Hey, I knew it was you...

I recently submitted an article for review with a scholarly journal and part of the process is a double blind peer review. In a nut shell: my article is sent to several reviewers anonymously; I don't know who reviewed it and they don't know who wrote it. No personal biases. That is the theory anyway. In a small field like mine it isn't hard to guess who is reviewing the article. Hints like "the author did not include the essential paper by John Smith." Hi John, is that you? I once reviewed a paper for a journal and could tell you within the first two pages the university and then it is not too hard to guess the author; not many there who could write on that topic. The double blind review worked...

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Community Church meets World Wide Web

This morning Fall River Baptist Church streamed its first service via the internet. This is not a large congregation and it doesn't have a big tech budget. It does have a few skilled people, access to basic web technology and the vision to do something different. I was in the sound booth watching as this internet experiment unfolded. Gradually, people started picking up the feed until by service end there were 9 remote observers. Pretty good for first time out! This included former members moved away and friends of the church. There was a chat feature to allow some limited two way communication. This raises interesting questions about the power of technology to help religious communities keep...

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