[Merged]Peer-reviewed technical paper to appear in mainstream journal

[Par]

The truther universe runs on an older version of Windows. Clock drift is a bitch...

It's not a problem if you re-boot your system often - I find two or three times a day and older versions of Windows work just fine.

I hate to sound pedantic*, but Windows 2000 featured authoritative time synchronisation and was also relatively stable.

* = That’s false.

 

[DC]

older version of windows just working fine?

 

[ElMondoHummus]

when his newest claims of red/grey chips that according to him seems to be a sort of thermite, are true and provable in other samples, i think we dont need to look for natural sources. If

You think we don't need to look for natural sources of thermite? Stop and think about this for a minute:

• At heart, thermite is iron oxide plus aluminum.
• The Twin Towers were aluminum clad buildings with steel frames that, as all steel does in nature, had rust.

How sir would you rule out natural sources when two major components of the building in question are the same two components of the "planted" compound one is looking for? You cannot avoid natural generation of thermite; the only question is how much would be present. So despite the chip Steven Jones found - a chip that's not established as being anything other than the most likely candidate (paint or primer) - the question still stands: How does a person distinguish between emplanted thermite and naturally occuring thermite? No chip Steven Jones presents comes close to answering that question.

 

[DC]

You think we don't need to look for natural sources of thermite? Stop and think about this for a minute:

• At heart, thermite is iron oxide plus aluminum.
• The Twin Towers were aluminum clad buildings with steel frames that, as all steel does in nature, had rust.

How sir would you rule out natural sources when two major components of the building in question are the same two components of the "planted" compound one is looking for? You cannot avoid natural generation of thermite; the only question is how much would be present. So despite the chip Steven Jones found - a chip that's not established as being anything other than the most likely candidate (paint or primer) - the question still stands: How does a person distinguish between emplanted thermite and naturally occuring thermite? No chip Steven Jones presents comes close to answering that question.

there are many difrent therm?tes.

 

[ElMondoHummus]

there are many difrent therm?tes.

Good. Now distinguish between natural occurances and planted thermite for us.

 

[alexg]

This gives me a great get-rich-quick idea.

Start a journal called "Peer Reviewed Scientific Journal". Accept any paper from anyone willing to pay out $5,000 or more. They then have the bragging rights to having published in my journal, widely read by anyone who has paid me $5,000 or more.

Although, from the looks of things, it appears someone else has already thought of it.

But it should be called "A peer reviewed scientific journal". Then you can simply say I had my pape published in A peer reviewed . . . .
and you would not be lying.

 

[JamesB]

Jones, Ryan et al finally got their peer-reviewed paper, of course they had to water it down to basically agree with NIST in order to get it published.

http://911blogger.com/node/15081

 

[Sizzler]

Jones: Publication in a Peer-reviewed Civil Engineering Journal!

Here it is....

http://911blogger.com/node/15081

It is a letter published in The Open Civil Engineering Journal online.

I'm going to reserve comment because all of the points raised in the article have been debated to death here and elsewhere.

I'll just say it is interesting to note that these "issues" passed legit peer review and are now published in a civil engineering journal.

How will this be received by the civil engineering community?

And here is Jones' message to Jref

With publication in an established civil engineering journal, the discussion has reached a new level – JREF’ers and others may attack, but unless they can also get published in a peer-reviewed journal, those attacks do not carry nearly the weight of a peer-reviewed paper. It may be that debunkers will try to avoid the fourteen issues we raise in the Letter, by attacking the author(s) or even the journal rather than addressing the science – that would not surprise me.

Is that a challenge I smell?

 

[Walter Ego]

Here it is....

http://911blogger.com/node/15081

And here is Jones' message to Jref


Quote:
With publication in an established civil engineering journal, the discussion has reached a new level – JREF’ers and others may attack, but unless they can also get published in a peer-reviewed journal, those attacks do not carry nearly the weight of a peer-reviewed paper. It may be that debunkers will try to avoid the fourteen issues we raise in the Letter, by attacking the author(s) or even the journal rather than addressing the science – that would not surprise me.



Is that a challenge is smell?

When I went to the homepage of the presumably prestigious peer-reviewed online publication that has ‘accepted’ Dr. Jones’ paper, this immediately caught my eye.



Attractive open access fees? A little investigating found this.

PUBLICATION FEES: The publication fee details for each article published in the journal are given below:

Letters: The publication fee for each published Letter article submitted is $600.

Research Articles: The publication fee for each published Research article is $800.

Mini-Review Articles: The publication fee for each published Mini-Review article is $600.

Review Articles: The publication fee for each published Review article is $900.

http://www.bentham.org/open/tociej/MSandI.htm

I’m not an engineer or academic, but is this standard for a peer-reviewed academic journal? This smells of a vanity publication to me.


Edit: Here's some more info on Bentham Publishers.

Bentham Science Publishers is a publisher of 42 journals and from 2005 a further 19, making 61 journal titles together with 5 new book series. We publish primarily in areas of pre-clinical and pharmaceutical research for academic and pharmaceutical libraries. Many of our journals have high impact factors and we are fortunate to have the leading journal for reviews in medicinal chemistry, Current Medicinal Chemistry with an impact factor of 4.4. We also have other journals with rising impact factors like Current Pharmaceutical Design which is one of our leading titles. It publishes 32 issues a year and has an impact factor of 5.55.

http://www.aardvarknet.info/access/number50/monthnews.cfm?monthnews=11

 

[gtc]

Hmm, my University library gives me access to 1104 electronic journals that start with the letter 'O'. Everything from 'O' Oprah's magazine to the Journal of Ozone.

Nothing from The Open Civil Engineering Journal though.

Doesn't mean that the article is baloney, just that the journal is not well known.

Let's look at what the Journal itself says:

Let's look at what it says about peer reviewing manuscripts (letters appear to be counted as manuscripts):

REVIEWING AND PROMPTNESS OF PUBLICATION: All manuscripts submitted for publication will be immediately subjected to peer-reviewing, usually in consultation with the members of the Editorial Advisory Board and a number of external referees. Authors may, however, provide in their Covering Letter the contact details (including e-mail addresses) of four potential peer reviewers for their paper. Any peer reviewers suggested should not have recently published with any of the authors of the submitted manuscript and should not be members of the same research institution.
All peer-reviewing will be conducted via the Internet to facilitate rapid reviewing of the submitted manuscripts. Every possible effort will be made to assess the manuscripts quickly with the decision being conveyed to the authors in due course.

I will read the letter and see what I can add.

 

[Orphia Nay]

Hahahaha! I thought for a minute, "Publication Fee" might mean what Jones would be paid, but no... from Walter Ego's link:

PUBLICATION FEES: The publication fee details for each article published in the journal are given below:

Letters: The publication fee for each published Letter article submitted is $600.

Research Articles: The publication fee for each published Research article is $800.

Mini-Review Articles: The publication fee for each published Mini-Review article is $600.

Review Articles: The publication fee for each published Review article is $900.

Once the paper is accepted for publication, the author will receive by email an electronic invoice.

"We will publish your article, but only if you pay us."

 

[Panoply_Prefect]

Isn't this the same as in this thread? What new insights does this paper put forth to further the truthers agenda?

 

[gtc]

It's a load of crud. Look at this section, ostensibly about whether the building was designed to withstand a jet impact:

2. Withstanding Jet Impact

FEMA: “The WTC towers had been designed to withstand the accidental impact of a Boeing 707 seeking to land at a nearby airport…” [2]
...

Makes sense, right? They even admit that the operative words are 707 and 'seeking to land'. Then they insert this quote from Skilling taken from a Seattle newspaper in 1993:

Concerned because of a case where an airplane hit the Empire State Building [which did not collapse], Skilling's people did an analysis that showed the towers would withstand the impact of a Boeing 707.

Again, makes sense. But then they go off on a tangent by continuing the quote from the Seattle article:

Skilling - a recognized expert in tall buildings - doesn't think a single 200-pound car bomb would topple or do major structural damage to a Trade Center tower. The supporting columns are closely spaced and even if several were disabled, the others would carry the load.

…Although Skilling is not an explosives expert, he says there are people who do know enough
about building demolition to bring a structure like the Trade Center down.
"I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it."

This has nothing to do with whether or not the WTC could withstand the impact of an airline. It merely shows that Skilling believed in 1993 that some hypothetical person could, if given sufficient resources and time, demolish the building with expolosives; without suggesting whether or not Skilling had ever actually researched the controlled demolotion of the towers (and why would he, when they weren't planning to demolish them). Does it have anything to do with whether the building was designed to withstand a plane crash? Nothing whatsoever. Does it have any relevance to the article, at all? No. How did this get past peer review? But it gets worse as the 'letter continues'

Thus, Skilling’s team showed that a commercial jet would not bring down a WTC Tower, just as the Empire State Building did not collapse when hit by an airplane, and he explained that a demolition expert using explosives could demolish the buildings. We find we are in agreement.

The Empire State Building is completely irrelevant. It is a different building and a different plane travelling at a different velocity etc. Their conclusion is also completely wrong, the letter is supposed to be about where they agree with FEMA and NIST:

Our goal here is to set a foundation for scientific discussion by enumerating those areas where we find agreement with NIST and FEMA.

Here they are not agreeing with NIST or FEMA, instead they are agreeing with an 1993 article from a Seattle newspaper (actually a straw man argument they have created from the newspaper article). It appears that they are either dishonestly trying to suggest that NIST or FEMA have suggested that the WTC should have withstood an impact or they have no idea what they have written.

I suspect that they might have used the loophole that lets you nominate your peer reviewers to get around the, apparently minimal, scrutinisation process.

All I can suggest is that the authors were forced to pay $600 to publish their letter there because it would have been torn to shreds if it was published in these forums.

 

[Panoply_Prefect]

Ummm:

“Why the Towers Fell” produced by NOVA [7]. The “pan-
cake theory of collapse” is strongly promoted in a Popular
Mechanics article along with a number of other discredited
ideas [8, 9]. We, on the other hand, agree with NIST that the
“pancake theory” is not scientifically tenable and ought to be
set aside in serious discussions regarding the destruction of
the WTC Towers and WTC 7.

Did Popular Mechanics promote the FEMA "Pancake-theory" as a cause for collapse initiation as suggested by this article? Source given is:

wgbh/nova/transcripts/2907_wtc.html [Accessed March 17, 2008].
[8] J. B. Meigs, D. Dunbar, B. Reagan, et al. “Debunking the 9/11
myths, special report”, Popular Mechanics, vol. 182, pp. 70-81
March 2005.

I don't have that paper so I have no way of checking. (And as a side note: who uses the pancake-theory as explanation for the initiation of the collapse nowadays anyhow, and have anyone ever used it in connection with WTC7?)

 

[Panoply_Prefect]

One thing more:

13. Total Collapse Explanation Lacking
NIST: “This letter is in response to your April 12, 2007
request for correction… we are unable to provide a full ex-
planation of the total collapse” [25].
This admission by NIST after publishing some 10,000
pages on the collapse of the Towers shows admirable candor,
yet may come as a bit of a shock to interested parties includ-
ing Congress, which commissioned NIST to find a full ex-
planation.

Doesn't NIST mean that they haven't modelled, or tried to explain, the events that took place after collapse initiation? Here it appears as if NIST can't really explain what happened - but isn't that a strawman?

Was the mission really to "find a full explanation" e.g modell the collapse itself as well?

 

[Edmund Standing]

This is extraordinary - an academic journal that charges a hefty sum for an author's work to be featured?!

There are also some oddities in his references section.

Given this is supposed to be a technical scientific paper, what is he doing citing a theologian (David Ray Griffin), the Seattle Times, Public Broadcasting System, the New York Times, and the Hartford Advocate? Where are all the references to other scientists, and to credible mainstream research papers that support his views? (*cough*) I also notice he repeatedly cites a spurious journal that he just happens to edit, the peer review process of which has been shown to be a joke.

 

[DC]

do peer reviewer for known journals, review papers for free?

 

[ref]

I have asked Bentham, who did the peer-reviewing for this paper.

Btw, the Open Civil Engineering Journal means, that it is an open access journal at Bentham Open. The Civil Engineering Journal is one of Bentham's over 200 open access journals.

 

[volatile]

Jones, Ryan et al finally got their peer-reviewed paper, of course they had to water it down to basically agree with NIST in order to get it published.

http://911blogger.com/node/15081

Subtle, but stupid. It's too subtle for the truthers, and to get any traction in the discipline, I'd imagine. It reads like a giant, unfunny in-joke that no-one who isn't involved in 9-11 forums will get, and I can't see any of the usual readers of this journal (is it really so respected?) giving a flying monkey's.

 

[volatile]

do peer reviewer for known journals, review papers for free?

Yes. Authors submit for free too, and they should certainly never be asked to pay a fee to get published (unless the article contains images that need to have rights clearance, which never happens in technical papers, I'd imagine).

This paper is the Truth Argument with all the interesting parts removed. It's just so limp-wristed.