(charness@psy.fsu.edu)
As one moderately experienced novice on the internet, let me try to outline some of the opportunities that I believe could help psychologists enormously in their role as researchers. More and more frequently, most of you will be working on a PC in your office which has an ethernet card in it. That card is your link to your campus backbone network, and among the machines on the network is one or more host machines that link up to other host machines around the world, usually through a high-speed connection. Most campuses and businesses also have their own local networks, usually ethernet-based. Some of you may still need to go to a terminal room and use a machine that has a dedicated link to the Internet to use E-MAIL. Or you need to use a modem and a telephone line to log into a machine that handles mail.
THE INTERNET
The Internet is a world-wide network of computer networks, all marching along to the tune of TCP-IP, (Transfer Control Protocol-Internet Protocol) a protocol for passing messages. Most of you use the Internet already when you exchange electronic mail (e-mail), one of the first uses of the Internet, and still by far the most popular use. As you probably know, Cameron Camp has been maintaining a list of email addresses for those with interests in aging for Division 20. There are other formal LISTSERV groups out there that supply messages concerning humanities and aging, and cross-cultural aging. I used the latter to make an important contact in Russia who is helping me with some chess and aging research. Just got the first data by e-mail a few minutes ago.
FTP
An important tool is available for uploading and downloading files (such as programs and documents) that people make available on local servers, usually through a protocol known as FTP (file transfer protocol). Those with direct access to the internet through ethernet links and their PC can connect to other computers around the world to upload and download files. Many server machines support ANONYMOUS FTP, allowing you to logon to their computer anonymously, sending your account address as the password. Then you have the ability to browse their machines for files that you want. There are famous sites on the Internet (e.g., CICA, in the USA) that house enormous stores of PUBLIC DOMAIN SOFTWARE (e.g., program files for PC, MacIntosh, and Unix users) that you can download and try before registering. Many computer and peripheral manufacturers have sites for the latest software updates, such as ATI for software drivers for their graphics cards, which you can access for free.
Other sites demand passwords for access. For instance, I have set up a machine in my old lab at the University of Waterloo as an FTP server. (It is a 486 machine running LanWorkplace programs for FTP. My grad student there can work away at other tasks while I get those files, since the server runs under Windows.) I can access files on that machine from my office computer here at Florida State University. I have worked out similar arrangements with colleagues in Berlin for transferring data files from their server.
Most of you have a departmental machine that handles your email links to the outside world running UNIX as the operating system. Most UNIX machines can be set up to support FTP transfers. Here at Florida State University, one of our departmental machines runs an anonymous FTP service that permits you to dump a file here or pick one up.
For those who don't have FTP access, it is also possible to transfer binary files (non-text files, such as formatted word processing documents, spreadsheets, and programs) via e-mail, if your e-mail service supports document attachments (usually encoding them with binhex for Macintosh, MIME for PCs). The old-fashioned way to do this was with UUENCODE and UUDECODE, two Unix programs ported to other operating systems such as PC and Macintosh. The programs convert binary files to text form, then you could put them into your e-mail message as text, and the receiver could cut out the relevant portion and use the decode program to transform them back to binary files.
NEWSGROUPS
The Unix world (the first denizens of the internet) created special e-mail lists, called LISTSERV groups, that would automatically send e-mail to all those that subscribe to the mailing list. The problem here is that your mailbox can be cluttered up with unwanted e-mail messages -- a real nuisance. So, newsgroups formed that require you to subscribe to the newsgroup and use your news reader program to pick the messages you want to read, rather than forwarding all the messages at once. Newsgroups on the Internet now number in the thousands. You can use dedicated newsreaders to browse through the topics: intel chips, microsoft windows programs, sports, sex, psychology, chess, items for sale, etc. (I was lucky to have sold my home in Waterloo through a newsgroup posting. It certainly saved a bundle on realtor commissions.) Most newsgroups have little information and a lot of noise (nasty "posts" called "flaming"), but occasionally there are useful nuggets to be mined. (Lots of opinions flying around these days on the psychology newsgroup (sci.psychology) about The Bell Curve.) Some newsgroups are moderated (censored) but most are uncensored and anyone can "post" to them. Reading them can be a great time-waster if you are not careful.
GOPHER
One of the problems faced by many organizations is how to provide information electronically. Several protocols have been worked out. The most popular one for a while was GOPHER originating out of the University of Minnesota. Many universities have GOPHER servers for posting information about the university and allowing GOPHER programs to access that information from other sites around the world.
WORLD WIDE WEB
By far the most popular protocol these days for posting information is HTML (hypertext mark-up language) for use by programs known as browsers of the World Wide Web (WWW). The advantage to WWW is that it allows the posting of complex documents that contain both graphics and text information. HTML also supports more exotic information: sound files, animations, movies, but these tend to create very large files that move slowly across the Internet. Many of you who have experimented with WWW browsers will know how slowly big graphics move.
There are several free (not even shareware, but freeware) programs for browsing WWW. The first popular program in the field was MOSAIC. A group of MOSAIC programmers split off and formed their own company and now distribute an even better browser, NETSCAPE. It also has a newsgroup reader included in it, e-mail capabilities, and ftp capabilities. The 1.0N version is available for free by FTP (yes, that interchange protocol) from
ftp://ftp.mcom.com/netscape/
Netscape, like Mosaic, comes in different flavors (PC, Mac). If you have FTP capabilities, you can download it yourself. You will probably need to seek help from your departmental computer guru to set it up. To use it, you will need an ethernet card and knowledge about the names of the various servers on campus (ip addresses) that support access to the Internet.
Many, many government (e.g. the Census Bureau, the White House), university, commercial (Microsoft, IBM, Apple), and even individuals are setting up WWW pages to provide information. For instance, I used the census bureau page to get recent population statistics for overheads for my aging course this term. We have a page for the Psychology Dept under construction here. The nice thing about a browser like Netscape, is that it uses a point and click interface. (Windows, OS-2, Macintosh operating systems all provide support for pointing devices now.) So, if you open a location (a URL, or Universal Resource Locator, site) that has a WWW page, up will come a nicely formatted document, often containing graphics. You point at a highlighted piece of
text and you are automatically transferred to another part of the document, a different document, or a document at another site on the internet. The highlighted item indicates a hypertext link. You can also automatically download a file that has the correct link type if your browser properly supports ftp transfers. Further, many browsers support forms. On some sites, you can fill out a questionnaire online, or a message box.
For those who have WWW browsers such as Netscape or Mosaic, try the following for Psychology-relevant sites:
http://matia.stanford.edu/cogsci/org.html#apa (APA listed services on this page)
http://psych.hanover.edu/APS/ (APS home page)
http://matia.stanford.edu/cogsci/journals.html#psycoloquy (An electronic psych journal)
http://www.psy.fsu.edu (Florida State University Psychology Department; I couldn't resist)
As you will find out by browsing the links at each page, many pages are
interconnected. The point and click interface makes it very easy to "surf"
the Internet.
My DREAM
What the WWW makes possible is individual publishing of complex documents that are elegantly formatted for the viewer. Fairly soon many word processors will enable you to save a file in HTML format. (Microsoft claims that at the end of January they will place an "add-in program" for creating such documents for Word for Windows on their ftp site.) You can then arrange to put your file on a server. In other words, as you prepare your documents electronically in the usual way for submission to academic journals, you will also, with very little extra work, be able to prepare them for WWW format. Plus, you can also include your datasets for people to access via a link from your article. In short, some day, we should be able to browse the Internet for journal articles and have the reference section contain links that enable you to read the references, and possibly get access to the dataset as well!
That day is now, technically. In fact, for those of you whose instititutions permit SLIP or PPP access to the internet from modems, you can even do all these things from the comfort of your home office. (Though a 14,400 baud modem connection is not always pleasant for Netscape. Your phone and cable companies will eventually be offering much higher speed connections. Pilot projects are underway that give you near ethernet card connection speeds.)
The ACM (computer scientists' version of APA) is in the midst of working out the arrangements for electronic publishing in their professional group. (See: http://info.acm.org/pubs/author_guide_cr.txt ) We should do the same. All we need to do is re-arrange copyright permissions to suit scientists and
publishers.
I've always wondered why the purveyors of information collect much more than the producers. It made sense when typesetting and distribution was costly and difficult, but not any more. Incidentally, things are not going well on that front, with publishers trying to restrict fair use practices of copyright rather severely for electronic publishing. But, that it the topic of another column.
I have approached APA and APS (by e-mail, in December 1994) to allow me to try an experimental publication of some materials at the Florida State University Psychology Department server. No response yet from APA. I have to say, frankly, that this trend is not necessarily in the interest of APA which derives a fair amount of revenue from journals and other publications. Whether it is in the interest of the scientists and researchers who belong to APA is another matter. There are undoubtedly ways to protect both sets of interests.
For instance, Netscape is embedding encryption (encoding) techniques that will make it possible for you to provide an information page provider with your credit card in a secure fashion, so that when you find something you want to download, you are billed a small sum to access it. There is no reason why our professional organizations shouldn't want to jump on that bandwagon and hopefully, make the charge less per article than copying it or even sending for reprints.
An attractive feature of the Internet is its grassroots flavor. You can start a newsgroup (some rules apply), a WWW page, e-mail anyone, etc. Although the Internet started out as a US defence department project to link a small set of military and university establishments together, today it involves 1000s of computers and some 20 million users. Although there are efforts to commercialize the Net (as it is known), research use can still flourish alongside commercial use. It is up to us to lobby our professional organizations to support expansions in ways that will help us as scientists. Let your professional organization representatives (APA, APS, etc.) know your wishes, if you think this Dream is worth fulfilling.
To direct comments about the information contained in these pages, please write to marsiske@ufl.edu