The latest commentary featured an email exchange between Matt Schaffner and Geoff Kait, where Kait proudly says the research would take more than two years to understand and points Gentle Reader to research on his website by "Dr. Marja Vanderloo & Dr. Henk Boot."
Well, in THIS case, Gentle Reader is a very real PhD student and knows the educational system. I did the first thing any PhD student does -- checked their credentials. They've published/copublished NO papers in English and nothing in any journal that was listed in the major journal archives. Suspecting that those might be Dutch surnames, I did a google search for Dutch language publications.
They are indeed Dutch, he misspells the names on his website (hers is Van der Loo... and that's a rather important name, implying she comes from a noble family), but the only thing they've written or published is books on Windows (a server setup book, a troubleshooting book.) I see a PDF that deals with databases, but it doesn't appear to have been published in any standard or electronic journal. In the academic world, nothing appears even when scholarly publications in Dutch are searched.
The last several times I've seen this sort of thing, the "scholars" had purchased their PhD's... not the way I am, by taking years of classes and throwing truckloads of money at a university, but by buying a title.
So... a look at their paper on 6moons (http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/photoncannons/photoncannons.html).
I am assuming the statements that it's written for public consumption, that they had a translator proofreading the thing and editing it. Even so, there are a number of things that scream "degree mill."
The first is their names at the end of the article. Even in Europe, the standard is not "Dr. Boot" (though that's how they're introduced and greeted) but "Marja Van der Loo, PhD."
The second is that there's no references. This is sort of hardwired into most of us (read Phil Plait, read Pharyngula, read blogs by the PhDs around and you note they always link and reference, even when writing for public consumption.)
The third is the "Americanisms" sprinkled throughout... like the sentence "Go figure." (sic)
The many errors of fact are unusual. For example, we have this howler: "Something like 0001 + 0001 would then suddenly become 0011."
Uhm... no. Not even close. The answer is "0010". My degree is in Information Science, and I'm certain of that answer.
And then there's this peculiar statement: "Of all the possible errors, only the concealed errors can possibly be audible. You hear a short pop or tick or even a whole range of this as though the disc were 'hanging'" Now, THIS page (http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/cache/281-0-0-225-121.html) tells us that a CD is sending an output of 64kilobits per second. Given the speed of human neural transmission AND the processing speed of the brain, you really can't hear a single bit error since it's not sustained long enough to be an "attention" factor.
I also found this statement amusing: "The reason for our ongoing tests was to find out why copying of pressed CD to CD-R in 99.9% of all cases sounded from just better to very much better. It worked out that by way of measurements, this could not be explained." You see, laymen have known and written about the differences for years: http://johnvestman.com/digital_myth.htm and there's whole books on the subject that explain this (http://books.google.com/books?hl=en...ts=zYV0wmunHg&sig=GwBtZMx7ar6KG-U02eF1JrbKVDs and http://books.google.com/books?hl=en...ts=VlozuPMlDe&sig=rTvzjpBVdNo01TCVoiM7j-735WI)
And then there's the published papers on it (too numerous to list, going back to the early papers on CD-R technology.
Now... ANYONE who did a real PhD had to do a "readings course" where you read everything that was current (and a lot that was old) on your subject or things related to your subject. A typical reading list for your dissertation would be around 150 papers and 30 books, some of which you don't use.
So why didn't they know the explaination? Inquiring students want to know.
Buried near the end is something significant: "With our four discs, we subsequently performed some measurements with Plextools Pro yet none of the outcomes were as revealing as the listening tests. Between the original and the EAC versions, there was a slight change in jitter measurements but nothing significant. The same went for the other discs. Bigger numerical differences in the same digital realm arose in the numbers for C1 and C2 errors, between original and copies. But those are just indicators of the working of CIRC and, again, not audible. For the real 'Why', we must look elsewhere."
I believe your answer is "in the eye of the beholder." PhDs are scientists, and as much as we might prefer one CD over the other, this has to do with our ears and their range of hearing as well as he abilities of our brain to process musical information. Any standard audiology test will show how wide the variances are, so an evaluation by human ears will have a lot of variances in the results and will not be quite as honest as a test by a machine.
Their final comment is: The Buddha already said it: "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense".
I believe their reasoning is that of people who have written a book or two about the computer industry but I see little or no indication that they've actually done the work to earn a PhD and the quality of their research would not pass muster with anyone on my committee.
Well, in THIS case, Gentle Reader is a very real PhD student and knows the educational system. I did the first thing any PhD student does -- checked their credentials. They've published/copublished NO papers in English and nothing in any journal that was listed in the major journal archives. Suspecting that those might be Dutch surnames, I did a google search for Dutch language publications.
They are indeed Dutch, he misspells the names on his website (hers is Van der Loo... and that's a rather important name, implying she comes from a noble family), but the only thing they've written or published is books on Windows (a server setup book, a troubleshooting book.) I see a PDF that deals with databases, but it doesn't appear to have been published in any standard or electronic journal. In the academic world, nothing appears even when scholarly publications in Dutch are searched.
The last several times I've seen this sort of thing, the "scholars" had purchased their PhD's... not the way I am, by taking years of classes and throwing truckloads of money at a university, but by buying a title.
So... a look at their paper on 6moons (http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/photoncannons/photoncannons.html).
I am assuming the statements that it's written for public consumption, that they had a translator proofreading the thing and editing it. Even so, there are a number of things that scream "degree mill."
The first is their names at the end of the article. Even in Europe, the standard is not "Dr. Boot" (though that's how they're introduced and greeted) but "Marja Van der Loo, PhD."
The second is that there's no references. This is sort of hardwired into most of us (read Phil Plait, read Pharyngula, read blogs by the PhDs around and you note they always link and reference, even when writing for public consumption.)
The third is the "Americanisms" sprinkled throughout... like the sentence "Go figure." (sic)
The many errors of fact are unusual. For example, we have this howler: "Something like 0001 + 0001 would then suddenly become 0011."
Uhm... no. Not even close. The answer is "0010". My degree is in Information Science, and I'm certain of that answer.
And then there's this peculiar statement: "Of all the possible errors, only the concealed errors can possibly be audible. You hear a short pop or tick or even a whole range of this as though the disc were 'hanging'" Now, THIS page (http://h71036.www7.hp.com/hho/cache/281-0-0-225-121.html) tells us that a CD is sending an output of 64kilobits per second. Given the speed of human neural transmission AND the processing speed of the brain, you really can't hear a single bit error since it's not sustained long enough to be an "attention" factor.
I also found this statement amusing: "The reason for our ongoing tests was to find out why copying of pressed CD to CD-R in 99.9% of all cases sounded from just better to very much better. It worked out that by way of measurements, this could not be explained." You see, laymen have known and written about the differences for years: http://johnvestman.com/digital_myth.htm and there's whole books on the subject that explain this (http://books.google.com/books?hl=en...ts=zYV0wmunHg&sig=GwBtZMx7ar6KG-U02eF1JrbKVDs and http://books.google.com/books?hl=en...ts=VlozuPMlDe&sig=rTvzjpBVdNo01TCVoiM7j-735WI)
And then there's the published papers on it (too numerous to list, going back to the early papers on CD-R technology.
Now... ANYONE who did a real PhD had to do a "readings course" where you read everything that was current (and a lot that was old) on your subject or things related to your subject. A typical reading list for your dissertation would be around 150 papers and 30 books, some of which you don't use.
So why didn't they know the explaination? Inquiring students want to know.
Buried near the end is something significant: "With our four discs, we subsequently performed some measurements with Plextools Pro yet none of the outcomes were as revealing as the listening tests. Between the original and the EAC versions, there was a slight change in jitter measurements but nothing significant. The same went for the other discs. Bigger numerical differences in the same digital realm arose in the numbers for C1 and C2 errors, between original and copies. But those are just indicators of the working of CIRC and, again, not audible. For the real 'Why', we must look elsewhere."
I believe your answer is "in the eye of the beholder." PhDs are scientists, and as much as we might prefer one CD over the other, this has to do with our ears and their range of hearing as well as he abilities of our brain to process musical information. Any standard audiology test will show how wide the variances are, so an evaluation by human ears will have a lot of variances in the results and will not be quite as honest as a test by a machine.
Their final comment is: The Buddha already said it: "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense".
I believe their reasoning is that of people who have written a book or two about the computer industry but I see little or no indication that they've actually done the work to earn a PhD and the quality of their research would not pass muster with anyone on my committee.
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