For LENR peer-reviews what kind of unbiased specialists would you suggest?
For a manuscript that includes gamma spectra, maybe someone familiar with those techniques?
It's up to the editor. Submitting authors can often make suggestions to aid the assigning editors find someone suitable. But there is no guarantee the suggestions will be followed. It helps the editors if you have a focused paper.
Your material on outside peer review has intrinsic interest for me, but how do you think it is relevant?
On the one hand, I don't think that ResearchGate has editorial mechanisms that are anything like those Baldwin studies. On the other hand, whether outside review began 10 years ago or 500 years ago, how would that change any argument that has been made here?
I completely disagree with your assessment of Researchgate. I think it is a great tool for preprint publication. That it is not being properly used or paid attention to seize its potential by a great part of the scientific community is not Researchgate’s fault. The comments section is a de facto space for open peer review, and the possibility of posting open questions are great tools for collective peer review. People simply doesn’t engage much in most cases, but I have taken part and follow many extraordinarily valuable discussions that are taking place at Researchgate about important scientific matters with deep implications.
Well no. You don't disagree with my assessment of ResearchGate. I also think it is a great tool for preprint publication. I agree with everything you say.
But ResearchGate is not a forum for peer-reviewed science because publication of the works does not require the the authors to make a case that expert reviewers find acceptable. It should not be the final stop for significant research. Authors who feel they have important results to share should have the guts to put them in front of competent specialists whose opinions are consequential. Everyone benefits.
Why didn't you present a talk on your gamma-spectrum work at the recent ICCF meeting? It could have been one of the videos we are talking about on this thread.
Shane D. I would not address this except for your threats to ban Ascoli.
Oliver Barham (US Navy Project Manager) DID NOT SAY "in light of 25 years further study...." as you imply. That was in the McKubre paper (in fine print where it is hard to read) on the right side of the slide you reference. That was an old article by McKubre and rightfully he pondered the question.
Ascoli did not imply what you say. You are wrong here. He said, clearly, that the quote came from the McKubre paper and he said that that paper was on the right side Barham slide. You are just repeating back to Ascoli exactly what he said.
And so on. Ascoli isn't going off the deep end here. It is all just the regular to and fro of discussion. It isn't tricks. I just don't understand where you see the harm.
I should have known you were just looking for another opportunity to smear the community. Mission accomplished, now no more of your poison on this thread.
Ascoli's post is well-written, logical, polite, and relevant to the ongoing conversation on this thread. It is not a smear and it is not poison. It appears to me to be a person's sincere opinion.
I am sad but unsurprised when I see that people have upvoted your nasty mischaracterization.
You only like open data that you can pick holes in by 'being unsure' of course.
Not true.
As I have mentioned before (here) I see hope, in Daniel's program, for open-science investigators and an online community to interact and come to agreement about what would sway a sceptic. I am hoping that such agreement (on what would be persuasive) would be achieved before the results come in and that sceptics would thus be trapped into committing themselves to valuing the outcome.
That is a very offensive way to describe 2 people with distinguished academic careers at a respected university. Another example of academic snobbery on your part.
You misunderstand. I completely agree that they are accomplished researchers with distinguished careers at prestigious universities. They are the real deal. In fact, that was precisely my argument. Real scientists don't think of ResearchGate or ArXive as the permanent home for genuine science.
I called them "the so-called Swedish Professors" because that is what people were calling them here on LENR Forum ... "the Swedish Professors".
Dear Bruce. You are an unutterable snob. Take that as a compliment.
This is not snobbery. I am pointing out completely ordinary intellectual standards that the entire LENR community should be supporting if they want their subject taken seriously.
Posting something or other on a preprint service can be worthwhile if, in the end, it gives rise to an actual published work subjected to real peer review. But it is not worthwhile if it is used to lend a faux aura of science to poor work, or nonsense, or malevolent fakery. If this is what happens, then it is literally pseudoscience.
No one takes ResearchGate or other preprint services seriously as ultimate destinations for genuine science. Look at the so-called Swedish Professors who "published" a study on Rossi's fraudulent device on the ArXive.org repository. When legitimate questions were raised about this work, and when outright fraud by Rossi was suspected, did any of them address the concerns or publish anything notifying people that the work might not be valid? No. They just shut up about it and slunk away. Why? Because none of them see this as a genuine publication. Nothing is actually at stake. If they had actually published in a real journal and then failed to reveal a possible fraud underlying it, they would all have been at risk of serious academic sanctions from their respective universities ... even up to dismissal. No risk of that here though. In their judgement a preprint isn't worth defending. They are right too!
Writing a real scientific paper is hard work. Fighting it through peer review to publication is just as hard. Wyttenbach definitely needs help writing and if you are doing that then more power to you. But why go through that hard work unless your intention is to end up with a real publication instead of something pseudo?
I found Daniel Gruenberg's iccf presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFsEjW-U2Rs) to be disappointing. Little evidence was presented for his claims. The only plot that might be supposed to support his claims was poorly formatted and did not show what it was supposed to show. Nonetheless, I think that this research could potentially lead to something persuasive if the right approach is taken.
A refereed paper demonstrating Daniel's results would, of course, be welcome. But even in its absence, I think that there might be another avenue that would persuade. Daniel has professed willingness to send working reactors to independent labs for validation of their ability to produce excess heat. I think that is this were done in an open data manner -- such as practiced by MagicSound -- it could lead to very persuasive results.
I, personally, can conceive of a confluence of labs, procedures, and results that I would find persuasive as to the reality of LENR. I wonder if others feel the same way.
... you will see a paper published by Jurg and me later this years or early 2022. So you might say we collaborate.
OK.
I hope you two are not intending ResearchGate as the ultimate receptacle of this work. I wouldn't call a work appearing on ResearchGate a "paper". I would call that an unreviewed manuscript. Nor would I call it "published". I don't know what word should substituted for "publish" though. "Displayed"?
This fuel was not prepared by Russ.
Thank you. Is this a supposition? I am unsure how knowledgeable you are about Wyttenbach's current work.
If Wyttenbach is currently seeing gamma radiation from fuel not prepared by Russ George (but prepared generally according to George's ideas) then this is a sort of replication of George's previous results isn't it? I would think that would be important.
Yes: The spectrometer sees it...
I'll try asking my question a different way in the hopes that you will see more clearly what I am asking ...
Do the gamma spectra you are currently investigating all come from fuel pellets originally prepared by Russ George?
No- I spent my time teaching students and seeking (and getting) donations from both government and industry. I had the mistaken view that I was paid to teach, and went above and beyond to do that.
I see nothing wrong with teaching. But there is thus a part of academic science -- enduring referee's direct criticisms and fighting for your work to be published -- that you have not had. That is what I meant. What you see as an extraordinary singling out of LENR for victimization I see as pretty normal scientific to-and-fro.
I spent 10 years as a university lecturer, plus 3 years working in academic science (bio-research) so I do know a little about academic life, in the UK at least..
I was insufficiently clear, I think, when I said that people complaining about the negative reaction of mainstream science to cold fusion (as it was then) are people with little experience of academic science.
I don't just mean experience of life in an academic institution. By experience of academic science I mean the experience of working to address the concerns of expert peer reviewers reading grant proposals or manuscripts submitted for publication. That is at the core of things, as THH has recently pointed out.
Many of the sceptical posts that produced extremely adverse responses on this site just strike me as pretty ordinary scientific discourse of the sort one often gets from referees. Sometimes it is right on and sometimes not, but it is all science and that is the life one lives. You get used to it. When I see people complaining that they and their friends are being subjected to some sort extraordinary persecution I therefore suspect that they are just not in the life and so are not used to how things actually go.
I don't know what a lecturer post entails in Britain. Does it mean 10 years of writing grant proposals and publishing 2-3 peer reviewed papers per year?
Yes: The spectrometer sees it...
Right. I understand that you measure gamma radiation from fuel. And I understand that you use a spectrometer and so on. This was all in your ResearchGate manuscript. But all those claims were based measurements carried out on on fuel manufactured by Russ George. I am now asking specifically about the source of the fuel for your recent claims of gamma activity.
Are you using fuel that you prepared yourself?
... I consider it pretty much an established fact that LENR was relegated to pseudoscience status, and stigmatized since a few months after the FP's news conference. Once that was established, it became a mere afterthought that those following the science would have to pay a reputational price, and there should be no doubt they did!
I agree with all this. My original point was that mainstream research is broad and mainstream researchers are always picking away at the edges of science to try and discover new things. It is pretty typical that established scientists have a variety of projects on the go in their labs ... some of which are very much following up previous leads and so likely to be productive and so not too adventurous, and some of which are much more speculative and risky. So I think that the results coming out now would have come around anyway without all the gnashing of teeth and claims of victimization we have seen from the LENR community over the years.
I think the moral of the story from us believer's standpoint, is that mainstream has it's flaws, but overall they do much good. But, they screwed up when it comes to LENR.
I don't think that mainstream science screwed up here. How do you expect funding to work .... give public funds to projects that have been tried and appear to have failed? The most science-y part of science is to identify claims that while interesting, do not appear to have empirical support. But no one has a crystal ball. The call can be wrong. And that is not a screwup -- it is just science working. If there is something to the claim after all then someone will produce convincing data at some point.
We switched to more reproducible surface layers. And yes we base our work on Russ' work and gammas are for 100% reproducible.
Thanks for the reply. However I still do not totally understanding your meaning. Are you saying that you are seeing gamma radiation from fuel you have made?
A bigwig college dean said that! At Cornell or someplace. He was kidding, but only partly kidding. His point was there is a great deal of petty disputation in academia. Every academic I have quoted that to wryly agrees.
Of course there is petty disputation. Here is a joke told to me by a departmental chair ...
"Q: How do you tell a professor outside the door from a dog outside the door?
A: When you open the door the dog stops whining."
But all of this business about corruption and low standards is not something I see around me. It's bosh.
We currently are only interested in the radiation to better understand the coupling.
I will rephrase my question. Since Russ George left, have you made new batches fuel that exhibit gamma radiation?
