Civil Engineering September 2022 | Vol 30 No 8

Civil Engineering September 2022 45 “L et me tell you a story.” This is the iconic introduction used by the old Italian granny in the 1970s TV show Golden Girls. The introduction normally had some vague relevance to or a different perspective on the overall story line. In any case, it makes a good attention grabber opening. Let me start my story by telling you about my unique qualifications to tell this story. Google Scholar can be used to rate a person’s international researcher rating. One of the criteria used in the evaluation is how many times your published work had been used or referenced by other researchers – a kind of a reference index. In this process of rating, I observed there are many internationally peer reviewed publications referencing previous work published by Emile Horak. The references are in diverse fields like the digital divide, cancer studies, medicine in various fields, plant pathology, breathing illnesses and asthma, etc., as well as various aspects related to mushrooms. 1 I now also get invitations to be a speaker at international conferences based on my recently published research. However, in some of these fields my alter ego published, and I cannot take up the invitation as my own. My professed field of research spe- cialisation is in roads, airfields, materials, pavement performance and pavement structural analysis. I am on an Academia reference listing link which virtually daily prompts me to claim ownership of references and guide this listing towards some form of truth of actual publications I can claim to be the author of. I often have to use the “not me” button on Academia reference listings. I believe if I could have claimed all of the nearly 6 000 listings of “my publications” by my “alter egos” I would be one of the most cited interna- tionally recognised researchers. It seems the name Emile Horak may be as common in Europe and America as Koos van der Merwe is in South Africa. The publications by my “alter ego” on all forms of mushrooms, specifically the hallucinatory type, piqued my interest. Using my alter ego I claim instant knowledge in a distortion of the Dunning- Kruger Effect. 2 I claim the instant confidence to talk authoritatively about mushroom farming. No surprise there! The sum of my knowledge is in effect the comical expression: “It is about keeping them in the dark and feeding them horse dung.” I will expand on the darkness and the horse dung with the parallel observed in the field of road and transportation research and development (R&D) in South Africa. THE STORY FRAMEWORK We have all heard that a picture can tell a story or is worth a thousand words. Figure 1, which shows the conceptual model for the life cycle of R&D 3 , does just that, demonstrating the whole field of progression from basic research to full implementation. This same conceptual diagram has previously been used successfully to demonstrate the impact and context Op i n i on Dr Emile Horak Pr Eng Managing Director Kubu Consultancy emileh@global.co.za The parallels between road and transportation R&D and mushroom farming in South Africa This article is the first of a two-part essay on the framework for the discussion of ignorance and agnotology in the roads and transportation field in South Africa. The second part will be published in a future issue of Civil Engineering . Figure 1 Model of development of technology (Adapted from Oujian and Carne, 1987)