On Thu, 28 Nov 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote:
That said a few things should be kept in mind with academic work. The time from when work is done until it appears in publication is quite legthy, especially when peer reviewed (the Grubesic et al article was peer reviewed). I saw his paper presented in the Fall of 2001, which means he probably did the research in the spring of 2001, and the latest data available was Boardwatch 2000. so, you end with a lag in Internet time that seems horrendous. One of the problems with
The paper would have the same problems in 2000. It starts with bad assumptions. Age doesn't improve bad assumptions. Suppose I wrote an academic paper about the design of the Federal Reserve Banking System. After carefull analysis of the map at http://www.federalreserve.gov/otherfrb.htm (street addresses available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/fraddress.htm) I write a fully footnoted paper that the Federal Reserve system is vulnerable to the destruction of the board in Washington DC and twelve banks in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas and San Francisco. The US banking system would collapse, ATMs would stop, paychecks wouldn't get cashed, checks couldn't be cleared, etc. I would miss Alan Greenspan, but that's not how the US banking system works. The Federal Reserve system does have vulnerabilities. So does the Internet (and the post office, and the telephone network, and ...) But misunderstanding the risks and vulnerabilities is worse because it diverts resources away from the real ones.