Are IH and Cherokee on the verge of Bankruptcy?

Quote from sifferkoll

Back to the real question. Do you still believe it is easy to raise $89M for a tech where you do not CONTROL&OWN the IP, only license it, and if you piss off the inventor? Is not this the absolute core of the IH problem, then tell me?

I don't need to be Dewey Weaver to be able to answer this. IH does not have a problem. They are not going to raise $89 million for Rossi IP. That's over, ancient history. If they did it, they will owe an explanation to any investors who put money in, that the Rossi IP --apparently-- did not work out. This is not the same as a conclusion that it was completely worthless, so they are not giving up their license rights yet. If they decide to do that, they may go after Rossi for the $10 million. Don't be surprised if that happens.

Sifferkoll is assuming that the Rossi IP is valuable. How does he know that? Does he have the ERV report? Is he convinced that the test was fully valid, not subject to possible fraud somewhere, somehow, or simply measurement error, i.e, full validation was missing? If Sifferkoll has private information, fine. We don't believe it, not yet, because we, the public, do not have access to what we would need in order to draw sound conclusions. I think that at some point Dewey said he had seen the ERV report, so if that is correct, he is speaking from knowledge. We can then imagine that he's lying or something, but that is speculation unless there is conclusive evidence to the contrary. Planet Rossi is built from the accretion of speculation. Given enough, fusion begins in the core, generating massive hot air.

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Since I've been following this for a while now and had the pleasure (!) to communicate with you ... I've come to the conclusion that you IH guys might have some skillset/connnections in the paperwork domain, but are basically worthless when it comes to actually doing anything, like managing people and/or producing stuff.

That, as well, seems highly speculative. First of all, Dewey Weaver is not an "IH guy." He is an investor, and that means, obviously, he has money to invest. If he has management skills, they would show up in other activities. However, that he has the money to risk in IH would probably indicate success in other areas. Not conclusively, sometimes people inherit money or find it in the street, so to speak. Success at the beginning, the I Ching calls it.

I am not seeing that IH ever started a production effort. They, sanely, wanted proof of concept testing first, from their own use of the IP, as assisted by, but not controlled by, Rossi. Without that, no production effort, period. Prototypes only, until there was fully independent testing, I would assume (and much more than a single 1 MW test). They would not ramp up and put a hundred million dollars into production of devices if they are not totally satisfied on reliability. And if they are not totally satisfied, they are not going to toss good money after bad, $89 million after $11.5 million. It's ordinary business sense, and that Torkel Nyberg apparently does not understand this shows how deeply he is stuck on Planet Rossi. Rossi did not understand this; to him, there was an Agreement and that's that. He flat-out doesn't understand business, he has a primitive idea of what it's about, and his comments and the Complaint reek of it.

We still know very little of the activity of IH, other than Rossi's highly selective story.

Meanwhile a word about psychiatric diagnosis. I have an old friend with Aspberger's, possibly the smartest person on the planet in his field. However, he is extremely opinionated, and once he has an opinion, he can be thoroughly stuck, convinced he is right. And of course, in his area of expertise, he is usually right. But he is terrible at judging people and does not understand social process and how society actually functions. He's a mathematician, and had studied quantum mechanics (though his world-class expertise is with something very different, but it does involve the application of math to politics). We had been collaborating and had co-written some papers. Then he found that I was involved with cold fusion. He was convinced that my mind had been taken over by con artists and frauds, and everything I wrote, he fit into that picture. His intelligence and cleverness became devoted to proving that he was right. People who knew us both tried to talk him down. He was impervious, after all, he was sure, he knew that cold fusion was impossible, he knew all the reasons. That I also knew the reasons had no effect on him. Once he made his mind up, the whole world could try to talk him down, but, being Smart As Hell, he was going to stick to his guns, he was not about to change his mind because inferior people thought so!

He decided I was obviously unstable and decided to remove me from the organization we had started (and, yes, this was entirely because I had mentioned my involvement with cold fusion). I simply backed up, I was, by that time, very busy with cold fusion. He was then expelled from the organization's board by the board he had chosen and supported, because of his continual alienation of others. He still advises them from time to time -- as do I. But ... his Aspie's disempowered him, over and over, because he did not adequately factor for it. It was not just this one example.

I have a different diagnosis, a "developmental disorder," and I need to be very aware of it, because, for similar reasons, it can be disempowering, if I'm not careful. So, all the best, Torkel. As the Buddha said, work out your salvation with diligence.

Quote from axil

joshua cude:
Certainly, it is not conceivable that cold fusion itself will ever be proved impossible, so you are likely to go your grave clinging to the belief that it's real, but with most of the world ignoring it as it does other pseudosciences.

I have come to the conclusion that the FP Heat Effect is real, that there is anomalous heat. (By the way, Shanahan, the last published cold fusion critic, also thinks there is an anomaly, but merely that it is not nuclear nature, that it is unexpected chemistry.) Reviewing the helium evidence, I have come to the conclusion that helium is being produced proportionally to that anomalous heat, and that this indicates a nuclear reaction which, for communicative convenience, I call "cold fusion."

This is a testable conclusion, so this is not pseudoscience, but the position that cold fusion is pseudoscience is typical of Cude, and Joshua P. Schroeder, though not exclusive to them, because they are not the only pseudoskeptics on the planet. I will go to my grave soon enough, and whether or not cold fusion is real is not that important to me, what is important to me is what I stand for with the time I have left. I am already successful in life by the strongest measures. How about 7 children and 6 grandchildren and counting? My stand is for science, genuine skepticism, and that indicates testing that conclusion, attempting to falsify it. And I published my findings, got them through initially hostile peer review, and they were published in a decent multidisciplinary journal. Cude couldn't get published in any serious journal, only on the internet, where anonymous trolls can flourish.

From what I wrote the testing is actually happening or about to happen. I'm told that my paper had an influence. So I'm happy. Real science is my interest, and I only happen to know more about cold fusion than many other fields. I am also, long-term, interested in social process and most of my activity, in fact, has to do with that.

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You are lazy. You don't keep up with current research.

Cude acknowledges this. Let me explain that a little. His position is that "mainstream scientists" don't have time to pursue useless junk. He's right, and that makes perfect sense. What, however, is missing is that this is, properly, always a personal choice, or the collective choice of a specific organization. The sociological problem with cold fusion is that the rejection cascade, the establishment of that opinion of "junk," became established so strongly that even where contrary evidence appeared, it was shouted down. I wish it was only that it was ignored. It wasn't. There was active retaliation against people who dared to support cold fusion. It was considered proof of derangement. Fortunately, this was not universal. Journals continued to publish, just not the most notable, as Nature and Science, which appear to have an editorial policy against even reviewing papers on cold fusion (after all, why waste the precious time of reviewers?) That was their choice to make as publishers, and as long as they were not able to shut down all publishing, it was not total repression. But there continue to be effects, even though this is shifting.

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When will you discredit the work of Holmlid? I continue to wait.

I've looked at Holmlid. The biggest problem with Holmlid is that, though he has quite interesting results, they are unconfirmed. He is a publishing powerhouse, paper after paper. It is not clear what relationship this has with cold fusion. The conditions are radically different and also the effects he reports. This would appear to be LENR, if not artifact. But ... unconfirmed. And were I Holmlid, I'd slow down, if necessary, and work with others to replicate and confirm. More and more results could end up collecting dust. He is building a house without attending to the foundation, replicable and independently confirmed results.

Oh god

Cude makes a series of his usual accusations, and I'm responding to only one, because it is based on his fantasy of what happened and I care to present what actually happened.

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Anyway, in your paper that received an initially hostile review, has it occurred to you that between that and the second review, the editor got on the phone and asked the reviewer to hold his nose and let it through, because the paper was invited, and he couldn't really reject it, and it was only going into a low impact journal, and there was a deadline...? I suggest this because you claimed you revised it completely in between reviews, and yet, it reads pretty much like your usual polemic in these forums since 2011 or so, which is to say, it falls well below the standards of ordinary journals.

No, that has not occurred to me, because I did not complain about the hostile review. It was not complete, the reviewer's hostile comments were preliminary. I addressed his concerns, yes, rewriting the paper extensively. focused on communicating with him. He did not merely approve of the paper, he became effusive about it and helped write the conclusions. There is no editor who would have made that call at that point. I was dealing with the two section editors only, at first, that was the first review, with only a minor problem. One of them was my roomate at ICCF-18, a physicist, so getting through that first review was expected. They would not have intervened without telling me. This is what I got from the reviewer:

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I am happy that the author has tried to address many of the questions raised by me. Now I understand that while some aspects of this phenomenon are understood, most of the features including the mechanism of 4He production are still not explained. I have given my final comments which may be incorporated by the author.

Best regards.

My comments on the paper

I appreciate very much the efforts put in by the author to provide answers
to many of the questions/comments raised by me.

The title could be

Replicable Cold Fusion Experiment: Heat/Helium Ratio

The author could use the following in his concluding part of the paper.

It is clear from the various data available in the literature that the phenomenon of heat and helium correlation is replicable. While some attributes of this phenomenon are consistent with d –d fusion( e.g 4 He production and the energy associated with the heat), many of the other features expected from d- d fusion are not observed in these experiments( e.g. detection of high energy gammas, neutrons and other charged particles). Even the mechanism of production of 4He and the correlated heat generated is not understood. The fact remains that it is an interesting phenomenon which needs more detailed experimentation and requires new theoretical approaches for understanding all the observed features.

With these changes, I recommend that this paper be accepted for publication in Current Science.

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When I say that it's over in the journals, I mean that the extreme skeptical position has almost entirely disappeared and positive reviews and papers are being accepted. My paper was successful, it realized my goal, which was not merely getting a paper published, but actually catalyzing a more precise measurement of the heat/helium ratio. Real science.

The 1989 DoE review was quite negative, but it also recognized that there were open research issues. The 2004 DoE review came up a long way. Even though the work was not presented in a focused way and the review process was flawed, half the reviewers considered the evidence for anomalous heat to be conclusive. And one-third considered the evidence that the effect was nuclear in nature to be convincing (one) or somewhat convincing (the rest). This was a drastic change from 1989. The 2004 DoE review focused on everything and the kitchen sink. Jones was there presenting his TiDx neutron results. Totally confusing. Nevertheless, they recommended modest funding for research, which is all that is needed at this point. We need basic science, which was neglected in the search for More Heat to satisfy skeptics.

My paper was focused, and that focus had never before been published like that. And then I noted an experimental procedure that had been done, but only more or less accidentally, that apparently allows full capture of the helium. We do not know the results of experiments until they have been performed, but based on the prior work -- and yes, it's all over ten years old, that matters? Does science get stale, does it rot? -- I expect to see in the work, under way now, an improvement in the precision to better than 10%, we might get to 5%, with little question remaining about the retained helium.

So I could die with the sense that I've made a major contribution. It offends some people that I point this out, but I DGAF. (The dislike of self-promotion is very Wikipedian. Hmmm.....)

In that exchange with the reviewer, I showed that it was possible to convince a genuinely skeptical physicist, by focusing on the experimental evidence. That was a small example of what has happened in many places. Obviously, it doesn't work with some dedicated, committed pseudoskeptics and snarky debunkers. But so what? They are not journal editors and they have no real power in the world, only in their dark fantasy caverns.

As acknowledged, there remain journals with closed doors, but researchers stopped submitting to those journals years ago, for the most part. They may get another chance to publish a breakthrough paper. Not some rehash of old work, but new work, with the best facilities and careful attention. If the researchers need money, we will find it for them.

They already have what was difficult to get for so many years, a live graduate student, a pleasure to see her photograph.

No, IH is not on the verge of bankruptcy. They were not formed to fund public research, but ... I'd bet they would be receptive to making a small donation for basic research, of the kind I have proposed, which is far less expensive than product research, it's focused, with specific goals, not open-ended and speculative. Meanwhile, I need to work on the paperwork for a 501(c)(3) organization. I'm told by people with money to spare that there is plenty, available for good work.

No more moping in the corner for cold fusion. Times are changing.