a few comments, mostly in response to the statements from person X, not you. (so, i suppose i should just write to that person instead of putting my thoughts here, huh? perhaps when we get back from ASIS...&T):

- as regards the statement "the tech courses at SILS aren't up to par with other technology or comp sci graduate programs", i would say that's as it should be. to continue this person's analogy. surgery depts don't have courses on scalpel design. they are not at the cutting edge of scalpel creation. that's not their job. those are just the tools they use. however, surgery schools do abound with courses in the use of these tools. (if you want to get down to it, surgery is a craft more than a field of study, anyway. it's almost entirely about tool use. all the medical research/information is just there to facilitate that tool use. does that make it any less valid?) every profession has it's tools and, thus, needs to train it's practitioners in their use. though that field is not responsible for the tools themselves, it is responsible for being innovative in the techniques of their use.

- of course, this really draws us back to the "big questions" issue. do all the trappings of a field constitute the essense of that field? are there some "practical" issues that that shouldn't necessarily be lumped in with that essense? as an academic, it's easy to ignore the logistical issues. it's easy to dismiss them as unimportant becasue they are not solely about ideas. but, what real purpose does academia serve for the human race if it's not working to define, describe, understand, and PROPOSE SOLUTIONS for the everyday issues the race is dealing with? or, to put it another way, what makes a "big question" big?

- some say that big questions are mostly concerned with theory...that big questions are answered primarily through reason...plus a little observation. to that point, the human race spent thousands of years trying to reason it's way into an understanding of the world. this includes plato, aristotle, and countless other philosophers and scientists. nowadays, science is based more on observation...on simply getting out into the field, playing around, and seeing what happens. i would argue that much of what we really KNOW about the world has been the result of just this kind of technique. (serendipitous discovery, as xy put it.) few fields can really be explored purely through reason, mathematics being the main one that comes to mind. consider that socrates was the father of what became the scientific method. he was one of the first people to really try to understand the world that he lived in outside of myth and superstition. his technique was simple: ask questions and observe.

damn. i didn't realize how worked up i had gotten about this. i guess i have a practical side that i just can't surpress. sorta makes sense, though. i AM the son of a brilliant electrical engineer who spent his whole life designing, building, and managing power plants throughout the US. as easy as it would have been for him to live in the world of ideas, i was raised with the idea that i should always consider how my actions and thoughts related to the lives of ordinary people.

One size fits all doesn't work very well (IMHO). So, I think that there is room for different approaches to research, teaching, or whatever. I think that we learn more when different people attack a problem from different points of view. In a resaerch project that I am involved in there are theoreticians, simulators, and experimentalists; There are some tensions about which is real science in this mix and certainly some status differences within the field, but the fact is that when these people cooperate the theory and practical implications both benefit. This is the essence of the idea of triangulation. Theory for what? Practice that is evidence-based and contributes to a theory of practice?