Sallen and Key's classic 1955 paper

Are you close to any engineering schools? Way down in the basement of Worcester Polytechnic Institute's library there were technical publications going back to the late 1800's.

It bothers me to find that paper cited often. If it is hard to find (as in, 'not readily available'), then I suspect that many are citing it without having actually read it. Almost dishonest.

Jon

Yes and no. Yes, because they are basing what they are writing on second= =20 hand sources.

But no, because too often the origins get lost, so nobody bothers to look= =20 for them.

One classic case is the superregenerative receiver. Patented in 1922, the= =20 more it faded from view the less description it got, until there was a=20 schematic and very vague description, so most people would only treat it=20 like a mysterious black box. Then about a decade ago, Charles Kitchin=20 went back and looked at the patent and original articles, wrote about the= =20 originals rather than the descendants far removed, and then with full=20 understanding did work to improve the concept.

You can't do that if there are no pointers to the original material.

In the case of active filters, others have problem better synthesized the= =20 material, yet it's still important to point back to that first source.

Michael

I may have to go to my local university, but I did receive two replies from the email I sent to the IEEE Xplore support link:

First reply: Thank you for your email. Unfortunately we do not have the legacy content for this particulal issue. "IRE Transactions on Circuit Theory " 1955, Issue # 1, Vol # 2. It is therefore not available to view from our IEEE Xplore site. You may as a suggestion try contacting the History Center at Rutgers.

Second reply: Thanks you for your email. I just sent a email to the History Center over at Rutgers. The History Center does not have the old professional group transactions, only the IRE Proceedings. However, it is likely that you may contacts Linda Hall Library in Missouri, he may be able to obtain. Linda Hall is the repository library for engineering, and it has a document delivery service.

So I will contact Linda Hall and see what secrets they have.

I'll make the accusation clearer. I suspect they aren't even reading secondary interpretations by those who have actually read the original paper. I think they simply have heard (or read) that it is a seminal paper on the broader subject at hand and decide to simply include it, without having any idea whatsoever if it applies to anything they said, or not. Frankly, I consider that to be dishonest. If you don't have specific knowledge that a paper is germane to the content of what you are writing... and I mean __specific__ knowledge... then it shouldn't be cited.

The biblio becomes "whimsical dumpware," otherwise.

If I accepted your argument (and I'm not saying I think you believe it, just that you are offering it as a possible explanation), then I would have to accept a very bad behavior. Dumping references at the end of a paper without having _any_ specific knowledge about them and how they may apply to the topic at hand leaves the reader unsure if any of it is worth a darn. It's the author who is claiming some expertise and it is the author who should know better (or not) if some paper applies to what they are writing about. If they can't even be troubled to find out, themselves, my gosh....

Well, I don't accept the behavior or the argument.

I didn't say that authors shouldn't cite germane material, for gosh sake! If it is appropriate material to cite, cite it. But the author should at least know the difference.

I'm going to assume that the paper you are referring to was an important one and was actually read, at the time. Others will, knowing it's value and appropriateness, cite it in their work. Which is as it _should be_. And if it is cited, there is a trail to follow.

If a paper isn't cited, perhaps it should disappear from view.

In any case, allowing authors to cite without a clue is like playing the game of 'telephone' they used to do in grade school to show just how different a message can get when it is passed in secret from person to person around a classroom. The first person knows exactly what the message is. But by the time the message gets to the other end, listened to by ignorant people without a clue and interpreted as best they can and then passed on, it has no similarity at all anymore to the original.

The solution is obvious. Require those passing along the message to do their own "self correction" by reading the paper, itself. Failing that much, they should have specific knowledge of sections of it they have picked up where the text is fully cited in part. Failing that much, they should use only papers such as the one you point out from Charles Kitchin where the context is part of the document's purpose and its provenance is a matter of explicit record.

Anything less and the whole process devolves back into a child's game.

You made the case that it was important to actually go back and read the material. Which is my point. Those who failed to do that, failed their readers. The citations eventually become hubris piled upon debris and the interlocking nature of science knowledge becomes a mere sham.

As a reader of these materials, it is offensive to me that an author would cite a paper without knowing whether or not anything contained in it meaningfully applied to the topic at hand. It wastes my time and that is an inexcusable mark of disrespect for readers.

Jon

I would like to have a copy, if you ever get it. :)

Wayne please keep us posted. I went to the University of Buffalo library website and tried to find the article.. .same story that you are getting. They have the second and all other volumes in the series, but someone lost the first volume!

George H.

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Hi Jon, You shouldn't let yourself get too upset. This kind of thing happens all the time in academia. (And probably in industry too.) Everyone tends to 'parrot' what has been done before. I'm a physicist and if you look at intro physics texts they all tend to be the same. I=92m reminded of an instance documented by Stephen J. Gould in one of his books of essays. In all biology books you will find that the first horse. (please don=92t ask me to quote the scientific name, I think the name means 'dawn horse') is referred to as an animal that was about the size of a fox terrier. Now fox terriers are no longer a breed that is at all common and yet everyone writing about the first horse uses the same =91copied=92 analogy. Gould follows the comparison back to the first mention of this fossil horse and finds the original reference there.

Anyway there are lots more examples of this. Bottom line, we all tend to be a bit lazy.

George H.

George et. al.,

I have successfully contacted the Linda Hall Library in Missouri and they do have Sallen and Key's original paper. There is a fee of $37 that includes the copying of the paper and the IEEE copyright. Their web address is:

-Wayne

Have you already ordered it? If not, I discovered I have a copy which I can email to you.

I can

Not yet, so if you have a copy it would be nice to obtain one for free. Several others would like a copy as well. :-)

Thanks in advance.

-Wayne

The "dawn horse" is eohippus.

My impression is that eohippus was about the size of a usual domestic cat, or a bit smaller - about the size of a smalish domestic cat.

My impression is that eohippus was an early stage branching of evolution of mammals from something more like a rat to something first stage of towards horse from more-like-a-rat. This could be close to where hooved herbivores evolved from common ancestor of hooved herbivores and modern rodents.

"Eo" means dawn, and is used elsewhere - notably in a traditional-in-science dye, eosine. That organic dye is "dawn-pink" in color in a common form/concentration, though usually fluoresces a yellowish shade of green like fluorescein, which eosine is a derivative of. Another fluorescein-derivative is erythrosine, named for being blood-red in a common form/concentration, and that also often fluoresces yellow-green.

===============

The Wikipedia article that I get from "eohippus" shows that to be a genus rather than a species, and appearing to me to me to be early stage evolution of ungulates, related to then-present ancestry of rhinos and tapirs. This Wikipedia article takes on the title "Hyracotherium", and "therium" makes me think prehistoric rhinos.

That article mentions that this was earliest "equidae" before being reclassified as a "paleothere" related to both horses and "brontotheres" ("brontotheres" are literally "thunder beasts", an extinct family of "somewhere-between-horse-and-rhino likely-closer-to-horse" "My Words").

(Brontotherium included the Baluchitherium, a "hornless rhino" larger than any elephant in history and probably larger than every prehistoric one probably including all "mammoths".)

This "greater family" ("My Words") of mammals here is "Perissodactyl" or "odd-toed ungulates", a classification great enough to be at least often referred to as being of status of an "order" (Perissodactyla).

Eohippus now looks to me so far as I see roughly 60 cm in length typically, sounds to me roughly slightly larger than a usual domestic cat, likely more than double linear dimensions of a usual rat and likely

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

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Thanks Don, The bottom of this wiki article has the Stephen Jay Gould reference.

But you have to read Gould's essay.

George H.

Yes please.

I will have to scan it tonight. In the meantime, everyone who wants a copy should post a valid email address. I would suggest protecting it in some manner, such as posting with spaces between characters or spelling out "at" for the @ symbol, etc.

Hi Phantom, I sure would be interested to have a copy.

freddotbartoliatfreedotfr

I'm interested in a copy too,

please email to: scepp at shaw dot com

thank you for your effort.

Shaun

Its much appreciated. Baron at linuxmaniac . net

copy

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Please email it to:

wayne -dot- little -at- gmail -dot- com