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Internet Standard

Internet standard

An Internet standard is a specification for an innovative internetworking technology or methodology, which the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ratified as an open standard after the innovation underwent peer review. An Internet standard begins as an Internet Draft, which may then mature into a Request for Comments memorandum. RFCs that are intended to become Internet standards evolve through a series of three maturation stages: proposed standard, draft standard, and standard; collectively, these stages of evolution are known as the standards track. A proposed standard specification is generally stable, has resolved known design choices, is believed to be well-understood, has received significant community review, and appears to enjoy enough community interest to be considered valuable. However, further experience might result in a change or even retraction of the specification before it advances. Usually, neither implementation nor operational experience is required. A specification from which at least two independent and interoperable implementations from different code bases have been developed, and for which sufficient successful operational experience has been obtained, may be elevated to the draft standard level. A Draft Standard is normally considered to be a final specification, and changes are likely to be made only to solve specific problems encountered. In most circumstances, it is reasonable for vendors to deploy implementations of Draft Standards into a disruption sensitive environment. A specification for which significant implementation and successful operational experience has been obtained may be elevated to the Internet standard level. An Internet standard, which may simply be referred to as a standard, is characterized by a high degree of technical maturity and by a generally held belief that the specified protocol or service provides significant benefit to the Internet community. Generally Internet standards cover interoperability of systems on the internet through defining protocols, messages formats, schemas, and languages. The most fundamental of the standards are the ones defining the Internet Protocol. All Internet standards are given a number in the STD series - The first document in this series, STD 1, describes the remaining documents in the series, and has a list of proposed standards. Often, documents in the STD series are copies of RFCs or are a few RFCs collected together. For example, STD 8 defines the core of the telnet protocol and comprises RFCs 854 and 855.

Reference

The Internet Standards Process is defined in a "Best Current Practice" document [http://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/bcp/bcp9.txt BCP 9] (currently RFC 2026).

External links

- [http://www.iab.org/ Internet Architecture Board]
- [http://www.ietf.org/iesg.html Internet Engineering Steering Group] Category:Internet standards

Specification

In engineering and manufacturing, the term specification has the following meanings:

Technical requirement

An essential technical requirement for items, materials, or services, including the procedures to be used to determine whether the requirement has been met. Specifications may also include requirements for preservation, packaging, packing, and marking. See requirements analysis.

Procurement

An official document intended primarily for supporting procurement, which document clearly and accurately describes the essential technical requirements for items, materials, or services, including the procedures by which it will be determined that the requirements have been met. An example of a Federal specification is FIPS-PUB 159, Detail Specification for 62.5-μm Core Diameter/125-μm Cladding Diameter Class Ia Multimode Optical Fibers. Source: from Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188

Internet Engineering Task Force

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is charged with developing and promoting Internet standards, in particular, those of the TCP/IP protocol suite. It is an open, all-volunteer organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. It is organized into a large number of working groups, each dealing with a specific topic, and intended to complete work on that topic and then shut down. Each working group has an appointed chair (or sometimes several co-chairs), along with a charter that describes its focus, and what and when it is expected to produce. The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter; each area is overseen by an area director (AD) (most areas have 2 co-AD's); the ADs appoint working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF. The IETF is formally an activity under the umbrella of the Internet Society. The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which oversees its external relationships, and relations with the RFC Editor. The IAB is also jointly responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA), which provides logistical, etc support for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations.

History

The IETF started in January of 1986 with U.S.-government-funded researchers meeting quarterly. Representatives from non-government vendors were invited, starting with the fourth IETF meeting, in October of that year. Since that time all IETF meetings have been open to anyone. The majority of the IETF's work is done on mailing lists, however, and meeting attendance is not required for contributors. The initial meetings were very small, with less than 35 people in attendance at each of the first five meetings and with the peak attendance in the first 13 meetings of only 120 attendees, at the 12th meeting in January of 1989. It has grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 90s; it had a peak attendance of 3000 at the July 2000 IETF held in San Diego, CA. Attendance declined with industry restructuring in the early 2000s, and is currently around 1500. During the early 1990s the IETF changed institutional form from an activity of the U.S. government to an independent, international activity associated with the Internet Society. The IETF has at times been ascribed nearly magical abilities by the trade press, who assumed its mechanisms were responsible for the success of the Internet because it works on the Internet's core protocols. The reality that it is a group of engineers putting together specifications so that multiple vendors' products can interoperate across networks is considerably more prosaic. The details of its operations have changed considerably as it has grown, but the basic mechanism remains publication of draft specifications, review and independent testing by participants, and republication. Interoperability is the chief test for IETF specifications becoming standards. Most of its specifications are focused on single protocols rather than tightly-interlocked systems. This has allowed its protocols to be used in many different systems, and its standards are routinely re-used by bodies which create full-fledged architectures (e.g. 3GPP IMS). Because it relies on volunteers and uses "rough consensus and running code" as its touchstone, it can, however, be slow whenever the number of volunteers is either too small to make progress or so large as to make consensus difficult. For protocols like SMTP, which is used to transport e-mail for a user community in the many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change which is not fully backwards compatible. Work within the IETF on ways to improve its speed is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is very great, consensus mechanisms on how to improve have been slow to emerge.

List of IETF chairs

- Mike Corrigan (1986)
- Phill Gross (1986–1993)
- Paul Mockapetris (1994–1995)
- Fred Baker (1996–2001)
- Harald Tveit Alvestrand (2001–2005)
- Brian Carpenter (2005–)

External links and references

- [http://www.ietf.org/ The official IETF site]
- [http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/directory.html IETF Online Proceedings]
- [http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/directory2.html Early IETF Proceedings] (note: large pdf files, one for each volume)
- [http://www.ietf.org/meetings/past.meetings.html Past Meetings of the IETF]
- [http://www.ietf.org/ietf_chairs_year.html IETF Chairs]
- [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3160.txt The Tao of the IETF]: details on how IETF is organized [http://www.ietf.org/tao.html (also as HTML)]
- [http://koi.uoregon.edu/~iaoc/ IAOC information]
- [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/pubs/txt/current-guide.txt An Implementation Guide for RTP MIDI]
- [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/pubs/txt/current-rtp-midi.txt RTP Payload Format for MIDI] Category:Internet governance Category:Internet Category:Standards organizations ko:IETF ja:Internet Engineering Task Force

Peer review

Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. Publishers and funding agencies use peer review to select and to screen submissions. The process also forces authors to meet the standards of their discipline. Publications and awards that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals in many fields. author

Reasons for peer review

A rationale for peer review is that it is rare for an individual author or research team to spot every mistake or flaw in a complicated piece of work. This is not because deficiencies represent needles in a haystack, but because in a new and perhaps eclectic intellectual product, an opportunity for improvement may stand out only to someone with special expertise or experience. Therefore showing work to others increases the probability that weaknesses will be identified, and with advice and encouragement, fixed. The anonymity and independence of reviewers is intended to foster unvarnished criticism and discourage cronyism in funding and publication decisions.

How it works

Peer review subjects an author's work or ideas to the scrutiny of one or more others who are experts in the field. These referees each return an evaluation of the work, including suggestions for improvement, to an editor or other intermediary (typically, most of the referees' comments are eventually seen by the author as well). Evaluations usually include an explicit recommendation of what to do with the manuscript or proposal, often chosen from a menu provided by the journal or funding agency. Most recommendations are along the lines of the following:
- to unconditionally accept the manuscript or proposal,
- to accept it in the event that its authors improve it in certain ways,
- to reject it, but encourage revision and invite resubmission
- to reject it outright. During this process, the role of the referees is advisory, and the editor is under no formal obligation to accept the opinions of the referees. Furthermore, in scientific publication, the referees do not act as a group, do not communicate with each other, and typically are not aware of each other's identities. There is usually no requirement that the referees achieve consensus. Thus the group dynamics is substantially different from that of a jury. In situations where the referees disagree about the quality of a work, there are a number of strategies for reaching a decision. Traditionally reviewers would remain anonymous to the authors, but this is slowly changing. In some academic fields most journals now offer the reviewer the option of remaining anonymous or not; papers sometimes contain, in the acknowledgments section, thanks to (anonymous or named) referees who helped improve the paper. At a journal or book publisher, the task of picking reviewers typically falls to an editor. When a manuscript arrives, an editor solicits reviews from scholars or other experts who may or may not have already expressed a willingness to referee for that journal or book division. Granting agencies typically recruit a panel or committee of reviewers in advance of the arrival of applications. In some disciplines, such as computer science, there exist refereed venues (such as conferences and workshops). To be admitted to speak, scientists must submit a scientific paper (generally short, often 15 pages or less) in advance. This paper is reviewed by a "program committee" (the equivalent of an editorial board), who generally requests inputs from referees. The hard deadlines set by the conferences tend to limit the options to either accept or reject the paper. Typically referees are not selected from among the authors' close colleagues, relatives, or friends. Referees are supposed to inform the editor of any conflict of interests that might arise. Journals or individual editors often invite a manuscript's authors to name people whom they consider qualified to referee their work. Authors are sometimes also invited to name natural candidates who should be disqualified, in which case they may be asked to provide justification (typically expressed in terms of conflict of interest). Editors solicit author input in selecting referees because academic writing typically is very specialized. Editors often oversee many specialties, and may not be experts in any of them, since editors may be full time professionals with no time for scholarship. But after an editor selects referees from the pool of candidates, the editor typically is obliged not to disclose the referees' identities to the authors, and in scientific journals, to each other. Policies on such matters differ between academic disciplines. Scientific journals observe this convention universally. The two or three chosen referees report their evaluation of the article and suggestions for improvement to the editor. The editor then relays the bulk of these comments to the author (some comments may be designated as confidential to the editor), meanwhile basing on them his or her decision whether to publish the manuscript. When an editor receives very positive and very negative reviews for the same manuscript, the editor often will solicit one or more additional reviews as a tie-breaker. As another strategy in the case of ties, editors may invite authors to reply to a referee's criticisms and permit a compelling rebuttal to break the tie. If an editor does not feel confident to weigh the persuasiveness of a rebuttal, the editor may solicit a response from the referee who made the original criticism. In rare instances, an editor will convey communications back and forth between authors and a referee, in effect allowing them to debate a point. Even in these cases, however, editors do not allow referees to confer with each other, and the goal of the process is explicitly not to reach consensus or to convince anyone to change their opinions. Some medical journals, however, (usually following the open access model) have begun posting on the Internet the pre-publication history of each individual article, from the original submission to reviewers' reports, authors' comments, and revised manuscripts. After reviewing and resolving any potential ties, there may be one of three possible outcomes for the article. The two simplest are outright rejection and unconditional acceptance. In most cases, the authors may be given a chance to revise, with or without specific recommendations or requirements from the reviewers.

Recruiting referees

Recruiting referees is a political art, because referees are not paid, and reviewing takes time away from the referee's main activities, such as his or her own research. To the would-be recruiter's advantage, most potential referees are authors themselves, or at least readers, who know that the publication system requires that experts donate their time. Editors are at an especial advantage in recruiting a scholar when they have overseen the publication of his or her work, or if the scholar is one who hopes to submit manuscripts to that editor's publication in the future. Granting agencies, similarly, tend to seek referees among their present or former grantees. Serving as a referee can even be a condition of a grant, or professional association membership. Another difficulty that peer-review organizers face is that, with respect to some manuscripts or proposals, there may be few scholars who truly qualify as experts. Such a circumstance often frustrates the goals of reviewer anonymity and the avoidance of conflicts of interest. It also increases the chances that an organizer will not be able to recruit true experts – people who have themselves done work like that under review, and who can read between the lines. Low-prestige journals and granting agencies that award little money are especially handicapped with regard to recruiting experts. Finally, anonymity adds to the difficulty in finding reviewers in another way. In scientific circles, credit and reputation are important, and while being a referee for a prestigious journal is considered an honor, the anonymity restrictions make it impossible to publicly state that one was a referee for a particular article. However, credit and reputation are principally established by publications, not by refereeing; and in some fields refereeing may not be anonymous.

Different styles of review

Peer review can be rigorous, in terms of the skill brought to bear, without being highly stringent. An agency may be flush with money to give away, for example, or a journal may have few impressive manuscripts to choose from, so there may be little incentive for selection. Conversely, when either funds or publication space is limited, peer review may be used to select an extremely small number of proposals or manuscripts. Often the decision of what counts as "good enough" falls entirely to the editor or organizer of the review. In other cases, referees will each be asked to make the call, with only general guidance from the coordinator on what stringency to apply. Some journals such as Science, Nature have extremely stringent standards for publication, and will reject papers which are of good quality scientific work that they feel are not breakthroughs in the field. Others such as the Astrophysical Journal and Physical Review use peer review primarily to filter out obvious mistakes and incompetence. Different publication rates reflect these different criteria: Nature publishes about 5 percent of received papers, while Astrophysical Journal publishes about 70 percent. The different publication rates are also reflected in the size of the journals. Screening by peers may be more or less laissez-faire depending on the discipline. Physicists, for example, tend to think that decisions about the worthiness of an article are best left to the marketplace. Yet even within such a culture peer review serves to ensure high standards in what is published. Outright errors are detected and authors receive both edits and suggestions. To preserve the integrity of the peer-review process, submitting authors may not be informed of who reviews their papers; sometimes, they might not even know the identity of the associate editor who is responsible for the paper. In many cases, alternatively called "masked" or "double-masked" review, the identity of the authors is concealed from the reviewers, lest the knowledge of authorship bias their review; in such cases, however, the associate editor responsible for the paper does know who the author is. Sometimes the scenario where the reviewers do know who the authors are is called "single-masked" to distinguish it from the "double-masked" process. In double-masked review, the authors are required to remove any reference that may point to them as the authors of the paper. While the anonymity of reviewers is almost universally preserved, double-masked review (where authors are also anonymous to reviewers) is not always employed. Critics of the double-masked process point out that, despite the extra editorial effort to ensure anonymity, the process often fails to do so, since certain approaches, methods, notations, etc., may point to a certain group of people in a research stream, and even to a particular person. Proponents of the single-masked process argue that if the reviewers of a paper are unknown to each other, the associate editor responsible for the paper can easily verify the objectivity of the reviews. Single-masked review is thus strongly dependent upon the goodwill of the participants.

Structure of a peer reviewed paper

First is the abstract which is an one paragraph summary of the findings of the study. Unlike the rest of the article, the abstract is often free and can be read in online databases like Medline. The article itself starts with an introduction that describes earlier relevant research and explains the purpose of the current study. Next is section called material & methods (or something similar) that describes exactly how the study was conducted. The aim is that other researchers should be able to duplicate the study using this information and get the same results. The findings are described in the results section. Finally, there is a discussion (or conclusion) that interprets the results and may compare them to earlier findings.

Criticisms of peer review

One of the most common complaints about the peer review process is that it is slow, and that it typically takes several months or even several years in some fields for a submitted paper to appear in print. In practice, much of the communication about new results in some fields such as astronomy no longer takes place through peer reviewed papers, but rather through preprints submitted onto electronic servers such as arXiv.org. In addition, some sociologists of science argue that peer review makes the ability to publish susceptible to control by elites and to personal jealousy. The peer review process may suppress dissent against "mainstream'" theories. Reviewers tend to be especially critical of conclusions that contradict their own views, and lenient towards those that accord with them. At the same time, elite scientists are more likely than less established ones to be sought out as referees, particularly by high-prestige journals or publishers. As a result, it has been argued, ideas that harmonize with the elite's are more likely to see print and to appear in premier journals than are iconoclastic or revolutionary ones, which accords with Thomas Kuhn's well-known observations regarding scientific revolutions. However, others have pointed out that there is a very large number of scientific journals in which one can publish, making control of information difficult. In addition, the decision-making process of peer review, in which each referee gives his opinions separately and without consultation with the other members, is intended to mitigate some of these problems.

History of peer review

Peer review has been a touchstone of modern scientific method apparently only since in the middle of the twentieth century.[http://www.designinference.com/documents/05.02.resp_to_wein.htm] Before then, its application was lax. For example, Albert Einstein's revolutionary "Annus Mirabilis" papers in the 1905 issue of Annalen der Physik were not peer-reviewed. The journal's editor in chief (and father of quantum theory), Max Planck, recognized the virtue of publishing such outlandish ideas and simply had the papers published; none of the papers were sent to reviewers. The decision to publish was made exclusively by either the editor in chief, or the co-editor Wilhelm Wien—both certainly ‘peers’ (who were later to win the Nobel prize in physics), but this does not meet the definition of "peer review" as it is currently understood. At the time there was a policy that allowed authors much latitude after their first publication. In a recent editorial in Nature, it was stated that "in journals in those days, the burden of proof was generally on the opponents rather than the proponents of new ideas."

Famous papers which were not peer-reviewed

Because of its relatively recent status as a fixture in the scientific enterprise, many of the major breakthroughs in the history of science ironically were published without having undergone peer review. However, even after peer review had become common practice, some famous papers have been published without review. These include: # Publication of Watson and Crick's 1951 paper on the structure of DNA in Nature. This paper was not sent out for peer review. John Maddox stated that “the Watson and Crick paper was not peer-reviewed by Nature... the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident. No referee working in the field (Linus Pauling?) could have kept his mouth shut once he saw the structure” (Nature 426:119 (2003)). The editors accepted the paper upon receipt of a “Publish” covering letter from influential physicist William Lawrence Bragg. # Abdus Salam's paper "Weak and electromagnetic interactions", which elucidated the unification of the weak nuclear force with the electromagnetic force into an electroweak force. It was originally published in Svartholm: Elementary Particle Theory, Proceedings Of The Nobel Symposium Held 1968 At Lerum, Sweden (Stockholm, 1968, 367–77). Salam shared the 1979 Nobel prize, along with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow, for this work.

Peer review and fraud

Peer review, in scientific journals, assumes that the article reviewed has been honestly written, and the process is not designed to detect fraud. The reviewers usually do not have full access to the data from which the paper has been written and some elements have to be taken on trust (except perhaps in subjects such as mathematics). The number and proportion of articles which are detected as fraudulent at review stage is unknown. Some instances of outright scientific fraud and scientific misconduct have got through review and were detected only after other groups tried and failed to replicate the published results. An example is the case of Jan Hendrik Schön, in which a total of fifteen papers were accepted for publication in the top ranked journals Nature and Science following the usual peer review process. All fifteen were found to be fraudulent and were subsequently withdrawn. The fraud was eventually detected, not by peer review, but after publication when other groups tried and failed to reproduce the results of the paper. An example of what can happen within academic publications without peer-review is that of NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal's publication of [http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity] in the journal [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_text/ Social Text]. The submission for publication by Sokal was a hoax that became known as the Sokal Affair.

Peer review and software development

A variety of kinds of peer review are used in various software development processes at several stages of the development process, including requirements definition, preliminary design, detailed design, and coding. Some of the more formal and rigorous approaches are termed software inspection. In the open source movement, something like peer review has taken place in the engineering and evaluation of computer software. In this context, the rationale for peer review has its equivalent in Linus's law, often phrased: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", meaning "If there are enough reviewers, all problems are easy to solve." Eric S. Raymond has written influentially about peer review in software development, for example in the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The value of peer review is largely that it identifies issues earlier than they would otherwise be identified (by testing or by users), which minimizes the amount of effort and cost associated.

External links

- [http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/about.cfm Magazine “Peer Review”]
- [http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/PDF/peerReview.pdf Peer review and the acceptance of new scientific ideas] (Warning: 469 kB PDF)
- [http://www.jpgmonline.com/article.asp?issn=0022-3859;year=2001;volume=47;issue=3;spage=210;epage=4;aulast=Gitanjali Peer review – process, perspectives and the path ahead]
- [http://www.allmedmd.com AllMed Healthcare Medical Peer Review]
- [http://peerreview.blogs.com/peer_review/ Blog “PEER Review”]
- [http://www.spoiledink.com Peer Review Writing Community]
- [http://www.digibio.com/archive/SomethingRotten.htm Something Rotten at the Core of Science? ]
- [http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/peerrev1.htm Malice's Wonderland: Research Funding and Peer Review]
- [http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/123/9/1964 Is agreement between reviewers any greater than would be expected by chance alone? ]
- [http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/ss/ss5.html Peer Review as Scholarly Conformity]
- [http://www.geosociety.org/science/csf/0407gt.htm Science and Politics: An Uneasy Mix]
- [http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Buff_022004,00.html Science Versus Science]
- [http://slate.msn.com/id/2116244 The case against peer-review]
- [http://nov55.com/prv.html Peer Review is Censorship and Intimidation]
- [http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-02/ns_mh.html Peer review: the Holy Office of modern science]
- [http://www.mantleplumes.org/PeerReview.html The end of the Peer Show - scientists’ misguided attempt to solve a non-existent problem]
- [http://smartbearsoftware.com/codecollab-overview.php Peer Code Review for Software Development]
- [http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/ss/ss5.html Peer Review as Scholarly Conformity]
- [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=90156666&dopt=Abstract The philosophical basis of peer review and the suppression of innovation]
- [http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives.142.html Peer review is broken. ]
- [http://www.thegreatboycott.net/Dissent_in_Science.html Suppressing Dissent in Science]
- [http://www.tribunes.com/tribune/art96/bere.htm Hampering the progress of science by peer review and by the 'selective' funding system]
- [http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/2005/7716/7716.html A Case Study of Data Suppression and Misrepresentation]
- [http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/histcomp/lock-difficult-bal_2/index-lcs.html "A Difficult Balance: Editorial Peer Review in Medicine"]
- [http://www.truthinlabeling.org/l-manuscript.htm A STUDY IN SUPPRESSION OF INFORMATION]
- [http://www.iseepi.org/about/ethics.html Proposed Definitions Relating (1) to the Suppression of Research and (2) to the Repression of Research]
- [http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Suppression-Of-Dissent.htm Suppression of Dissent in Science ]
- [http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-10-t-000059.html Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?] Frank J. Tipler Category:Academic publishing Category:Scientific method ja:査読 simple:Peer review

Request for Comments

In internetworking and computer network engineering, Request for Comments (RFC) documents are a series of memoranda encompassing new research, innovations, and methodologies applicable to Internet technologies. Through the Internet Society, engineers and computer scientists may publish discourse in the form of an RFC memorandum, either for peer review or simply to convey new concepts, information, or (occasionally) engineering humor. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) adopts some of the applied information theory published in RFCs as Internet standards. The IETF issues each RFC document a unique serial number. Once issued a numerical identifier and published, an RFC is never rescinded; if the document requires amendments, the authors publish a revised document via the IETF; therefore, some RFCs obsolete others. Together, the serialized RFCs compose a continuous historical record of the evolution of Internet standards.

RFC production and evolution

The RFC production process differs from the standardization process of formal standards organizations such as ANSI. Internet technology experts may submit an Internet Draft without support from an external institution. Practically speaking, standards-track RFCs are usually produced by experts participating in working groups which first publish an Internet Draft. This approach facilitates initial rounds of peer review before documents mature into RFCs. The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact standards-authorship accomplished by individuals or small working groups has important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO. Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a flourishing tradition of joke RFCs. Usually at least one a year is published, usually on April Fool's Day. The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work - they manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions. For more details about RFCs and the RFC process, see RFC 2026, "The Internet Standards Process, Revision 3".

History

The inception of the RFC format occurred in 1969 as part of the seminal ARPANET project. Today, it is the official publication channel for the IETF, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and —to some extent—the global community of computer network researchers in general. The authors of the first RFCs typewrote their work and circulated hard copies among the ARPA researchers. In December of 1969, researchers began distributing new RFCs via the now-operational ARPANET. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and published on April 7, 1969. Crocker first drafted the document in his bathroom to avoid waking his roommate. Many of the subsequent RFCs of the 1970s also came from UCLA, not only because of the quality of the scholarship, but also because UCLA was one of the first Interface Message Processors (IMPs) on ARPANET. Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute was another of the four first ARPANET nodes, as well as the first Network Information Centre, and (as noted by the sociologist Thierry Bardini) the source of a large number of early RFCs. From 1969 until 1998, Jon Postel served as the sole RFC editor. Following his death, the Internet Society (acting on behalf of the IETF) contracted the Networking Division of the USC Information Sciences Institute to assume the editorship and publishing responsibilities (under the direction of the IAB).

Obtaining RFCs

Official sources for RFCs on the World Wide Web are the [http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html RFC Editor] and the [http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html IETF repository]. Unofficially, they are obtainable from a multitude of mirrors accessible via the HyperText Transfer Protocol, anonymous FTP, the gopher protocol, and other prominent application layer protocols. One may retrieve any individual, published RFC via the following Uniform Resource Locator by replacing the # with the document's RFC serial number: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc#.txt Every RFC is available as ASCII text, but may also be available in other file formats; however, the definitive version of any standards-track specification is always the ASCII version.

Sources

- [http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcfaq.html RFC Frequently Asked Questions]

:This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

Category:FOLDOC sourced articles

External links

- [http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html RFC Database]
- [http://www.ietf.org/iesg/1rfc_index.txt RFC Index] (plaintext)
- [http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcxx00.html Official RFC standardization status]
- [http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html RFCs from the IETF]
- [http://www.elook.org/computing/request-for-comments.htm eLook.org Computing Reference - Request for Comments]

RFC document mirrors

- [http://tangentsoft.net/rfcs/ Important RFCs]
- [http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/np.html RFC by Category] at [http://www.faqs.org/ faqs.org]
- [http://www.rfc-archive.org/ RFC-Archive.org]
- [http://rfclibrary.hosting.com/ RFC Index]
- [http://www.elook.org/computing/rfc/ eLook Computing Reference - RFC Database]
- [http://rfc.8x.ca/ RFC Library - Searchable RFC database]
- [http://zvon.org/tmRFC/RFC_share/Output/index.html ZVON RFC Repository] Category:Internet standards ja:Request for Comments

Internet protocol

Internet protocol may refer to:
- The Internet Protocol, a data-oriented protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork.
- The Internet protocol suite, a set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs.

Coordinated Universal Time

:For alternate uses of UTC see UTC (disambiguation) Coordinated Universal Time or UTC, also sometimes referred to as "Zulu time" or Z, is an atomic realization of Universal Time (UT) or Greenwich Mean Time, the astronomical basis for civil time. Time zones around the world are expressed as positive and negative offsets from UT. UTC differs by an integral number of seconds from International Atomic Time (TAI), as measured by atomic clocks and a fractional number of seconds from UT. UTC is a hybrid time scale: the rate of UTC is based on atomic frequency standards but the epoch of UTC is synchronized to remain close to astronomical UT. The Earth's rotation is very slowly decelerating (due to braking action of the tides), hence the mean solar day has increased since TAI was introduced on 1 January 1958 (under another name). For this reason, UT is 'slower' than TAI. As of 1 January 1999, TAI was ahead of UTC by 32 seconds, consisting of a 10-second offset introduced on 1 January 1972 to account for all variations between 1958 and 1971, plus an additional 22 leap seconds introduced between 1972 and 1998. UTC is maintained within 0.9 s of UT1 (UT1 is one of three precise definitions of UT); leap seconds are added (or, theoretically, subtracted) at the end of any UTC month as necessary. The primary dates for leap second adjustments are at the end of the day on June 30 and December 31. The secondary dates, which to date have been unused, are March 31 and September 30. To date, all such adjustments – the first in 1972 – have been positive and applied on dates June 30 or December 31, where an additive leap second is designated as 23:59:60. The announcement of leap seconds is made by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), based on precise astronomical forecasts of the Earth's rotation. Historically, one leap second has been required every one to two years. However a leap second has not been required since 1998, as the deceleration of the Earth's rotation slowed temporarily in the past seven years. The IERS announced in July 2005 that the next leap second will be on 31 December 2005. For most practical and legal-trade purposes, the fractional difference between UTC and UT (or GMT) is inconsequentially small, and for this reason UTC is colloquially called GMT sometimes, even if this is not technically correct.

Proposal to redefine UTC and abolish leap seconds

There is a proposal to redefine UTC and abolish leap seconds, such that sundials would slowly get further out-of-sync with civil time. See Leap second for more information.

General information

"UTC" is not a true acronym; it is a variant of Universal Time, UT, and has a modifier C (for "coordinated") appended to it just like other variants of UT. It [http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/general/misc.htm#Anchor-14550 may be regarded] as a compromise between the English acronym "CUT" and the French acronym "TUC" (temps universel coordonné). It is sometimes erroneously expanded into "Universal Time Code".

Converting Universal Time
to Standard (Winter) Local Times
Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time	UTC -10
Alaska Standard Time	UTC -9
Pacific Standard Time	UTC -8
Mountain Standard Time	UTC -7
Central Standard Time	UTC -6
Eastern Standard Time	UTC -5
Atlantic Standard Time	UTC -4
Greenwich Mean Time/Western European Time	UTC
Central European Time	UTC +1
Eastern European Time	UTC +2
Moscow Time	UTC +3
Indian Standard Time	UTC +5:30
Singapore Standard Time, Hong Kong Time, Australian Western Standard Time, Chinese Standard Time	UTC +8
Japan Standard Time, Korea Standard Time	UTC +9
Australian Central Standard Time	UTC +9:30
Australian Eastern Standard Time	UTC +10
New Zealand Standard Time	UTC +12

For more, see time zone.

International standard UTC time can only be determined to the highest precision after the fact, as atomic time is determined by the reconciliation of the observed differences between an ensemble of atomic clocks maintained by a number of national time bureaus. This is done under the auspices of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (International Bureau of Weights and Measures). However, local clusters of atomic clocks are sufficient for accuracy to within a few tens of nanoseconds. UTC is the time system used for many Internet and World Wide Web standards. In particular, the Network Time Protocol, designed to synchronize the clocks of many computers over the Internet (usually to that of a known accurate atomic clock), uses UTC. As indicated in the standards, it is convenient to include the UTC date too. The UT time zone is sometimes denoted by the letter Z since the equivalent nautical time zone (GMT) has been denoted by Z since about 1950, and by a "zone description" of zero hours since 1920. See Time zone history. Since the NATO phonetic alphabet and radio-amateur word for Z is "Zulu", UT is sometimes known as Zulu time.

Amateur Radio

Those who transmit on the amateur radio bands often log the time of their radio contacts in UTC, as transmissions can go worldwide on some frequencies. In the past, the FCC required all amateur radio operators in the United States of America to log their radio conversations. While maintaining a record of radio transmissions is no longer required in the USA, many American amateur radio operators still choose to maintain a log expressing the time of their transmissions in UTC, due to the world wide reach of ham radio.

References

- ITU-R Recommendation TF.460-4: Standard-frequency and time-signal emissions. International Telecommunication Union. (Annex I of this document contains the official definition of UTC.)
- Dennis D. McCarthy: "Astronomical Time". Proc. IEEE, Vol. 79, No. 7, July 1991, pp. 915-920.
- Nelson, McCarthy, et al.: "[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/metrologia-leapsecond.pdf The leap second: its history and possible future]" (381 KB PDF file), Metrologia, Vol. 38, pp. 509–529, 2001.
- David W. Allan, Neil Ashby, Clifford C. Hodge: The Science of Timekeeping. Hewlett Packard Application Note 1289, 1997.

External links

- [http://www.bipm.org/en/scientific/tai/time_server.html Bureau International des Poids et Mesures UTC/TAI Time Server]
- [http://www.time.gov/ The official U.S. time]
- [http://www.worldtimeserver.com/ World Time Server - any location, any time]
- [http://www.thetimenow.com/ thetimeNOW - Current time in all time zones]
- [http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/UT.html United States Naval Observatory - What is Universal Time?]
- [http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eoppc/bul/bulc/bulletinc.dat International Earth Rotation Service Leap Second Updates]
- [http://www.qsl.net/zl1bpu/micro/CLOCK/ Make your own UTC /Local time hardware clock]
- [http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime W3C Specification about UTC Date and Time] and IETF Internet standard RFC 3339
- [http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/MAEL/ag/zulu.htm Zulu Time]
- [http://www.hko.gov.hk/gts/time/worldtime2.htm Hong Kong Time by Hong Kong Observatory] Category:Time scales als:UTC ko:협정 세계시 zh-min-nan:UTC ja:協定世界時 nb:UTC simple:Coordinated Universal Time th:เวลาพิกัดสากล

Standardization

Standardization or standardisation (sometimes abbreviated s13n), in the context related to technologies and industries, is the process of establishing a technical standard among competing entities in a market, where this will bring benefits without hurting competition. It can also be viewed as a mechanism for optimising economic use of scarce resources such as forests, which are threatened by paper manufacture. As an example, all of Europe now uses 230 volt 50 Hz AC mains grids and GSM cell phones, and (at least officially) measures lengths in metres. In the context of social criticism and social sciences, standardization often means the process of establishing standards of various kinds, and improving efficiency to handle people, their interactions, cases, and so forth. Examples include formalization of judicial procedure in court, and establishing uniform criteria for diagnosing mental disease. Standardization in this sense is often discussed along with (or synonymously to) such large-scale social changes as modernization, bureaucratization, homogenization, and centralization of society. In the context of business information exchanges, standardization refers to the process of developing data exchange standards for specific business processes using specific syntaxes. These standards are usually developed in voluntary consensus standards bodies such as the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT)and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Standards can be de facto, which means they are followed for convenience, or de jure, which means they are used because of (more or less) legally binding contracts and documents. Government agencies often have to follow standards issued by official standardization organizations. Following such standards can also be a prerequisite for doing business on certain markets, with certain companies, or within certain consortia. A standard can be open or not (proprietary). There are many worldwide standards and drafts (for example, for the standardization of powercords) developed and maintained by the ISO, the IEC, and the ITU. Many specifications that govern the operation and interaction of devices and software on the Internet are de facto standards. To preserve the word "standard" as the domain of relatively disinterested bodies such as ISO, the W3C, for example, publishes "Recommendations", and the IETF publishes "Requests for Comments" (RFCs). These publications are often informally referred to as being standards. In a military context, standardization is defined as: The development and implementation of concepts, doctrines, procedures and designs to achieve and maintain the required levels of compatibility, interchangeability or commonality in the operational, procedural, materiel, technical and administrative fields to attain interoperability. Note: the three levels of standardization in ascending order are: compatibility, interchangeability and commonality.

Category:Internet standards

This category contains current and future Internet Standards, i.e., published RFC documents currently on the IETF's Standards Track. This can include both network protocols and other non-protocol standards. See also: :Category:Internet protocols Category:Computer and telecommunication standards Category:Electronic documents Standards Category:Standards ko:분류:인터넷 표준

Wal Hannington

Wal (Walter) Hannington (born 1896) was a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and National Organiser of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, from its formation in 1921 to its end in 1939, when he became National Organiser of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. In 1936, he wrote a book about his experiences as leader of the NUWM, called "Unemployed Struggles 1919-1936". He died in 1966. Hannington, Wal Hannington, Wal Hannington, Wal

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