At 04:00 PM 12/16/2009, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
What's the payoff? ...That Steorn is really good at manipulating PR?
...That they they can pull a fast one on everyone? There seems to be
an equally unproven assumption that if Steorn can "pull it off" that
future prospective clients will know that they, too, will be able to
cash in on Steorn's PR skills and make tons of money by hiring them to
manipulate "PR" to their own advantage.
Such convoluted reasoning stretches my own internal BS scale. However,
I also have to confess that having such a conclusion prominently
displayed over at Wikipedia as the preferred explanation probably
didn't help my predisposition in taking it seriously. ;-)
Okay, being the resident expert on Wikipedia
(there are certainly people who know it better
than I, but they aren't reading this list, I think), I'll look at the article.
All right. The account above is inaccurate. While
individual articles often violate guidelines on
neutrality and sourcing, due to the way that
Wikipedia process operates, and there are also
groups of editors who might be highly inclined to
put in skeptical material outside of what the
guidelines allow, the article doesn't state that
advertising PR skills is "the preferred explanation."
Rather, the article simply reports that this
explanation has been offered by some published
commentators, and it also notes others. It's
possible that the standards for "published" have
been pushed a little, but the article presents
this neutrally, as far as I've noticed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn
About the 2007 demonstration. They blamed it on a
failed bearing due to the "greenhouse effect" in
the plastic housing. Okay, so it took them two
years to fix the bearing and pop some cooling holes in the plastic housing?
No, it's obvious, I'd say. They are creating delay.
If the article is accurate, they have already, at
least once, released misleading information, by their own account.
In May 2006,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunday_Business_Post>The
Sunday Business Post reported that Steorn was a
former
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot.com>dot.com
business which was developing a microgenerator
product based on the same principle as
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy>kinetic
energy generators in watches, as well as
creating
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce>e-commerce
websites for customers. The company had also
recently raised about 2.5 million from
investors and was three years into a four year
development plan for its microgenerator
technology.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn#cite_note-post-ie-9>[10]
Steorn has since stated that the account given
in this interview was intended to prevent a leak
regarding their
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy>free
energy
technology.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn#cite_note-steorn-crisis-management-interview-10>[11]
In other words, when it suits them, they will
lie. At least that's how it looks to me! Lies are
sometimes not reprehensible. But ... the lies
that aren't reprehensible are lies to enemies who
will do harm with information, but the Sunday
Business Post? The public? Gratuitous
misinformation? Does that explanation make any sense at all, on the face of it?
