Shane D. Administrator
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  • from Pensacola Beach, Fl.
  • Member since Jan 26th 2015
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Posts by Shane D.

  • ICCF-24 updates and other Anthropocene/ARPA-E news

    Quote from Gregory Byron Goble

    Solid state fusion, as a term for cold fusion, dates back decades.

    Team Google in attendance it seems they have not abandoned the field. Neither has Matt Trevithick in my opinion.

    Will future conferences have a Solid State Energy Summit? How was this one decided upon? Is it an ICCF creation or other?

    Whatever is going on with the former TG, IMO having this ICCF in Silicon Valley is a milestone, and a very promising development. Something Page probably had in mind when going through the trouble to make this happen. And something we should keep in mind as the conference approaches.


    I did a little search on LENR-CANR and it appears this is the first ICCF in the innovation capital of the world. It will attract some attention from the right people. An added bonus is that SV is also an area rich with investors looking for their next green venture.

  • Frank Gordon's "Lattice Energy Converter (LEC)" online Simposium video

    Very high quality, and informative production. Congratulations to the LF team of David, Alan S, Ruby for making it happen, and forum member Jeff for volunteering his editing skills. Many thanks go to the distinguished members of the panel for contributing their time, and expertise, and special thanks go to Gordon and Whitehouse for their invention, and commitment to open science.


    This is the kind of team effort that will help keep the LENR community interconnected between conferences and shorten the innovation process from concept to lab, to market. We anticipate many more to come.

  • Updates from Google on LENR research

    Quote from Ahlfors

    PLOP

    US20210151206A1


    THE INVINCIBLE TEAM


    Thanks as always. That one patent application resulting from the TG funded effort, IMO, had the best chance to slip by the USPTO examiner and be approved. It was the only solid lead reported in the Nature paper that I recall.


    Sadly it was rejected. And in no unambiguous terms, as the examiner used quite strong wording IMO in his very long rebuttal. He even went so far as to call LENR (which the team denied it being) "fringe science", and gasp, used Schenkel's own public writings against him. What a low blow.


    Nothing new here, LENR has seen this all before. As always it appears that whoever wants to capitalize/monetize on their lab results, or theory, will just have to make something with it, and go from there.

  • Updates from Google on LENR research

    Quote from orsova

    Matt’s DCVC bio. It seems he’ll be focused on clean energy investments. It will be interesting to see what details filter out over time. Perhaps there’ll be some LENR in there, but who knows. It’s only a guess, but it feels more and more likely that Google’s interest in LENR is over.


    https://www.dcvc.com/bio/core/matt-trevithick.html

    Nice how they don't shy away from mentioning CF in his bio. Maybe one day the name will come back in vogue:


    "Matt also directed a reevaluation of cold fusion that included sponsored research at MIT and facilitated Alphabet’s investment in Commonwealth Fusion Systems"


  • Updates from Google on LENR research

    Nice find Gregory Byron Goble . Koningstein also said this in the interview:


    "I help through our group sponsor research, for example, at a couple of universities in Nuclear Excitation via Electron Capture, which is a recently observed form of nuclear transition that might have an energy option. So that could be really cool for, let's call it, designer nuclear power for portable applications."

  • Clearance Items

    Quote from magicsound

    Some background: "A longtime professor of physics at UCLA, Wong served as the director of the Plasma Physics Laboratory at UCLA"


    That is from a US DOJ press release: https://tinyurl.com/2p98e8se

    headlined "Former UCLA Physics Professor Agrees To Plead Guilty In Federal Contract Fraud Case And Pay Nearly $1.7 Million In Damages"

    He should have taken a lesson from Rossi on how to fake invoices.

  • Clearance Items

    That is the Alpha Ring International guy and there have been some posts about them scattered about. Nothing all in one place that I can see though. If you dig and find something worthy about him, then of course a dedicated thread would be in order.

  • Caveat Emptor (investors beware)

    Quote from Daniel_G

    Coincidentally my brother is an oncologist who took care of the one of the brothers who were commercializing the Papp engine. I had a lot of time to talk with them during that time. They are a couple of engineers, one brother mechanical and one electrical that did control systems (he was the one who had cancer). They showed me photos and videos of what they were doing. They were the original partners of Joseph Papp. They ran a small machine shop in Iowa. I think one of the brothers tried to steal the concept and built a company and then finally ended up under criminal investigation. The other brother contacted me one to ask me if I could help him get some thorium. Haven't heard from them since.

    Yes, that was a colorful story. What I remember most though, is that Papp took his secrets to the grave. That is the moral of the story IMO. Not what he claimed his machine could do. Many in this field have done, and will continue to do, the same.


    Ironically, the many selfless researchers who have kept no secrets, seem to suffer the same fate.

  • Caveat Emptor (investors beware)

    Quote from Ahlfors

    ... and indeed I put foregoing brochure in playground place, following the save rule of relegate irrelevant or lunatic opinions behind nominal fences. Enclosure appears lately a bit too crowded.

    That is fine. This is a good place to keep until we find out more. The only reason I find it interesting is because of Hagelstein and Nagel. Good find nonetheless. Anything LENR we need to check it out. Thanks.


    Just in case there is something to this, I moved it to this thread. It may get lost in the Playground.

  • Caveat Emptor (investors beware)

    Quote from Ahlfors

    "This energy gain phenomenon may best be theoretically explainable by the same or similar process

    as observed in low energy nuclear reactions (LENR)."

    The only thing I can find on WPPEnergy GmbH is this video with COO Troy MacDonald from July 2021. In it he mentions the green H tech, and at 6:02 LENR. The rest is greek to me (hard to understand); i,e, Blockchain, NFT's, and Crpyto.


    WPP Energy GmbH, Troy E. MacDonald, COO & CIO – It's Market


    Since Nagel and Hagelstein are listed as being on the "Team", I am curious. Have we talked about them before? The forum search gives me error code. .

  • The Playground

    SocArxiv, pressured by the cancel culture mob over this Mexico City Ivermectin paper, caves and withdraws it. "This is the first time we have used our prerogative as service administrators to withdraw a paper from SocArXiv".


    ivermectin – SocOpen: Home of SocArXiv
    socopen.org


    Preamble by Philip N. Cohen, director of SocArXiv


    SocArXiv’s steering committee has decided to withdraw the paper, “Ivermectin and the odds of hospitalization due to COVID-19: evidence from a quasi-experimental analysis based on a public intervention in Mexico City,” by Jose Merino, Victor Hugo Borja, Oliva Lopez, José Alfredo Ochoa, Eduardo Clark, Lila Petersen, and Saul Caballero. [10.31235/osf.io/r93g4]


    The paper is a report on a program in Mexico City that gave people medical kits when they tested positive for COVID-19, containing, among other things, ivermectin tablets. The conclusion of the paper is, “The study supports ivermectin-based interventions to assuage the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health system.”


    The lead author of the paper, José Merino, head of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI), a government agency in Mexico City, tweeted about the paper: “Es una GRAN noticia poder validar una política pública que permitió reducir impactos en salud por covid19” (translation: It is GREAT news to be able to validate a public policy that allowed reducing health impacts from covid19). The other authors are officials at the Mexican Social Security Institute and the Mexico City Ministry of Health, and employees at the DAPI.


    We have written about this paper previously. We wrote, in part:

    “Depending on which critique you prefer, the paper is either very poor quality or else deliberately false and misleading. PolitiFact debunked it here, partly based on this factcheck in Portuguese. We do not believe it provides reliable or useful information, and we are disappointed that it has been very popular (downloaded almost 10,000 times so far). … We do not have a policy to remove papers like this from our service, which meet submission criteria when we post them but turn out to be harmful. However, we could develop one, such as a petition process or some other review trigger. This is an open discussion.”


    The paper has now been downloaded more than 11,000 times, among our most-read papers of the past year. Since we posted that statement, the paper has received more attention. In particular, an article in Animal Politico in Mexico reported that the government of Mexico City has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ivermectin, which it still distributes (as of January 2022) to people who test positive for COVID-19. In response, University of California-San Diego sociology professor Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra posted an appeal to SocArXiv asking us to remove the “deeply problematic and unethical” paper and ban its authors from our platform. The appeal, in a widely shared Twitter thread, argued that the authors, through their agency dispensing the medication, unethically recruited experimental subjects, apparently without informed consent, and thus the study is an unethical study; they did not declare a conflict of interest, although they are employees of agencies that carried out the policy. The thread was shared or liked by thousands of people. The article and response to the article prompted us to revisit this paper. On February 1, I promised to bring the issue to our Steering Committee for further discussion.


    I am not a medical researcher, although I am a social scientist reasonably well-versed in public health research. I won’t provide a scholarly review of research on ivermectin. However, it is clear from the record of authoritative statements by global and national public health agencies that, at present, ivermectin should not be used as a treatment or preventative for COVID-19 outside of carefully controlled clinical studies, which this clearly was not. These are some of those statements, reflecting current guidance as of 3 February 2022.

    • World Health Organization: “We recommend not to use ivermectin, except in the context of a clinical trial.”
    • US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “ivermectin has not been proven as a way to prevent or treat COVID-19.”
    • US National Institutes of Health: “There is insufficient evidence for the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel (the Panel) to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.”
    • European Medicines Agency: “use of ivermectin for prevention or treatment of COVID-19 cannot currently be recommended outside controlled clinical trials.”
    • US Food and Drug Administration: “The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals. … Currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”

    For reference, the scientific flaws in the paper are enumerated at the links above from PolitiFact, partly based on this factcheck from Estado in Portuguese, which included expert consultation. I also found this thread from Omar Yaxmehen Bello-Chavolla useful.


    In light of this review, a program to publicly distribute ivermectin to people infected with COVID-19, outside of a controlled study, seems unethical. The paper is part of such a program, and currently serves as part of its justification.


    To summarize, there remains insufficient evidence that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19; the study is of minimal scientific value at best; the paper is part of an unethical program by the government of Mexico City to dispense hundreds of thousands of doses of an inappropriate medication to people who were sick with COVID-19, which possibly continues to the present; the authors of the paper have promoted it as evidence that their medical intervention is effective. This review is intended to help the SocArXiv Steering Committee reach a decision on the request to remove the paper (we set aside the question of banning the authors from future submissions, which is reserved for people who repeatedly violate our rules). The statement below followed from this review.


    SocArXiv Steering Committee statement on withdrawing the paper by Merino et al. (10.31235/osf.io/r93g4).

    This is the first time we have used our prerogative as service administrators to withdraw a paper from SocArXiv. Although we reject many papers, according to our moderation policy, we don’t have a policy for unilaterally withdrawing papers after they have been posted. We don’t want to make policy around a single case, but we do want to respond to this situation.

    We are withdrawing the paper, and replacing it with a “tombstone” that includes the paper’s metadata. We are doing this to prevent the paper from causing additional harm, and taking this incident as an impetus to develop a more comprehensive policy for future situations. The metadata will serve as a reference for people who follow citations to the paper to our site.


    Our grounds for this decision are several:

    1. The paper is spreading misinformation, promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.
    2. The paper is part of, and justification for, a government program that unethically dispenses (or did dispense) unproven medication apparently without proper consent or appropriate ethical protections according to the standards of human subjects research.
    3. The paper is medical research – purporting to study the effects of a medication on a disease outcome – and is not properly within the subject scope of SocArXiv.
    4. The authors did not properly disclose their conflicts of interest.

    We appreciate that of the thousands of papers we have accepted and now host on our platform, there may be others that have serious flaws as well.


    We are taking this unprecedented action because this particular bad paper appears to be more important, and therefore potentially more harmful, than other flawed work. In administering SocArXiv, we generally err on the side of inclusivity, and do not provide peer review or substantive vetting of the papers we host. Taking such an approach suits us philosophically, and also practically, since we don’t have staff to review every paper fully. But this approach comes with the responsibility to respond when something truly harmful gets through. In light of demonstrable harms like those associated with this paper, and in response to a community groundswell beseeching us to act, we are withdrawing this paper.


    We reiterate that our moderation process does not involve peer review, or substantive evaluation, of the research papers that we host. Our moderation policy confirms only that papers are (1) scholarly, (2) in research areas that we support, (3) are plausibly categorized, (4) are correctly attributed, (5) are in languages that we moderate, and (6) are in text-searchable formats. Posting a paper on SocArXiv is not in itself an indication of good quality – but it is often a sign that researchers are acting in good faith and practicing open scholarship for the public good. We urge readers to consider this incident in the context of the greater good that open science and preprints in general, and our service in particular, do for researchers and the communities they serve.




  • The Playground

    Quote from stefan

    All elderly people should be banned as well to restaurants as many of those have a a weak immune system and even if they took the vaccine, they would not be protected from getting covid. So in order to go to an event you should show a covid pass and a birth certificate. This way we young and healthy would avoid getting covid and then not pass it on the elderly in secondary infections.

    Good idea. We can also isolate all the young people with "a body from hell" so they don't pollute the healthy. 8o