Collection of papers from Ed Storms

As I have mentioned, Ed Storms sent me a collection of papers. I mean physical papers in folders. There were approximately 3,400 documents including:

1,880 that I did not have

1,300 that are already on file at LENR-CANR.org

192 irrelevant documents

I finished scanning them all and I sent the images back to Ed. I threw away most of the actual physical paper.

The collection includes many papers that Ed thinks people should read to better understand cold fusion. Background information. Some of these papers are quite old. Here is the EndNote database showing some of them. The one selected here is by Lamb, written in 1937. Since these old papers do not directly pertain to cold fusion, I think I should put them in a separate library folder, which I will call The Storms Reading Room. I think the readers would be confused to find papers from 1937 in the main library.

I added several papers from Ed's collection to the main library. These are pertinent papers that I have been wanting to upload for some time. Just now I uploaded one by Gur, of the Stanford group.

Most recent papers

It took me about a month to winnow out duplicate papers and to compare the ones in Ed's files with the ones I already have. The author and title names were slightly different in many cases. I used the Levenshtein Distance algorithm to compare the database items, and to automatically reconcile them. It works remarkably well. I still have to do some preparation before uploading them. I am still concerned that this might constitute a copyright violation, so maybe I should not upload all 1,880 new ones. I think I am covered under the "fair use" provisions, but I hesitate to consult with an expert. If someone knows a friendly expert please have that person call me. I miss the late David French who was my go-to guy regarding copyrights and patents. He was a nice guy. A bit strange, but that comes with the territory.

U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index

Quote from orsova

Whilst writing a data integrity plan for the long term retention of family documents, I was shocked to learn that CD-Rs really only have a life of 5-10 years. It turns out that pretty much all digital storage media are wasting assets.

Yup. CD-Rs are not to be trusted. That is what I found trying to read old ones a few years ago.

The only way to reliably preserve data is with hard disks. HDD or SSD. You can use the ones in your own possession, or the ones at cloud services for individuals such as Google Cloud or Carbonite. I recommend you use both. Keep a rotating set of 3 to 5 backup disks and copy the data onto one every month. Use a program the confirms data integrity. I recommend copying data to both compressed images of the disk, and uncompressed copies of folders. Sooner or later one of your backup hard disks will fail. You will have 2 to 4 others. Probably, when one fails, the others are close to failing. Data is important, so buy new ones. They are cheap these days.

I use ordinary, off the shelf disks with an external caddy; a.k.a. docking station, such as:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-2-bay-hdd-docking-station/6153102.p?skuId=6153102

I store the disks in plastic boxes with desiccant packs. Such as:

https://www.amazon.com/Inateck-Protective-Shockproof-Dustproof-Anti-static/dp/B075688MR7

In the distant future, data storage technology will improve tremendously, probably with DNA storage. For now, and probably for the lives of your children and grandchildren, people will have to pay attention to preserve digital data. Keep in mind that digital data is actually more robust and easier to preserve than paper printed information. As long as you pay attention. It is less likely to be destroyed by a fire, flood or mold. Because you make multiple copies and you store them in different locations. One individual hard disk is as fragile as a soap bubble. They used to be, anyway. A little static electricity could erase them. Two hard disks are less likely to be destroyed. With five of them -- including one in a data center -- it is extremely unlikely you will lose all copies of the data. Redundancy is the secret to preserving data.

As late as the mid-1980s I knew of companies that got into deep trouble because they kept all data on one hard disk with no backups, and the disks failed. I heard a rumor than one company failed because of that. Even in 1968 anyone with knowledge of computers knew that was a disaster waiting to happen.

Quote from orsova

I have a hard time trusting SSDs, but for short term recovery (as opposed to archiving), they do seem best.

Me too. I use HDD for backup. I have two that I only use every 6 months. They have lasted for many years.

Plus they are cheaper.

Here is one of the most successful document preservation projects in history:

Haeinsa Temple Janggyeong Panjeon, the Depositories for the Tripitaka Koreana Woodblocks

The Temple of Haeinsa, on Mount Gaya, is home to the Tripitaka Koreana , the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, engraved on 80,000 woodblocks between 1237 and 1248. The buildings of Janggyeong Panjeon, which date from the 15th century, were constructed to house the woodblocks, which are also revered as exceptional works of art. As the oldest depository of the Tripitaka , they reveal an astonishing mastery of the invention and implementation of the conservation techniques used to preserve these woodblocks.

Haeinsa Temple Janggyeong Panjeon, the Depositories for the Tripitaka Koreana Woodblocks

The Temple of Haeinsa, on Mount Gaya, is home to the Tripitaka Koreana , the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, engraved on 80,000 woodblocks between…

whc.unesco.org

Quote from Alan Fletcher

Microsoft's Project Silica is an example of research into this technology, focusing on storing digital data in quartz glass for long-term archival storage.

That's great stuff. It would be an improvement on what we have now. But I think in the long term they will need to develop DNA storage. Microsoft and others are working on this.

I uploaded several more papers. Many of them are inconsequential. The most recent papers are here, as always:

Most recent papers

I decided to add more papers to the main library, rather than to a "Storms Reading Room." I am adding papers that are directly related to cold fusion, written by authors who asked me to upload their papers in the past. As I said, many papers in this collection are not directly related to cold fusion. I still plan to put them into a separate folder.

There are still ~1,800 left. This is taking too long. I need to write more programs to automate the process. The index system will be simpler than the one for the main library, with no abstract. I cannot automate the process of identifying and extracting the abstract. I am not going to do it manually 1,800 times!

Quote from anonymous

With regard to finding and identifying the abstract -- wait 10 years -- by then there should be an open source (i.e. free) LLM that knows how to read a paper and find the abstract.

Yup. That seems likely.

Quote from anonymous

Hopefully by 10 years it will be a librarian's dream -- let it crunch for about 1 minute per paper and it is all indexed and abstracted for future search.

Yes. Which means that I will have done thousands of hours of work that a computer will do in 10 minutes. A strange feeling . . . But think of how many people devoted their lives to things like assembling dictionaries in the past. Alphabetizing lists and so on. There is Japanese movie about making a paper dictionary in the 1990s -- The Great Passage -- which I saw with mixed feelings.

The Great Passage (2013) ⭐ 7.3 | Drama

2h 14m

www.imdb.com

The database at LENR-CANR.org was assembled manually, mainly by Dieter Britz and Ed Storms, and later by me. You can download the entire database here, in EndNote format:

http://www.lenr-canr.org/EndNoteExport.txt

You can install this in the free version of EndNote. The most recent paper I uploaded looks like this in the on-line index:

I convert it from EndNote to MySQL with a program. Here it is in the EndNote export format, with the fields marked with EndNote's peculiar notation:

%0 Journal Article

%A Tsarev, V. A.

%A Worledge, D. H.

%D 1991

%T New results on cold nuclear fusion: a review of the conference on anomalous nuclear effects in deuterium/solid systems, Provo, Utah, October 22-24, 1990

%B Fusion Technol.

%V 20

%P 484

%! New results on cold nuclear fusion: a review of the conference on anomalous nuclear effects in deuterium/solid systems, Provo, Utah, October 22-24, 1990

%K review

%X INTRODUCTION

A conference entitled "Anomalous Nuclear Effects in Deuterium/Solid Systems," organized by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the U.S. Department of Energy, and Brigham Young University (BYU) was held October 22-24, 1990, at BYU in Provo, Utah. It was not by accident that BYU was chosen as the venue for the conference on cold nuclear fusion (CNF). It was there that 1 \ yr earlier Jones et al. first discovered (independently of Fleischmann and Pons) neutron emission following the loading of crystal lattices of the transition metals palladium and titanium with deuterium. Thus started the "cold nuclear fusion era."

%U http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/TsarevVAnewresults.pdf

I uploaded 10 new papers and two revised ones. See:

Most recent papers

These are mainly attacks from Nature, and one by McGalliard. The Nature papers are famous, and may have had a large impact on cold fusion. I previously uploaded partial copies of two of the Nature papers. I found the entire papers are now available for free at the Nature site. They charge for most papers so I figure they want people to download these.

This paper by Lindley describes the NSF/EPRI workshop in 1989:

Lindley, D., Noncommittal Outcome. Nature (London), 1989. 341: p. 679.

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LindleyDnoncommitt.pdf

This is quite a contrast to the transcript of the workshop itself:

EPRI. NSF/EPRI Workshop on Anomalous Effects in Deuterated Metals. 1989. Washington, D.C.: Electric Power Research Institute.

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/EPRInsfepriwor.pdf

I uploaded 35 more papers to LENR-CANR.org. See:

Most recent papers

This is a somewhat random selection of papers. They are from the Storms collection. I judged them to be directly relevant to cold fusion, unlike some of the background papers.

I wrote some new programs that automate the process, to speed things up. The programs cannot grab the Abstracts from the papers. So the on-line MySQL database search does not work as well. If someone would like to add the Abstracts to the database, contact me and I will set you up to do this.

As I noted, I uploaded several nasty ones from Nature because I found they are now available for free from the Nature site, so I suppose they are not worried about copyrights. I put the URL at the top of the papers.

I still plan to upload all the background papers into a different folder. There are 1,772 of them. I am still winnowing out some duplicates and papers that are difficult to read. Now that I have automated the process, I can add them to the database quickly, although without the Abstracts.