In the Beginning, there was Chaos. Can we blame an ASIS SIG or Chapter? Who cares?
And, who paid for this report? Was it the ASIS Publication Committee? Was it the JASIS Editorial Bored? No, we have uncovered that it was the Society for Extracurricular Research (SEX) - which is the organization which dares to ask, "Was JASIS as good for you as it was for me?" This is also the organization that proved that the famous German female doctor from a previous ASIS/SIG-CON session was wrong, there can be SEX in IS!
Dr. Chaos wishes to thank his fellow ASIS/SIG-CON Panelists, who all have some relationship to Syracuse University, for letting him participate on this panel - sort of noblesse oblige, don't you think?
A key issue is complexity. Algorithmically speaking, and we know that those JASIS readers sure have AlgoRITHM, does NP = P (yes, only when N = 1 - very inside joke). Is JASIS really hard to read? As Richard Dawson would say, "Survey says, 'No, 'cause it has really nice pictures' and great covers." As for global complexity, isn't this an implication that a globe, which is round, is not all that complex, so how can JASIS be complex?
Information, how is this different from data? From knowledge? And, what about wisdom? How about t[r]opical relevance (see papers by Carol, and Ras, Boysen, Straw, and Blue - another insider joke).
The CHAOS sample of JASIS readers is biased, because any reader of JASIS has to be biased - in favor of literacy and (artificial) intelligence. But, there is a test of a JASIS reader - note the visual below and take it yourself and see.
But, there is more to this test than meets the eye. For example, a JASIS reader does not ask, when told by his/her computer to "hit any key," where the 'any' key is on the computer keyboard. Moreover, a JASIS reader does NOT use Whiteout® to correct word processing errors. Finally, a JASIS reader does not pronounce ASIS as "as is!"
The use of statistics was encouraged, but the CHAOS study required the use of only safe SAS. Moreover, we used the Sessio Taurino, noted in the hallowed pages of our favorite journal by Wallace & Van Fleet ("Describing technological paradigm transitions: a methodological exploration", 48(2), 1997, pp. 184-7, our favorite journal), and the GAB (general area of badinage) technique. We made good use of the Karyotypically Recursive Adamantine Formalistic Tautology perversion. This was achieved by including the anomalous participant (the standard deviant). This participant is totally out of synchronization with the other participants, is incapable of hearing other participants, and is prone to engaging in lengthy, presumably humorous discourses, which are, at best, ancillary to the general thrust of the ST methodology.
We pause now to deny a vicious rumor that the picture below is indicative of how the JASIS editor selects new Editorial Bored members.
67% of the JASIS readership want a foldout of the month
33% fear that the current editor of JASIS will be the first foldout and so definitely vote NO!
1% want to know what a foldout is
18% want to know if JASIS is a breakfast serial
67% want more sex and 49% want more violence in JASIS, while 89% want more of both
2% think that the pages of JASIS are worthy of being made into a movie, with Tom Selleck playing the current editor and Michelle Pfeiffer as the love interest (some rumors will not be denied by the CHAOS survey staff).
16.34925768%, more or less, want more articles on fuzzy sets; in fact, 0.34925768% feel that their sets are already fuzzy and/or rough enough
16% ask if fuzzy thinking is why JASIS is JASIS (check out the current Editorial Bored)
A vast plurality asks if the Schamber law of AI is true, that logic is just a lot of Boole.
14.5% noticed that JASIS is no longer spineless.
74.5% admired JASIS contributions to serials cataloging - with such activities as changing the name of the journal for a month (titular colonicity for an all-too-brief interlude) and the infamous ASIS/SIG-CON issue) - giving us runner-up status for the Snake-in-the-Grass Award from Title Changes.
43.9% requested a new service, where the publisher would agree under ASIS/SIG-CON auspices to help junior faculty who need publications to insure success when coming up for promotion and tenure. CHAOS has a journal for you (JASIS, you fools)! For a small, but reasonable (given the seriousness of that this merits) fee (to be split between the publisher, the current editor, and Llewellyn C. Puppybreath III - founder of SIG-CON), we guarantee publication in the top journal in the field (JASIS, you fools). Moreover, we will circulate all articles of this genre among the fee-paying authors, so that they can cite each other, adding to the citation counts for each author. Nevertheless (thank you Marcia Bates), this will insure a smooth flow of articles, as well as cash.
And, CHAOS would not be complete without noting that only one person (a fraction of a percent) was found who reads the entire issues of JASIS cover to cover. What is worse, that person writes the column on what is in each issue, and he gets paid for it! Subscribers, on the other hand, can read the entire issue for free, once they have joined ASIS. Thus, one can easily see that, as we say in the South, JASIS Saves!
A special study was done by querying an electronic database:
| a;sldj;ljaf |
?c 1 and 3
?c 2 and 4
? c 1 and 4
?c 2 and 3 Tefko in IPM
|
There is a dead heat in cross-publications
JASIS accepts 33% more of Kraft's papers than does IPM
JASIS leads in editorial chutzpah (chubris) -
45% of Kraft papers in JASIS
22% of Tefko papers in IPM
Tefko has won the JASIS Best Paper Award, BUT Kraft has never won the Best
IPM Award - CHAOS claims prejudice is at work!
Chaos wonders: is JASIS too Krafty? And, what about LQ and LISR?
Finally, CHAOS wonders why Kraft has never won the ASIS/SIG-CON Award of Merit, after publishing the "titular colonicity" article, generating more SIG-CON research than any other work.
So, you think you want to be a guest editor for a JASIS Perspectives or Special Topic Issue? To qualify, you must answer these simple questions to the current editor's complete satisfaction:
Why do "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing?
Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing?
Why does "cleave" mean both to split apart and to stick together?
Why isn't "phonetic" spelled the way it sounds?
Why isn't "palindrome" spelled the same way backwards?
Why is it so hard to remember how to spell "mnemonic"?
Why doesn't "onomatopoeia" sound like what it is?
What is another word for "thesaurus"?
If you keep trying to prove Murphy's Law, will something always go wrong?
If "pro" is the opposite of "con", is "progress" the opposite of "Congress"?
If you are in a car going at the speed of light, what will happen when you turn on the headlights?
Can you imagine a world with no hypothetical situations?
CHAOS has uncovered the latest sample text of the new JASIS rejection letter, albeit seldom ever seen:
"We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to ever consider publishing any work of a lower standard. And, it is unthinkable that in the next millenium we shall see the equal to your paper. Thus, to our regret, we are compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our shortsightedness and timidity."
Moreover, CHAOS has uncovered fragments of a Letter to the Editor of JASIS that accompanied a revised manuscript:
"Enclosed is our latest version, i.e., re-re-re-revised version of our paper, control number (fragment unreadable here). Choke on it. We have again changed the d*mn thing from start to finish. Hopefully, we have satisfied your blood lust, along with your killer referees who surely must have satisfied their sexual frustrations and repressed personalities on this poor paper. Just curious, are you and they, misanthropic psychopaths all, allowed out at night, or are they too busy clubbing baby seals and mugging helpless cripples?
"We are not sure about how to respond to reviewer C, who suggests that our maternal ancestries are from another species. However, we did respond to his/her (its?) request to shorten the paper by narrowing the margins and reducing the font size - no doubt this will make the paper much better. It is our hope that this reviewer's heritage will become the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes.
"And, we did add the thirty-nine references reviewer B wanted, all by the same author, including one that looked like a high school essay on sexual deviancy in the seven banded armadillo, although we still question its relevance to a paper on fuzzy retrieval. Note that these references were added in a section on 'review of irrelevant literature.' In this section, we also addressed the asinine comments of the other referees.
"We hope you will be pleased with this final revision. If not, do not start your car without looking under the hood first, you unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. However, if the paper is accepted, we wish to thank you for your scholarly insights. In order to repay you, could we volunteer to review papers for you in the future, perhaps those by some of your reviewers?"
CHAOS has come up with a general theory, based on the results of the CHAOS study. This theory can be expressed as the three definitions below, which are necessary (if not sufficient):
Information Scientist - a person in a dark room looking for a black cat!
Digital Librarian - a person in a dark room looking for a black cat where there is no cat!
JASIS Author - a person in a dark room looking for a black cat where there is no cat, but who is occasionally overhead as saying "I've got it! I've got it!"