economists cannot imagine existing. The author thinks that economists are too deeply embedded inside existing economic regimes and cannot poke their heads out to get a broader view of how human societies function.

I think Alan Bollard is where he is today because he tried living on a small island (not New Zealand) in a big ocean (the Pacific) and looked at economics with something like an anthropological eye.

I imagine that a musician could look at music research in New Zealand and see gaps in efforts by the small number of musicologists who work in the country.

Musicology is a large discipline and has many branches, so there is much to study, even if the number of people producing music is not large, in absolute terms.

A musician who can see gaps might be able to help researchers (and research journal editors) discover new priorities for their unavoidably limited efforts.

I guess I have asked two kinds of question here:

1. Abstract: Is it possible to recognise unseen gaping holes in knowledge by looking for negative search results in Google, without using keywords that relate to specific existing subjects?

2. Concrete: Is it possible to recognise unseen gaping holes in music knowledge in New Zealand by looking for negative search results in Google, using keywords that relate to specific existing subjects??

If you can give a positive answer to the first question, is there a general method that can be applied to the second question?

Perhaps I am asking if a machine can have imagination, even if it does not have consciousness or prior knowledge.

OK. This is all too much for a short blog story.

Please just see what you can do with any of these questions as a starting point.

The only rule is that the resulting story should somehow relate to music, research, and research communication, in 400 to 1600 words. Properly sourced illustrations can also be used.

I do not expect you to give this much time, for the price offered (the copyright will be yours). I am more interested in where the story goes, stylistically and in terms of content.

Deadline: when it is done, if it is done. Make it your own deadline.

Dear Sam,

Happy New Year from freezing Kyoto. My prints for Year of the Dragon (dragon fruit and dragoneye fruit)

If you are interested in earning some pocket money by blogging... I can offer you something to help enliven the Research Cooperative in various ways. Please let me know, any time.

Thanks, Peter

Dear Sam,

Here is a website your might have fun with...

PhilPapers: Online Research in Philosophy

A citation index of Philosophy containing thousands of bibliographies.

P.