davesmith_au wrote:As the topic of this thread is what is it, this seems as good a place as any for the following post.
Nereid. If you had come here in good faith to find out more about the Electric Universe, then you would be accorded with as much help as is available from those on the forum.
I should think that if you wish to participate in our forum you should either retract or support with evidence
your statement that Thornhill is a "well-known academic fraud". You made this claim without supplying any reference whatsoever. Such a libelous statement is disingenuous in the least, and without any evidential support is tantamount to fraud in itself, so seems rather hypocritical.
Please show those here where, in the peer-reviewed literature or in mainstream or any
bona fide media sources, Thornhill has even been accused of academic fraud, let alone convicted of such an act and received so much attention in this regard as to be a "well-known" academic fraud.
Until you can supply such reference, I see no reason why anyone on this forum should give you even the time of day.
Of course, if you are not "DeiRenDopa" on the JREF forum then I apologize. I personally find the use of pseudonyms curious and unnecessary for those who wish to be taken seriously.
Cheers, Dave.
Dave, may I ask if this post (which I am quoting) was made in your capacity as Forum Administator, or as an ordinary member (or, possibly, both)?
In any case, what was (is) my main purpose in registering, and posting, here?
A few seconds' with Google turns up at least a dozen references to "Nereid" in this forum; several, possibly most, refer to me (or so it seems).
I would like to understand what those who referred to me, in many of those posts, meant. Once that's clear, where there are misunderstandings etc I'd like the opportunity to clarify and address them.
As you say, as the topic of this thread is what it is, it seemed like a good place to start, and to use your own post to ask my first questions:
Nereid wrote:davesmith_au wrote:Nereid is no better, she just keeps harping on about peer-review. Once you give her some peer-review, she says it is not relevant. Give her something relevant, and she says that publication is not sound. Give her something sound, and she says no-one's cited it...
I do? Where (and when)?
But in the whole fiasco, she doesn't offer anything of substance.
I don't? Can I post some links to posts of mine which (I think) do contain something of substance?
What have I written about Thornhill and academic fraud?
I wrote ~ten posts in
a BAUT thread entitled "New research results from the "Stardust" mission"; specifically posts
#64 to
#73. The last two (#72 and #73) concern apparent, gross, misrepresentations which, if Thornhill had a formal position at a university, would warrant formal investigation by that university (at least, in my opinion; of course, Thornhill is not employed, in an academic position, at any university, as far as I know).
The document I examined, in some detail, can (still) be found here, on this site:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pdf
Here is my post #73, dated March 5th, 2008, in its entirety:
Are Thornhill and Talbott being (intellectually) dishonest? Is there something fraudulent about the "The Electric Comet" document?
There's a prima facie case to say they are, and that there is.
Start with the fact that there's a copyright notice on the bottom of page 2.
The apparent source for at least one of the images in the document explicitly claims copyright for that same image (the one of asteroid Itokawa, see my last post), yet Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott make no mention of this fact. Maybe someone who knows copyright law could pitch in here – is claiming copyright over something that you know is already copyrighted by someone else illegal? Whatever, it sure seems, to me, behaviour worthy of some kind of censure.
"The Electric Comet" document, by Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott, has the following at the bottom right of the first page:
POSTER PRESENTATION
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
33rd International Conference on Plasma Sciences (ICOPS)
Traverse City, Michigan
June 4-8, 2006
And here is the complete list of posters at this conference:
http://www.icops2006.org/technical_p...ter_order.html.
Notice something(s) odd?
The Thornhill & Talbott document is not listed as one of the 2006 ICOPS Poster Sessions.
Nor does it seem to conform to the standards for posters presented at scientific meetings (including ICOPS).
Click on the link to "ICOPS 2006 Poster", in the following link, for an example of a poster which does seem to have been presented at ICOPS 2006 (it's a > 1MB PDF):
http://www.gangolee.com/research.html. Note that the Ombrello et al. poster looks like what you see at scientific meetings, in terms of its format, use of attribution and references, etc.
So, we have a document purporting to be a poster presented at an international plasma physics conference … but it seems it wasn't.
We have a document claiming copyright of all material contained in it … but it seems at least some such material is copyrighted by others.
We have a document sharing the thunderbolts.info website with pages containing the same images (at least one) and where correct attribution (and credit) is given to those images … so Thornhill and Talbott are unlikely to have been ignorant about the need for credits (they are listed as "Executive Editors" of the picture of the day section).
And this prima facie misrepresentation (if not actual fraud) was brought to the attention of persons claiming to be close confidants or colleagues of Thornhill and Talbott some time ago … yet the document is still up on their website.
Once you have had a chance to check what I have posted for yourself ATKINS (and Luxor), I'd like to know if you condone this apparent kind of behaviour.
Subsequently I wrote several other posts on this topic (
an example), but I don't think I made any assertions - concerning intellectual dishonesty or academic fraud - beyond what's in the posts in that BAUT thread (and I would welcome any references to posts that I wrote which did go beyond those).