I remember The Javitz well because she was the last ship still in active service that had a fully carpeted galley. The carpet, badly stained and worn by nearly two decades of use, had been deemed a health risk and was scheduled to be removed in the fall of '87, but because of the ulterior motives of a smallish military appropriations auditor who's brother was the ship's captain, it remained there (and perhaps still remains there) well into it's third decade. Captain Bloom was often heard to remark, in his inimitable way, "that galley carpet needs to be either replaced or removed altogether." He did not to my knowledge ever say this to any one person directly, but would instead sheepishly hint at it during meals when his mumblings, by their very nature blaring on the side of incoherent grunting, would be quickly swollowed up by the deafening chatter of the feasting crew. His face would flush for a moment with the realization that he was in fact talking to himself and he would then return to his meal, or perhaps continue working on a model ship if he happened to be not in the mess hall but alone in his quarters on the lower deck at the time.

Of course given the situation, such grievances were not uncommon but this particular complaint was met inauspiciously by his superiors and he was dishonorably discharged in 1967 on account of an unrelated incident involving a Turkish whore he met on shore leave in Tahiti. I often thought about Captain Bloom, and what it might have been like to serve under him. Frustrating perhaps, but also exciting. The ratio of the amount of excitement generated by taking orders from a man of such extraordinary resolve and the frustration of not beining able to consistently understand those orders was difficult to assertain, but my best postulations would usually hover around a figure of of 7 to 4 (I might be willing to soften this a bit to 2 to 1 if I were explaining the situation to a very small child and needed to ralate such details in a more straightfoward manner, but only if the child was especially under developed mentaly, as the discrepency in no small way undermines the gravity of my approximation of my imagined experience).

Fighting alongside "Porcelain Bloom" in the flowering countryside of 1940's France was a recurring theme in a series of poems I wrote for The New Yorker in the years following the Gulf War. The poems, while never actually published, were exceptional and quite poetic, save for those written when I was feeling particularly obsequious towards the notion of urban development set against a suburban skyline; those poems dealt with socio-economics and the digging of vast underwater tunnel sytems and they did not rhyme.

Why The New Yorker they ever let Pauline Kael go is something I will never understand.

This was not the book I was looking for, but it is still worthy of buying if you have any interest at all in charting knowledge terrain and "knowing who knows". In honor of Eugene Garfield, arguably the most influential man in the sociology of knowledge in this century or any other, the book provides a wonderful collection of *methodological* articles about the bibliometrics and indicators associated with charting who quotes whom and what does it mean in terms of influence within and among nations, organizations, schools of thought, and individual cabals.

I was intrigued to find that the book, perhaps because it is so original and represents the first book-length collection of its kind, did not include an article on a topic near and dear to my heart, that is, developing algorithms to identify anomalies in citation such that one can weed out those who are citing one another simply to "beat the game." As citation analysis becomes a more mainstream means of measuring intellectual contributions (it is still not mainstream--too many otherwise talented intelligence community managers of analysts have no clue it exists), some form of citation validation and policing will be needed.

There are three other areas where I would say that this book is a vital and valuable foundation, and desperately in need of three distinct sequel publications:

First, we need to migrate the value of citation analysis to the Internet, not only to electronic journals but to citations of self-published papers on web sites as well as to informed observations in expert forums. Neither the classification schema nor the industry standards for making this possible exist today. I would go so far as to suggest that a new Internet standards committee dedicated to this specific issue should be created, immediately.

Second, an analagous situation exists with those experts who are not permitted to publish in the open literature, but who are very well known by virtue of their title, organizational affiliation, participation in conferences, or classified work revealed to a very few. As the core competency of government becomes the nurturing of national knowledge--not only in science and technology but also in all international as well as domestic matters--some form of citation analysis process must be developed that makes these experts (or if not expert, then influentials by virtue of their position at the international, national, state/provincial, or local levels) and their counterparts in non-governmental organizations (e.g. Red Cross, World Bank, elements of the United Nations) readily identifiable. The Internet, and the public availability of email communication pattern analysis information that does not intrude on the substantive privacy of electronic communications, may possible be helpful here.

Third, and finally, we come to the area of interest that originally led to my purchasing this book, which is that of actually identifying centers of excellence and "portals" into the entire range of published and unpublished knowledge on any given topic. Such a sequel publication must not only document, in an evolutionary or "living" way, who the top 100 people are across every social science and science topic, but also the top 25 institutions with deliberate distinctions between Asian, Americas, European, and African centers of excellence. The Institute of Scientic Information (ISI) has been unwilling to do this as an internal investment, and has not heard from enough governments and corporations to warrant its moving aggressively to create what I would regard as an extraordinarily valuable and relevant guide for all manner of investments and improvements in international, national, and state-based research and education. I would go so far as to say that such a guide, such a service of common concern, would go a very long way toward making possible extraordinary new means of leveraging distributed intellectual resources, lowering the cost of seminal research, and introducing new forms of transnational collaborative work.

Garfield, and citation analysis and all those who have built on Garfield's work, together represent the first mile in a hundred mile journey toward creating the "World Brain" that H.G. Wells, among a select few, has envisioned. There is much yet to be done.