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Re: The quality of discussion



Dean wrote:
<snip>
As I read the list yesterday, I too, at first, was concerned about the
amount of traffic and crisis notes, thinking they did not belong on the
list.   BUT ... my assistant and I are located in the basement of the
Library ... no windows, etc.      And like others on the list, sometimes
the only way to learn of "outside" events is through the listserv.
<snip>


the following portion from a WSJournal article today I think points out why.
<snip>
Internet Was Critical For Worried Friends
By SCOTT THURM

When Robert Williamson heard of the apparent terrorist attacks, he feared
for two friends in New York. The 38-year-old account executive for a
Norfolk, Va., newspaper tried three or four phone numbers for each friend,
but he heard only busy signals, recordings and dead air.
Then he tried e-mailing his loved ones, as well as a wider circle of friends
who might have heard from the two women. Within a few hours, both e-mailed
that they were unharmed. "The sense of relief was overwhelming," said Mr.
Williamson, looking at pictures of the two women that adorn his cubicle.
As Mr. Williamson and others learned, the Internet proved the most reliable
way to communicate, as the phone system sagged from severed lines and an
extraordinary volume of calls. Corporate executives used e-mail to find
employees across town or across the country. Outside the World Trade Center,
strangers whose cellphones didn't work lent each other Blackberry pagers to
send messages to loved ones.
The Internet "turns out to be more reliable than the phone system," said
Charles Kline, a Silicon Valley consultant. As a graduate student at the
University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969, Mr. Kline helped design the
network that became the Internet and participated in some of the first
transmissions.
The Internet's resilience is a legacy of design decisions Mr. Kline and his
colleagues made in the late 1960s, on what was then called Arpanet, after
the Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency, which funded the
effort to link universities and think tanks.
To complete a phone call, a physical circuit, a series of copper wires, must
be opened -- and kept open -- between the two phones. The Internet, by
contrast, works by breaking up e-mails, Web sites and other computer traffic
into pieces called packets, which are sent out on the network independently.
The packets can travel a variety of routes and then are reassembled at their
destination. E-mails are particularly resilient, because e-mail programs
repeatedly try to contact the destination computer until they succeed, Mr.
Kline said.
Packet-switching can make the Internet unreliable for phone calls, because
sounds have to arrive in a precise order and without delay. But Tuesday, the
Internet was a "godsend" for Michelle Peluso, chief executive of online
travel agency Site59 Inc., whose offices are about three blocks from the
World Trade Center area.
Ms. Peluso was on her way out of her Greenwich Village apartment when she
heard about the attacks, so she retreated. She found one employee at work on
a cellphone and ordered the office evacuated, then she set out to contact
her 65 other employees via the Internet. Within 90 minutes, she had found
all but two through e-mail or instant-messaging programs. With her cellphone
useless and her ordinary phone operating intermittently, Ms. Peluso also
found employees traveling in Louisiana and Kentucky via the Web.
Internet operators said they saw a surge in traffic as computer users
flocked to news sites for updates and turned to e-mail and instant-messaging
services to replace telephones. An AT&T Corp. spokeswoman said traffic on
its Internet backbone doubled. A Yahoo Inc. spokeswoman also said use of its
instant-messaging service surged.
Some news Web sites were almost impossible to reach for several hours
because of heavy traffic, according to Keynote Systems, which monitors Web
performance. Search engine Google at one point directed news seekers to get
off the computer and turn on radio or television. Computer users who wanted
to donate blood found the Red Cross site difficult to reach. But a Keynote
spokeswoman said the company didn't see "any significant problems" on the
Internet backbone.
<snip>

Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
Manager, Records Management Group
Woodside Summit Group Inc
Midlothian, Virginia
Office: 804-744-1247 x23
Fax: 804-744-4947
mailto:peter.kurilecz@woodsidesummitgroup.com

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