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something that jumped to mind when reading this again is the inference
based logic approach used by lawyers to "model clues and evidence" for
purposes of corroborating stories from multiple parties....in fact, the nsa
(natl security agency) presented at a conference i was at earlier this year
discussing the use of this approach to model information for open source
intelligence gathering, though the logic is similar.

for example (pardon the example, trying to make it marginally relevant) -
multiple parties witness and/or hear about a crime through direct and
indirect sources - like one person saw 'the back of the head' (hairstyle,
length, color, body type)...another saw other parts, another heard about
what the person looked like or sounded like and so on...and as the stories
spread to other parties, the facts change (now 4 hair color variations, 2
hair styles etc as the police and investigators are questioning
sources)...using a flow chart of sorts (per the nsa example), individuals
sources will be rated according to various criteria (namely the areas of
credibility, reliability, first/second hand knowledge etc) and then facts
mapped to one another alongside the dialogue and notes (the cited hair
colors for example)..

at any rate, my point: one place to look for substantial research could be
the world of criminal law, evidence and associated support for legitimacy
of evidence...information flow is critical, as some case foundations are
built on hearsay prior to collection of facts and evidence...and in some
cases, the testimony itself could be taken as telephone endgame...just my
opinion...law enforcement must study this quite seriously (e.g. those
training guys who preach NLP to elicit information and determine
reliability through personality profiling...)
-dave


At 05:12 PM 8/24/2004, Carter T. Butts wrote:
>***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/ *****
>
>Valdis wrote:
>>***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/ *****
>>
>>Is there any serious research on the distortion of information as it
>>travels along a network path -- similar to the popular children's game
>>of "Telephone"? A Google search brings up nothing.
>
>The canonical cite for this work is Allport and Postman's old
>stuff...there has been relatively little systematic empirical work since
>on that particular problem, although there is a great deal of work on
>related issues in network diffusion (both empirical and theoretical).
>Gabriel Lawson and I have recently revisited the original A&P data, and
>are working on this problem vis a vis the flow of crisis information
>through interpersonal networks. We presented some of this at the recent
>NAACSOS conference in Pittsburgh; a very brief summary is available in
>the online proceedings (search for NAACSOS).
>
>-Carter
>
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