[cap-talk] Scholarship of P-1935

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 14:14 -0800, Jed Donnelley wrote:
> On 2/4/2008 11:07 AM, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> > IDA is a think tank whose job is to
> > produce position papers.
> 
> Hmmm.  There I think you go a bit far.  Just because a paper
> is published through something other than a university doesn't
> to me mean that it can't be "scholarly".

It is certainly feasible for IDA to undertake an adequate review
process. It is my impression that on other white papers they may have
done so. On this one, it appears that they did not.

> Independent of the above point, I'm also not sure the term
> "think tank" applies to the Institute for Defense Analysis.
> Just as with the NSA or the DOE labs or NASA sites or other
> government funded institutions, the IDA has a job to do.

Technically. IDA is an administrative entity overseeing three Federally
Funded Research and Development centers. They are clearly different from
Hoover, which as a political entity cannot use Federal research funding
for its purposes. I can't speak to ISI, SRI or RAND funding (no time to
hunt it down), but I have an itchy memory that ISI and SRI actually
*may* be funded similarly -- certainly they all compete for the same
pool of research funding. Neither PARC nor Bell Labs were think tanks in
any sense, so I'm not sure why you raised them.


shap