At 06:32 PM 9/27/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Regarding Abd ul-Rahman Lomax's that we have "turned the corner" I
certainly agree that there have no substantive attacks in
peer-reviewed journals and science magazines lately. I haven't noticed any.
Even Sci. Am. has shut up. That may be Steve Krivit's doing. He
apparently had a conversation with the editor -- or an e-mail
exchange. He cautioned her to look at the literature and think twice
before publishing more attacks and ridicule. Perhaps she took his
advice. More power to him.
I've been watching for outraged response to the Naturwissenschaften
review. Or the review in Journal of Environmental Monitoring.
Then again, maybe they just lost interest. Horgan, the guy who
attacked cold fusion often in the past, left the magazine with the
change in editor.
Them losing interest is a very good sign, seeing that you-know-who is
now on the editorial board at Naturwissenschaften. Nobody told me
this, certainly not him! I finally noticed it because Krivit reported
it last year, I'd missed it.
Shanahan seems to be the last "technical skeptic," such as Frank
Close or John Huizenga. That is, the last person who offers an
actual technical argument as opposed to statements such as: "get
back to me when you can heat my house."
Yes. Huizenga was like a broken record, though. He sees evidence on
helium from Bush and Lagowski. His response: of course they failed to
see the gamma ray. He sees that confirmed from Miles, his response:
of course this hasn't been confirmed. And they didn't see the gamma ray.
Really, if you don't see a gamma ray, you don't have fusion producing
helium. Did I mention that they didn't see the gamma ray? Why didn't
they look for the gamma ray, you can't have fusion producing helium
without a gamma ray.
It's embarrassing to read Huizenga. It's like half of him was
functioning and the other half had gone south.
Lomax reports that the journals of shut out Shanahan, the way other
anti-cold fusion journals treat cold fusion researchers. They cut
short the debate. I am not happy about that. I can see why they do
not want to give him more space in the print edition to respond to
critics. Print edition space is expensive.
Yup. And they don't see the point. He's not presenting new evidence,
he's just presenting a fringe explanation, nobody accepts his
theories. Nobody except those who don't know the field. He could not
have gotten an original article through, anywhere. But this is my theory:
They got some outraged comments from readers wondering why they
published this crap from Marwan and Krivit. Then they got the
critique from Shanahan. Shanahan imagines, he wrote yesterday, that
they were totally naive, they didn't expect that anyone would
criticize the review, they allegedly swallowed the propaganda of
Marwan and Krivit. That their reviewers would not know that this
could be considered controversial is what's naive, not those editors,
I'm pretty sure. No, the editors were convinced by their own
reviewers that the material was reasonably solid. And they decided to
take the chance and publish it. You really have to recognize the
courage it takes to publish something like that.
Having published it, and getting Shanahan's shallow criticisms, they
took the opportunity *to address their knee-jerk skeptical readers,
while appearing totally neutral.* Had they published just Shanahan's
critique, they have made themselves look bad, to that segment of
readers, looking for some reason to justify their knee-jerk
skepticism. Instead, they published Shanahan plus the response by a
veritable phalanx of heavily published scientists in the field.
And that is exactly where they'd want it to stop. Yes, there is a
certain kind of possible dysfunction there, though there could also
be an element of protection of their readership from being distracted
by endless crap from a person who will never, it seems, admit even
the smallest error. Well, he did admit that the DoE reviewer got it
wrong, calling the 5/16 helium results as being from "electrolytic"
cells. He'd already told me I was completely wrong about this, so ...
he did back down *a little.*
But I also pointed out that these weren't 16 cells "showing excess
heat." That the actual Habelstein review only gave heat data for
*one* cell. (Probably there were eight deuterium cells and eight
hydrogen cells as controls. McKubre, elsewhere, does say that no heat
or helium was observed from any of the hydrogen cells, but, rather
frustratingly, he doesn't tell us how many, or give any of the
obviously interesting details. These lacunae are frustraing, and have
not helped the field!) Shanahan has since shut up completely about
this, I think he's hoping nobody will notice how deeply he stuck his
foot in his mouth.
But if they have an on-line publication I think they should give him
unlimited space there, because that costs nothing. It seems to me
they should show that kind respect for any author who gets through
peer-review. Shanahan has done a lot of work on these papers, and he
deserves to be heard.
o I prefer to let him have his say.
I think that Shanahan would never have gotten through ordinary peer
review on this. I think they nudged it through. But that's not a
final conclusion.... It would be interesting to know the actual story someday.
This is getting a little off topic . . . but limitations imposed by
technology are often prolonged after the technology becomes obsolete
and it abandoned. This is sometimes done for political purposes, or
to preserve the power of entrenched interests. Maybe that is what
the journals are doing when they cut off the Shanahan debate.
Unjustified, high costs are maintained by laws or by
anti-competitive mechanisms to protect the profits of established
companies. Scientific journals are a prime example. They make a lot
of money publishing results on paper; results obtained for the most
part using government research grants. Those results should be made
available free on the Internet to every taxpayer.
Yeah, I'd think so. But that's the model. Now, since they don't pay
for articles, really, the whole model is obsolete. "Archival
journals" should be created by nonprofit entities on-line. Do they
pay the reviewers? If so, then there would have to be funding to come
up with something equivalent. It could be done. Advertising could
provide on-line income, which could be used to pay authors and
reviewers and other staff.... but also this could be funded by grants
and other public-interest money.
In Japan, the election laws are excessively restrictive, allowing
only 1950s style street campaigning. They do not even allow on-line
campaigning, I think I read the other day. This is an example of
imposing the limits of the old technology on the new for political
reasons. Street campaigning is expensive, inefficient, and
ineffective. It gives the advantage to old or elderly politicians
who are have lost of money and who think the Internet is a series of tubes.
(Then again, perhaps the journals cut off Shanahan because they want
to edit his response, and that costs them money. The New York Times
recently decided to review on-line responses to their articles and
eliminate the lunatic fringe. Along with that, they had to limit the
number of responses and allow only about a day to respond, because
it costs them review responses.)
Yes. Filtering is expensive, unless you harness your readers to do
it. Some do that. There would be ways.
