1. Members of the cyberstalking gang based in sci.psychology.psychotherapy used an illicitly-obtained credit card number to impersonate an associate of mine, under whose 'real name sig' they posted a spurious negative review of my book (and marked numerous times as 'unhelpful' the two positive reviews of my book). In a response I used the customer review submission process to reply and in my reply I included a link to the cyberstalking report. Amidst efforts by Amazon.com officials to appear impartial (or just plain insouciant) by e-mailing form letters to each party stating that the conduct of the other will not be tolerated, I find evidence in my web logs that a representative of Amazon.com's customer service (or possibly legal) department (207.171.180.XXX) twice accessed my cyberstalking report directly, also accessing a supporting document, and adding the web site to its Favorites list).

2. The cyberstalking main report has also been accessed by The National White Collar Crime Center. Someone within The National Computer Security Center, a division of the NSA, reviewed my Google report. Having seen Will Smith's Enemy of the State (1998), Bourne Identity (2002), and Mercury Rising (1998), the NSA Kid's page struck me as kind of odd. I must have been absent the day they taught Cryptology in kindergarten, so pardon my bewilderment over the rash of NSA-bashing films. I guess the film industry has popularized the CIA to the point that it lost its mystique.

I don't understand why the NSA doesn't get better press.

3. I was visited by the City of Detroit Lakes. It's in Minnesota.

(You didn't really think it was in Michigan, did you?)

4. So I traced, right to the U.S. House of Representatives, one of the visitors reading my report blasting The New Freedom Commission initiative to require universal mental health screening. None of the committees of which he is a member would have any role in the processing of the initiatives into legislation. So I think. I clicked on the link to the only committee that seemed vaguely relevant. I don't know if this is a coincidence, but the chairperson of this committee happens to be the representative for my Congressional district.

5. I think I have to give a Florida International University psychology professor some credit. One of his students e-mailed me for information about my report "diagnosing" Psychology's academic community with borderline personality disorder. Apparently, the good professor thinks the premise would make a good subject for a senior lab assignment. Regardless of what he thinks about my essay, he deserves plaudits for challenging his students with these ideas. If this had been assigned to graduate students, I would have had the smell of entrapment. Any graduate student who does not come unequivocally down on the side of Psychology (and with enough scornful indignation for Wyatt Ehrenfels) is eliminated from the game show, handed a complimentary Swiffer, and then promptly burned at the stake.

6. J Wyatt Ehrenfels is cited in a power point presentation detailing Psychology's career ladders and lattices. Titled "Professing the Path to Professorship", the informative and amusing presentation created by a student of Melissa Shultz-Read (Ph.D., Cognitive and Neural Sciences, 2004), an Armstrong Atlantic State University assistant professor, builds on the structure and content of Wyatt's Careers page. The student, who reported having read Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, even worked a thumbnail image of the cover into the presentation.

7. CBS news magazine 60 Minutes Sunday blew the whistle on fraudulent sales tactics by post-secondary education programs luring applicants with false promises of lucrative careers. Among the nefarious practices, staff contrived or wildly inflated admission, graduation, and placement rates to persuade students to enroll in programs. While many students felt encouraged by their admission, in actuality, the schools admitted the vast majority of applicants, including substandard applicants. While program faculty were encouraged to give students passing grades to boost revenue, many of the substandard students were dismissed before they could complete the degree and many who graduated in the top of their class found themselves having to work off $20-$50K of loan debt, terminally temping in $11-an-hour jobs that were, at best, only vaguely related to their training. Folding T-shirts at the GAP or keying numbers into the mainframe of the local real estate tax service. Here on fireflySun.com, I discuss this practice by for-profit education groups and professional schools, of allowing just about every applicant in the door. Among these applicants: students they knew they would never allow to complete the program. But they'd devise a system that essentially did not terminate or outprocess the student until it's squeezed about 2 or 3 years worth of tuition (AKA federal loan dollars) out of the student.

I was interested to learn of the SEC's involvement in investigating these programs. In the weeks leading up to the 60 Minutes report, I tried to make sense of visits from such agencies as the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, U.S. Dept of Justice, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Department of Labor/Employment Standards Administration, not to mention a dozen education and finance departments at the state level. The fireflySun.com documents accessed by these agencies are consistent with the prosecution of the charges reported by CBS, with one notable exception: while the CBS story restricted itself to private education companies (e.g. University of Pheonix, CEC), the fireflySun.com documents accessed depict a much broader fraudulence involving the gross misrepresentation of post-graduate career opportunities by psychology programs housed in traditional universities, where psych profs seek to consolidate their financial base by jealously guarding the number of students declaring Psychology as a major. Having attracted the likes of state regents and university presidents, it's clear that the trends cited in these fireflySun.com reports are a growing concern.

Is it true that when a trace on an IP address returns "University of California, Office of the President" that my web site was actually being accessed by someone within the president's office? If that's the case, then fireflySun.com was accessed from within the president's offices of five distinct University of California campuses (i.e. Los Angeles, Merced, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Berkeley). Six if you consider one record of a "University of California Office of the President" on Franklin Street in Oakland, CA. There is no campus in Oakland, but the OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE REGENTS is located there (i.e. what Transylvania is to vampires worldwide, what Boston is to Red Sox Nation). And I was quite disturbed to learn of the specific web pages that interested this individual. The individual entered the web site through my report detailing the stalking of a freewheeling psychology critic (i.e. Brad Jesness) by a group of academics, practitioners, and non-degree holding supplicants nested within the sci.psychology.psychotherapy news group. After accessing the Favorites Icon (could I expect a return visit from this individual?), the visitor accessed my report profiling the members of that cyberstalking ring. This raises a disturbing question as to whether one of the stalkers is an employee of indeterminate rank of the Board of Regents for California's university system.

Most noteworthy of the visits from the campus presidential offices of is the one from the Berkeley campus, where an individual of indeterminate rank accessed the report titled Conservative-Bashing by Berkeley Psy'gists 'Hypocritical', 'Unseemly'. This self-flagellation is matched only by the reading of Rout West: Ehrenfels Overpowers UCLA Psych Prof inside the president's office at UCLA. (UPDATE 08/09/05: This essay has just been accessed by a source inside the Merced campus president's office). These reports were accessed directly, meaning the visitor did not happen upon the report when browsing the news page. Either the document turned up in a search of the Internet, or a link to the document was passed along to the visitor from a third party.

8. I think it's quite odd that within one hour, my web site received visits from inside both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. Prior to these visits, I had been excited about the number of federal employees whose surfboards washed ashore of my web site. But please...no official business. I realize there are some rather sensitive folk within the academic community who think me some kind of terrorist, but do not be misled by any document I might have lazily titled "war.php." I'm not that kind of insurgent. An hour later, there's a visit from "Fairfax County Government", which approved and aired my program for its community access television channel last Fall. How many of you conspiracy types or cryptanalysts are predicting that the military will screen copies of this tape for 'clandestine invectives,' also known as hidden messages?

But all joking aside, it would appear the visitors from military sites are interested in what I have to say about Psychology. And it's not one-and-gone, but repeat visits from either multiple persons or the same person from multiple terminals.

9. Distressed by the windfall of intriguing visitors who turned up in a search of my access logs, one ostensibly anonymous detractor urges anyone who might be foraging through the sci.psychology.psychotherapy dumpster for zings, tabloids, and flames to access fireflySun.com through proxy servers. This represents a remarkable adjustment for the flame warrior, who had been accustomed to urging people not to visit my web site and, prior to that, had been screaming at the top of his lungs that no one visits my web site. I wonder if this guy's a father. Unable to beat abstinence into their teens, parents everywhere remember surrendering to the inevitability of sex as they grudgingly urged their 13-year-old sons to use a condom. Don't get me wrong. I applaud the efforts of our unctiously altruistic detractor to scale back his goals. But does he honestly believe the major thoroughfare dumping traffic into fireflySun.com runs anywhere near, let alone through, Usenet (i.e. sci.psychology.psychotherapy)? As for that impression of a led balloon, he thinks he's reaching out to rush hour traffic in Penn Station. When he's really preaching to the seats inside the midnight showing of Gigli. Can you settle down a moment to switch on the lights? Yeah, there ... no one's listening.

10. While I do not want to tip any hands by divulging the names of the firms, I will reveal that a number of law firms have visited the web site. Judging by the nature of the documents reviewed (including the web site's favorite icon), it occurs to me now ... the range of legal issues addressed across the various documents on this web site. Issues ranging from fraud to various kinds of harassment and defamation. Someone from inside one of the nation's preeminent health law firms took interest in one document in particular: this one.

11. My scathing indictment of Gallup's hiring/interview procedures draws interesting visitors the world over, most notably the World Bank Group and the executive office of NASA.

12. A number of visits from inside the Department of Veterans Affairs has me wondering whether this is a passing, casual interest, or whether the V.A. system will officially acknowledge the widespread pattern of discrimination by psychologists employed at Veterans Hospitals. Whoever you are ... stick to the match.php document you originally came for. Trust me -- the EPPP.php and blunt.php documents are not nearly as compelling.

13. I see the visit from "Lifepath Hospice" and I think all of Psychology must be on life support right about now. Or at least the University of Western Kentucky, where 16 -- count them -- 16 -- distinct visitors (or one visitor from 16 distinct PCs) accessed my web site since 8:21 EST yesterday (i.e. 16 related but distinguishable IPs, all traceable to "Western Kentucky University" over the past 19 hours). I do not recall posting to any Western Kentucky message boards so this is either a class assignment (in which case some U of WK prof deserves some plaudits), or it's word of mouth fueled by anti-departmental sentiment like the kind that wreaked historic fireflySun havoc at the State University of Pennsylvania and Shippensburg University three years ago (at least if you believe e-mails from a couple individuals identifying themselves as wards of an unpopular prof there). Other universities that have distinguished themselves as hotbeds of fireflySun.com activity in recent weeks include Johns Hopkins University, University of New Brunswick, Michigan State University, University of Virginia, University of Maryland, and Saint Thomas University.

14. Virginia Information Technologies Agency. I visited the web site of the state agency from which this visitor hails. The acronym is suspiciously identical to the term used interchangeably with "resumé" in academe (i.e. vita). It also claims an "unfailing commitment to excellence" in nearly the same words reserved by university Deans and Department Heads for their "intellectual" (scratch that..."academic") soldiers. Except the good folks over at Virginia Information Technologies Agency added the word "unfailing" (I imagine to set set them apart). Apparently, it is also their mission to "grow our employees." It's regulatory culture phrases like this that makes me wish I was taller. So what does VITA do? And why is someone from this agency visiting my web site?

I notice the mission of this agency is as broad as its powers and vice-versa. I am also spooked by links titled 'Freedom of Information Act' although the closest this agency appears to get to higher education is the procurement of its technology. From what I can tell, you have the right to request things of VITA, but what exactly I cannot be sure. From the web site it's clear they won't clean your gutters, but just what information VITA can get you and what reforms they want to make to information technology in Virginia is not as clear.

15. Within five minutes, my web logs capture accesses from the University of Texas and then the University of Texas's Medical Branch at Galveston. Same document. This is either an astonishing coincidence or good word of mouth. I see this happening a lot and each time I see it produces the same "aw shucks" factor. We also see it with the University of New Mexico, the University of Mexico UNM-ALUMNI, and the University of New Mexico HealthSciences Center. Throw in New Mexico State University and New Mexico State Government, and we have ourselves quite a party. I am almost omnipresent in New Mexico.

16. University of Delaware. I wondered when you'd show. I think I've seen just about every university come through here over the past few years, but I don't remember seeing U of D (if that's actually its moniker).

17. University of Pennsylvania. Within the past two weeks, I have nearly made my rounds of all the Ivy League schools. But where's Brown and Yale? I promise not to think any less of the last one here. The day after I typed the preceding sentence (that would be today), I find Yale in my access log. One week later, the first visitor to respond to my posting to a career listserv hails from...Brown!

18. University of California, Davis. The California campuses are piling up in a hurry. But Cal administrators ... is it too much to ask to pass this web site along to some undergraduates? This state is very top-heavy.

19. I wonder how long it will take me to record at least one visit from every college and university in the states. I am hoping that maybe in time for my birthday. UPDATE (May 22, 2005 [my birthday]: Over 93% of the institutions represented on lists of colleges and universities have been here.

20. But what does it say when a number of different individuals from the same school access my web site? What inferences can I draw about the programs? I'll keep mum for now.

21. "Commander, Moncrief Army Hospital"?!..."Naval Air Systems Command?!"..."56 Communications Squadron"?! How many ways can I say "hmm." Apparently three. Five if you include visits from Disney Worldwide Services, Inc. (Burbank, CA) and Monterey Bay Aquarium. Absurdity is a bipolar continuum.

22. Traced a visitor to a Finnish university by the name of Lapland, instantaneously implanting a false memory of some barfly explaining how Fins have more fun.

23. A "Commander, Moncrief Army Hospital"?!..."Naval Air Systems Command?!"..."56 Communications Squadron"?! How many ways can I say "hmm." Apparently three. Five if you include visits from Disney Worldwide Services, Inc. (Burbank, CA) and Monterey Bay Aquarium. Absurdity is a bipolar continuum.

This report does not represent a departure from standard security policy. fireflySun.com works to safeguard the identities of visitors by password protecting its usage directory. The password protection has impaired the ability of search engine spiders to maintain accurate and up-to-date estimates of traffic to fireflySun.com.

Sweet 16: July 23, 2005