Imsology

SIMS - 1st "S" + ology = Imsology.

Geoff Nunberg, co-prof. in my QofI class, used this term today in his lecture and I can only imagine that it means "the study of information management and systems".

I like it. I guess I'm an imsologist.

Here at SIMS, we've been struggling with having such a diverse body of interests under one roof... when people ask us, "What is SIMS?" the best we can do is point to Anno's description of SIMS' mission. When someone asks me, "What do you study?" it's very hard to answer without boring them to death with a paragraph.

I will now say I'm an imsologist studying imsology. Word.

UPDATE [2004-11-21 10:19:02]: As Doug noted, I screwed up the link above for "Anno's description of SIMS' mission"... however, I did it in such an interesting, braindead blogger sort of way. Check it out... the link I pointed to was:

http://sims/about/mission.html

Why, that's not even a valid URL, you say? No, it doesn't appear to be. If I load this in Firefox, it's interpreted as an "I'm feeling lucky" (IFL) search on Google and it goes to the EA SIMS site:

http://thesims.ea.com/

Other browsers do other things with this URL. Safari just displays an error that it can't find the 'sims' server. Internet Explorer seems to redirect me to:

http://sims.net/errors/errorclick.html

So how did I come to enter such a goofy, inconsistent URL into my post? I suppose, being on the local SIMS network, entering http://sims/ goes to our root webserver, http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/ .

I had thought that the great thing about the imsology meme was that it wouldn't be confused with the overloading of the SIMS brand. Oh well.