User talk:Abd

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Welcome!

Hello, Abd, and welcome to Conservapedia!

We're glad you are here to edit. We ask that you read our Editor's Guide before you edit.

At the right are some useful links for you. You can include these links on your user page by putting "{{Useful links}}" on the page. Any questions--ask!

Thanks for reading, Abd!

--Michaeldsuarez 20:25, 1 August 2012 (EDT)

• Hi, Michael, thanks for the welcome. I did read the guide. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Abd (talk)
  • You're welcome. It's nice seeing you again. --Michaeldsuarez 22:49, 1 August 2012 (EDT)

RE: Email addresses?

The Email function appears to be disabled. --Michaeldsuarez 13:52, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

There are many things that are strange about this website. I'm here partially because strange things amuse me. Conservapedia is a curiosity that I've chosen to explore. --Michaeldsuarez 17:11, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

Cold Fusion.

I must disagree with your points on cold fusion, particularily the removal of the section "psuedoscience". The Pons-Fleischmann experiment was neither reproducible, nor even consistent with the effects of nuclear physics (namely the production of deadly neutron radiation). Today's proponents, also are quite sketchy, whose proof, often flies in the face of conventional nuclear physics. Furthermore, these people often tend to shift the blame of their non-reproducible experiments onto a conspiracy, a trait often seen in cranks. brenden 13:27, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

Thank you. You hold a number of common opinions that are, unfortunately, myths.

1. The Pons-Fleischmann experiment, as to the basic finding of anomalous heat from palladium deuteride under certain conditions, has been widely replicated. There are 153 papers showing the anomalous heat that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. (There are many more papers on the general topic). Recent work is continuing, and is focused on improving the reliability and level of heat, as to one approach, and another approach is attempting to explore the parameter space to gain information useful in developing theory.

2. Neutron radiation is an expected result of the energetic collision of two deuterons, half the reactions produce a neutron and Helium-3. However, not all possible fusion reactions produce neutrons. The belief that they do is simple ignorance, produced from a assumption that if there was any nuclear reaction there, it would simply be from the very high density attained, and would be the ordinary fusion of deuterons. Quite simply, it probably is not that.

3. There is no neutron radiation from cold fusion, not as a primary product. There are *many* reports of very low-level neutron radiation, difficult to distinguish from background. The U.S. Navy SPAWAR group made headlines a few years ago because they found good evidence of extremely low level neutron radiation. The level is extremely low, and clearly has nothing to do with the primary reaction, whatever that is. It is suggested that it's from very rare secondary reactions. The radiation was detected using solid state radiation detectors, and while there has been some criticism of earlier SPAWAR work detecting charged particle radiation (confirming much earlier work), the neutron detection was convincing because the detectors were placed such that the tracks could not be caused by chemical damage or radioactive contaminants. Complicated story.

4. There is no suppression of cold fusion, though there has been a kind of blackout in some journals, that still exists. There has been active effort to suppress funding for research. Both U.S. Department of Energy reviews (1989, 2004) recommended modest funding, but that has never been done, and intense lobbying by hot fusion proponents -- billions of dollars of funding at stake -- is probably connected with that. This is all well-documented by sociologists of science, it's not a crank theory as you imagine.

5. What is true about the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect (FPHE) is that it was quite difficult to replicate. It was, and remains, a quite difficult experiment in electrochemistry, taking serious expertise. There is a series of experiments done by SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) under contract with the Electric Power Research Institute, that showed the nature of the effect. The very same electrode showed different behavior under repeated conditions supposedly the same. It's all well understood now, but understanding it doesn't tell us exactly how to make more productive electrodes. It's an extremely difficult problem in nanostructure. We don't yet know the *exact* characteristics that produce the effect, but, nevertheless, what is known is conclusive as to "nuclear reaction." Basically, helium, a nuclear product, is correlated with the anomalous heat, at a value that is consistent with deuterium fusion. Because some don't understand the thermodynamics of this, I'll hasten to add that this does not show that the reaction is deuterium-deuterium fusion. Any reaction that converts deuterium, in whatever form, to helium, in whatever form, and by whatever mechanism, will produce that same energy/helium ratio.

6. We don't know what the reaction mechanism is. All we know is that in the FPHE, helium is being produced with about the right energy for the fuel to be deuterium. This is based on a reproducible experiment, it's been widely reproduced. To test the correlation, it's not necessary to have a "reliable" cell. Rather, one runs many copies of the same cell, records the heat from each, and measures (blind) the helium evolved. The "dead cells" become the controls! This has been done many times; and, in fact, some of the early "negative replications" also looked for helium and found none. It's obvious why. They also found no heat. Others who found heat did find helium, and the levels are correlated to the heat, and the levels also have been known to rise above ambient, so the common criticism that this is leakage from ambient -- which would not explain the correlation -- is simply mistaken. It couldn't be leakage, which would never rise above ambient.

7. Look, you can read the history of cold fusion if you want. There was abuse of scientific protocols that resulted in some level of suppression of cold fusion research. It's well known. For example, a grad student did his doctoral thesis on work with Bockris at the University of Texas, studying the production of tritium by these experiments. The work was sound. His thesis was denied, because of the reputation of cold fusion. He was accused of fraud, and though he was exonerated, the whole affair caused grad students everywhere to avoid working in the field, which then deprived it of the normal source of most ordinary replication labor. That had an impact. And to point it out isn't crankery, or are you claiming that suppression of research never takes place? I can name a number of situations where it did, and all of them involved some critical interest that believed it would be harmed if the research continued. But this has nothing to do with the science. After all, bogus research could be suppressed too.

8. I've never seen any cold fusion researcher, and I now know many of them, blame suppression for replication failure. You simply made that up. Some of this work is quite difficult to replicate, it can take patience. It took Pons and Fleischmann months to condition the cathode in a cell to the point where the effect appeared. The early replicators, under pressure from funding agencies to produce quick results, took weeks, found nothing, and reported that. Pons and Fleischmann, for intellectual property reasons, did not publish all their data and protocols initially, and some of the early replications simply did not have enough data. To give an idea of the advances in the state of the art developed by Pons and Fleischmann, it was not considered possible, before them, to load deuterium into palladium to a ratio of higher than about 70%. Later research, mostly by SRI, established that the necessary ratio to see the effect was higher than 90%. The early replications were doomed to failure, but they created a reputation of irreproducibility, which, as I'm seeing here, persisted, in spite of the fact that researchers did learn how to accomplish creating the effect. Miles, in fact, is cited in the 1989 ERAB panel report as having negative results. As the panel was still meeting, Miles started to get positive results. He attempted to notify the panel but they did not return his phone calls. Miles is the one who later went on, still working at the United States Navy Research Laboratory at China Lake, to find that helium was being produced correlated with the heat.

9. The best scientific opinion on cold fusion is in a formal and featured Review published in Naturwissenschaften, "Status of cold fusion (2010)," by Edmund Storms. That's a peer-reviewed journal, Springer-Verlag's "flagship multidisciplinary journal," Einstein was published in it (it was founded in 1913). Springer-Verlag is one of the two largest scientific publishers in the world. The other is Elsevier, which is also publishing on cold fusion.

Read the abstract: [1]. Or read a preprint of the paper: [2]. I'm mentioned just before the list of references, because I helped edit this paper.

10. I would suggest that the Conservapedia article on cold fusion should be based on solid scientific fact and verifiable history. What you have asserted is not. Cold fusion is not, by anyone who knows anything about it and who knows what pseudoscience is, considered a "pseudoscience." It's falsifiable, for example. The statement that the FPHE is the result of a reaction that turns deuterium into helium is testable. And it's been tested by a dozen research groups around the world, that found both heat and helium, and there is no substantial research that has found heat and not helium, not with the basic FPHE, using palladium deuteride. The statement that the effect was not reproducible is blatant nonsense. The peer-reviewed journals are replete with reports of replication of the basic effect. Get it straight, Brenden. If you'd like to help with the article, great, but please base your work on real knowledge, not rumor and opinion.

I wrote some of my changes without providing sources, but everything I wrote can be backed with citations to strong sources. I have still not received any assurance that my work here would receive proper and fair protection as needed from pseudoskeptics, so I've, so far, not been willing to invest the work to improve the article beyond the brief edits I made. I made a lot of effort on Wikipedia, was harassed by a dominant faction there, took an administrator from that faction to the Arbitration Committee, won the case, he lost his administrative privileges, yet I was banned for my trouble. I had no conflict of interest (then) and only cared about the quality of the article. I didn't edit it except seeking consensus, what was disliked was that I discussed the changes. They didn't like people who challenged administrators, even if it was done completely within due process and civilly. I don't want to repeat that, wasting my time. I don't have anything to gain personally by "promoting" cold fusion. I just happen to know a lot about it, I have the training in physics (from Richard P. Feynman) and I know the researchers and can ask them about anything. --Abd 02:36, 5 August 2012 (EDT)

Welcome, Abd. You are correct about Wikipedia and I am sorry that you had an unfortunate experience there. Perhaps you can add it to the Bias in Wikipedia pages. Wschact 03:45, 5 August 2012 (EDT)

Thank you Wschact. While I'd be happy to relate my experience at Wikipedia, I'm not eager to dive into interwiki politics. I took a look at that page, and specifically at the section Structural problems with Wikipedia (current version), because the Wikipedia problem is indeed a structural problem, and it's generic to wikis.

Different wikis propose different solutions. The problem with Wikipedia is that it presents itself as unbiased, and processes have been set up that purport to be -- and sometimes are -- unbiased, but processes are only as effective as the people who run them and use them, and Wikipedia has never set up structures that would compensate for what has been called MPOV-pushing, i.e., majority point-of-view pushing. Wikipedia assumes that the majority will be unbiased, effectively. Again, that assumption is contrary to policy, but if one looks at how decisions are actually made, they are made by the majority of those who show up to participate. In theory, decisions are made by argument, not votes, but the actual practice is such that only very highly-placed administrators can get away with making a decision contrary to a substantial majority. It's rare. More often those with high privilege just go with the flow, so a motivated faction can exert substantial control. There would be ways to compensate for this, but the Wikipedia structure became highly resistant to change. That's normal! It would take something extraordinary to avoid it.

Other models used include control by the founder, or sometimes almost total chaos. There are other possible governance models, but little work has been done. Control by founder or founder successor is a very common model for organizational governance, and this shades into control by a board (often self-appointed, but sometimes self-appointed implementing election results). Truly democratic organizational control is rare and has mostly not been attempted, even in organizations dedicated to advancing democracy. I could show examples. Basically, most activists don't trust the demos, the people, not when push comes to shove. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, it's just what's so.

The example in the section cited, however, "Netball and the Olympic Movement," is itself biased presentation of fact, not merely in how it's been presented, but how fact has clearly been misrepresented. When we are looking for something wrong, we will often find it, or imagine it, and think that what we imagine is "true."

The article version cited does not claim that "Netball is an Olympic sport," as stated in the critique. Rather, it states that "Netball is an Olympic-recognized sport." The article makes the difference clear. While some editor may have pointed to the legislative speech, that would not ordinarily be considered a reliable source. After all, politicians say what they please. I'm not bothering to research this further, I do know Laura Hale, she's a sports academic from Australia, and is not likely to be blatantly wrong on something like this. Her alleged "radical feminism" would be completely irrelevant to this issue. That her alleged political position is considered important is an example of ad-hominem argument. Netball is Olympic-recognized or not. It's just a fact, and the fact can easily be verified or refuted. For an idea, see [3]. Wikipediots might get their panties in a twist over whether or not a primary source like that can be used. However, "Verification, not truth" is an abstract principle, the majority of editors -- unless they are personally involved in a situation -- tend to go with truth, even if it comes from a primary source, if there is no reasonable controversy over the fact.

The Malawi photo objection is just silly, fluff. Both ways. Laura Hale may or may not know if this is really a netball team. Obviously, it would be the team plus some family members. Given her position, though, good chance she does know.

The real standard on Wikipedia is "editorial consensus," and that breaks down when factions prevent consensus formation, and especially if there are administrators among them, and they ban one side of a dispute, ipso facto. That happened with cold fusion; many editors knowledgeable about cold fusion were blocked and banned because of support -- in discussion! -- for a point of view. It started happening long before I was involved, and simply continued, including after I was myself banned. The faction involved is the "anti-pseudoscience" faction, which generally advocates against NPOV ("Neutral point of view"), claiming that SPOV should rule. ("Scientific point of view," which is actually an oxymoron.) These people are generally pseudoskeptics. Cold fusion was, for them, a minor skirmish, they were much more concerned about global warming, homeopathy, and all forms of "superstition." If you want to find out how they define "superstition," the real meaning, in practice, is "what I and my friends believe is false." Cold fusion was a beautiful test case, because the science has actually moved on, after 2004, but these people refused to read the sources. After all, why should they read nonsense? And then they made up excuse after excuse as to why the balance of publication has radically shifted toward peer-reviewed articles that assume cold fusion is real, including the most comprehensive review of the field ever published under peer review, I've linked it from Cold fusion. --Abd 13:29, 5 August 2012 (EDT)

I just noticed this. I hadn't looked at the history of Bias in Wikipedia. It was a coincidence that the netball thing leaped out at me, I really was looking for criticism of "structural problems." --Abd 14:44, 5 August 2012 (EDT)

the other place

I demoted you to sysop again.brenden 14:49, 5 August 2012 (EDT)

Aw, ruined my day. Now I have the option of creating block log entries and harassing others, I can unblock myself, what did you have to go and do that for? --Abd 15:23, 5 August 2012 (EDT)

This must be really important to somebody, he's wheel-warring with you. I put some popcorn in the microwave. --Abd 19:19, 5 August 2012 (EDT)