Costly data.

Q: I am developing a dissertation on intelligence agent systems for problem solving in manufacturing for my M.S. in manufacturing systems engineering. My background is the industrial engineering consultancy area, and I would like to perform this on the management side. In terms of selecting a survey approach to gather data about it, is it possible to [acquire an] e-mail database of people in the industry to achieve this dissertation goal?

A: Getting access to mailing lists is very sensitive in this era of spam and overburdened attention to electronic media of many kinds. There are very few lists in any field that are available to access for any reason at all. In general, the only way to get reliable lists is to pay for them from a marketing firm. You also may want to explore strategies that you can use to increase the response rate to make sure that you get full value from a list that you do find.

MARC RESNICK, PH.D.