At 09:30 PM 3/30/2010, you wrote:
I don't see anything wrong with the way Krivit presented the data in order to make his point.
Well, I have not examined this particular claim of Krivit's. Apparently I should. Generally speaking, though, if you are trying to make a point that someone altered data significantly, you can make the alteration look much larger by plotting it with a truncated graph, and that is very much a trick discussed in How to Lie with Statistics.
I don't agree with Rothwell that a truncated graph is never acceptable, but using it to create an exaggerated impression is indeed reprehensible.
Krivit wrote, as a defense, as seen in the mail forwarded with permission by Jed,
<http://newenergytimes.com/v2/library/2010/2010KrivitS-ACS.pdf>These slides are simplified so people can get the larger picture - which is, in fact, depicted correctly in this slide; the predicted value was shifted significantly.
"Significantly." If he had presented the full graph, would it still look "significant"?
Krivit is indeed "making a point," rather extensively and continuously, and it's an offensive point. He's just claimed that EPRI contradicts what McKubre told him at the press conference. EPRI simply did not confirm what McKubre told him, and the kicker is that this is all essentially moot. Krivit is just scouring the record for mistakes to report, dirt to dish.
I just posted a transcript of Krivit's questions at the conference. It appears that Krivit did not understand the paper he was asking Hagelstein about, the "University of Texas" paper, which was an EPRI report by Bush and Lagowski that had no energy/helium data, nor any energy data for the materials tested, which were from Pons. There is no way that this paper could be used, as it is, to impeach 24 MeV heat/helium. It's true that transmutation, if at high levels, would generate a lot of heat, but how that would affect heat/helium would depend on the relative abumdance of the reactions and what specific reactions were involved, whether they generated helium (i.e., alpha decay), etc.
Krivit is massively confused.
