Posts by Bruce__H

Quote from Alan Smith

... administrators use all the cash -ostensibly for research- for administrating, and there is little left for any actual research. So Unis eat like elephants and shit like mice.

This is sort of, but not exactly, true in my experience. When I was winning grants my research needed research space, it needed sometimes expensive equipment, it needed technicians. All expensive stuff but stuff that needs to be in place. Putting it in place is partly what I think you are calling administration ... and to that extent I would ask how else you think it might be done? I certainly didn't want to supervise contracts for new buildings or bargain with the technician's union. I just wanted to do research. So having the administration do their thing was fine with me.

Now university vice-presidents and vice-deans do have a habit of proliferating and empire building. They like to build new buildings and attract new funding instead of concentrating on maintaining and improving the infrastructure that is already in place. To this extent I agree with you and could be made more efficient. But I don't see how any of that is holding researchers "hostage".

I am attempting to find out how the funding of individual researchers works at universities in Britain and Italy. Alan Smith claims that university administrators have enough of a choke hold on the funds that they "hold hostage" the researchers -- which I suppose means that some research is allowed and other research is not.

Is this true? Does anyone know? My own take is that a tenured professor with funding is fairly autonomous and independent of local administrators.

Shane D.

I don't see the problem with someone being an anti-LENR crusader as long as they are courteous and logical. After all, they might turn out to be right.

Quote from Dr Richard

Don't worry everyone knows Rossi runs on faulty logic - that's why he's where he is today!

The people on ECW don't know it. Rossi creates a distortion field that they are completely mesmerized by.

Here are the contents of a post I sent to ECW that has subsequently been removed by Frank Acland. It is part of a thread in which I have been saying the replication is still the gold standard for verifying research claims. Just prior to this deleted post Pekka Janhunen had pointed out that Mr Rossi is saying the the upcoming event is supposed to attract customers and is not supposed to be a test or demonstration ...

"Pekka, I am very aware of Mr. Rossi's stated goal for he January event. . He is heavily pushing the idea that his inventions have reached a stage of development beyond scientific testing. He is doing this in the hope that people will conclude that the products have already been scrutinized sufficiently and found to be real. Nothing could be further from the truth. There has been no satisfactory testing and no independent corroboration of his results.

People on this site should be very careful that they don't let Mr Rossi push them into accepting faulty logic"

Alan Smith

What is the name for the funding stream in the UK that goes through the hands of university administrators and allows them to hold researchers hostage? What is the name of the corresponding funding stream in Italy?

Quote from Alan Smith

Back to the straw man. The budgets are held hostage, not the staff, this was from the beginning a comment about the waste of money, nothing else.

Thank you for the clarification.

What budgets? In Canada, university administrators allocate the funds for research infrastructure (buildings) but faculty fund equipment and operations mostly from money they obtain themselves. The share of the infrastructure support that a faculty member gets from the administration depends on how much funding they can win. Given all this the leeway for administrators to push around tenured faculty is not huge. And the question of tenure is, in the end, dealt with by the department (i.e., one's co-researchers) as a whole rather than being soley in the hands of administrators so there is not a huge amount of hostage taking there either.

So again. What budgets? Is the situation in Italy grossly different from as I have described such that most, or even a substantial minority of a researchers's budget is derived from the university itself (an thus under the control of administrators)?

Good then. We will now move forward on this basis and you will answer why you think that Levi retaining tenure while associating himself closely with Rossi an LENR is consonant with the picture that university administrators in Italy hold the teaching staff pretty much hostage.

Quote from Alan Smith

Bruce__H

You can create a straw man argument if you like, but go do it with somebody else who is a tad more receptive.

This has gone all weird has it not? I entered this particular argument expressing a personal view based on direct experience. Experience that I think you lack. Since you mentioned the situation in Italy, where neither of us have faculty experience, I brought up an example of an LENR- connected and tenured faculty member there. It was most definitely not my intention to raise him as a straw man in any way and it completely mystifies me how you think I have gone there. All I can do is give you my assurance that my posts are sincere and not some sort of trickery or manipulation.

Quote from Alan Smith

... your reply is off topic, I was not discussing issues of tenure, but issues of beauracratic waste and inefficiency. Which are huge.

Good heavens. Do we really have to go over what you just said? You asserted that teaching staff are "held hostage" by university administrators, which in the context of the conversation I take to mean that you think that the administrators are telling the researchers what directions their research can or can't take. I replied that this is not true for tenured faculty and then you responded that it is true, especially in Italy. So I have given you an example of a tenured professor at Bologna (Levi) who appears to wander around doing what he likes with respect to LENR and asked how this corresponds to being "held hostage".

My knowledge of faculty life is from Canadian universities, not in European universities.

Quote from Alan Smith

I know because my friends who work in that precise sector tell me so. UK is not so bad yet, but it is moveing toward the same destination that Italian Universities have already reached.

I see. So you have no direct experience with this. I think you don't really know what goes on.

I don't see Giuseppe Levi losing tenure at Bologna. How is the administration there holding him hostage? The most they can do is restrict his access to laboratory space ... but they would be doing this anyway because Levi barely publishes, holds no or few grants that I can find, and does not supervise students.

Quote from Alan Smith

The above shows that you know nothing about the way these universities are controlled and managed. In most cases the administration holds the teaching staff pretty much hostage.

This is not true for tenured faculty members in North America. Do you know otherwise for European Universities? How do you know?

interested observer

Go guy! You are right on beam!

Quote from Shane D.

We get wined and dined all the time by the big boys. In return, they get a mention by us.

They do? Please make that process as transparent as possible.

Quote from Shane D.

Good point. Everyone forgets this, but Rossi had a friend from the old country (Giovanni?) who he claimed was the owner of JM Products at Doral. Or at least that is what he said, as I never saw a record of that in the court documents.

You are thinking of Francesco Di Giovanni who is the beneficiary of Platinum America Trust which, in turn, owns JM Products.

This is indeed in the court files. It is in the deposition given by Rossi on behalf of Leonardo Corp. Also, Abd UlRahman Lomax has a useful page devoted to the issue. http://coldfusioncommunity.net/the-owner-of-jm-products/

Quote from can

...please also check the original document to make sure that the values are correct ..

I've double checked the data values. Everything is OK.

I have plotted the temperature and power data found in the table in LION's notes (thanks to can for transcribing the notes).

The blue markers show data from a calibration run in which the heating chamber of the Looking For Heat device was left empty. The orange markers show data from the first 4 days of LION's experiment using a fueled reactor in the heating chamber. The green square come from a later era of the same experiment after LION put the system through what he called a "thermal shock".

I am not completely sure where the temperature data come from. In particular, i am not sure how they would correspond to the temperatures acquired and stored on the data card that LION supplied. Are the 2 orange data points at input powers just below 200 Watts supposed to be illustrating excess heat?

Robert Horst

Bob Greenyer obtained the files from LION and has made them available for download at https://goo.gl/8hvrrM. This is where I got the data I am using. Can must have obtained his data from the same place.

The ThermoA and ThermoB columns in the file (LOG00002.csv) for the active run contain a large number of cells with error messages. Can mentions that when he downloaded the file he filled these cells with interpolated values. I have not interpolated any values. I have just left the cells blank.

P.S. The data files I have been working with are available (for the next 3 weeks) at https://ufile.io/fwewc. In generating these files I took the original LION data files posted by Bob Greenyer, stripped out blank lines, then replaced every "Error" entry by a blank. The "error" entries are profuse on the thermoA and B channels and make up about 1/4 of all those entries.

Quote from magicsound

I suspect that this noise in the therm-A trace may be caused by leakage from the DC chopper (PWM) power controller. LION's post seems to confirm that he had the PWM connected in his setup. See my previous post for a sample waveform and harmonic spectrum.

This seems right to me. The data acquisition rate is 1 Hz here which is far lower than the frequencies in the PWM output. I think that the periodic signal (with period ~23 sec) seen in the ThermoA trace is a severely aliased version of the high-frequency PWM output.

I asked LION what PID settings he employed in his recent experiments. He has answered here http://disq.us/p/1xvsphz.

I take it that the 1,300 C setting he refers to is the set point temperature. Since both thermocouples were below 900 C for the entire duration of these experiments I expect that the PID was always outputting its maximal control signal, whatever that was. This would be true for the control as well as the active runs.