At 06:24 PM 6/16/2011, Man on Bridges wrote:
Just a thought, as Wikipedia seems not to be able (or isn't willing) to solve this problem, what about setting up a website with so-called green- and red-lists for wikipedia subjects that are respectively not and are biased by administrators just as a tool to help everybody so it is known which subjects should be treated "with a grain of salt". Naturally input for these lists should be provided by REAL experts that are proven to be an active expert in that particular area; in my book that means that someone who is working in the field of hot-fusion is most-likely NOT an expert in the cold-fusion or LENR or CANR area!
Well, several thoughts. Citizendium was supposedly founded to respect expert opinion, but it had difficulty with critical mass. It's still stumbling along.
Some people think that Wikiversity, which is another WikiMedia Foundation wiki like Wikipedia, is the shining hope. Maybe. I'm active there. Expertise is respected. It's not an encyclopedia, it's much more an academic environment, though with a pop edge. You really can create educational resources there, and neutrality is handled by inclusion, rather than exclusions. Subpages are allowed, and what would be prohibited on Wiipedia, as an encyclopedia, is encouraged there: content forks. If two people can't agree on a page, why, let each one create one. The agreement only has to be on how they are linked from the top level of the hierarchy.
Original research is allowed on Wikiversity, just as it would be in any academic seminar.
Check it out! http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cold_fusion. Come on in, the water's fine.
If you look around, you will see extensive debates, often on attached Talk pages, between me and Barry Kort, a skeptic. Barry, in those debates, after some preposterous starts, came up with two at least reasonable (even if wrong) skeptical hypotheses to explain excess heat, one of which led Dieter Britz to write a study of the effect of bubble noise on the measurement of input power by the McKubre technique (constant current power supply, voltage varies and is captured as samples which are averaged, so input power is current times average voltage. That works if the current is constant, but if the bubble noise causes significant current variation, an AC power component would be missed.
Right now, those debates look like a mess, but eventually I hope to refactor them to summarize the positions and conclusions. It was quite useful to me, I know, for my continued learning of What The Hell Happened with Cold Fusion.
Indeed, I just gave a presentation on SRI P13/P14, at the 2011 LANR Colloquium at MIT, based on what I found, in those debates, about that famous experiment, the graph of the deuterium excess heat vs. that from the hydrogen cell, presented with red and blue lines, was in the presentation to the DoE in 2004, where it was inadequately explained. It's really a stunning result, demonstrating the nature of the beast, quite clearly. I call it the chimera.
You could do everything exactly the same and see nothing, and then, third time's a charm, the beast walks through the lab and licks your face, and you are never the same again. Same equipment, same materials, same loading, same current profile .... apparently the third time you had the right attitude or something.
Or, more to the point, the process of formation of reaction sites of just the right dimensions took time and multiple cycles and you were lucky.
