Virtuality

The good news is the bad news. Using the internet anyone can spout what they think inc what they think are the ‘facts’. Alas that means that sense can become lost in a sea of twaddle.

and because web search engines have learning algorithms regularly selected links from an offered set are promoted in the rankings. i.e. the more popular the resource the more likely the search engine is to place it top. This can be both good and bad.
If for example someone searched for RISC OS and always selected the ROOL site rather than the ROL site the ROOL would rise in the rankings – provided the query came from more than one IP or two.
Wandering around a few hotspots in London would probably do the job on a low traffic site pair.

High in rankings on various subjects is answers dot com – they content steal and either give laf the story or bad info. They are high because someone (many someones) is paid to do things to promote the site in search engines.
Sifting good from bad is a skill.

It was usually trivially easy to find errors in the experimental method or analysis that turned the claims into horsefeathers. Although in one case they’d got and used a grants for about 200,000 pounds and I was reading the project’s ‘final report’ because a colleague showed it to me.

I think this says a lot more about the politics of the money dispensing than anything else. Who gives out that kind of money without having the claims checked and double-checked? Maybe proper peer review would have picked this up sooner?

which we then did successfully. In once case I’d actually asked for money to improve an existing system that worked OK. The request was refused because what I proposed ’wouldn’t work’. Erm.

Let me guess – you told them what you wanted and described it accurately.
I figure that it might actually be simpler to build an FTL drive than to extract money from accounting.

You might have progressed further if you simply stated that you required the money to leverage the coherent synergies that would created by the proactive introduction of the enhanced strategic paradigm that upsizes and recontextualises the key internalised methodologies.

So, no, I’m not a fan of peer review.

I am assuming peer review of a scientific work by other scientists. Not some overweight underintelligent overpromoted underpaid pencil pusher who doesn’t even understand what they are reviewing.

Steve:

This can be both good and bad.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/17/french-blogger-fined-google

A French blogger was sued (€1500 plus $1000 costs) as her bad review of a restaurant rose quite well in the Google rankings when searching for restaurant, Il Giardino, in Cap-Ferret, south-west France. The judge obviously didn’t understand how Google works, how things rise up the listings, and to add insult to injury her followers on Twitter and WordPress “exacerbated” the harm caused.
It also opens an interesting discussion – that of being able to criticise bad service. There are procedures to follow (complain to the manager, etc) but what if that leads to nothing? You keep your mouth shut? Talking of procedures, notice that an “emergency hearing” was held, with no notification to the blogger who had to represent herself due to not having time to organise legal counsel. An “emergency” hearing six months later? Really?

Well, if I am down that part of the country, I’ll be sure to miss Il Giardino on principle. And I am naming the restaurant because the various on-line articles all name the place. Here’s TechDirt and here’s SlashDot. Google will show you lots more, and searching for the name of the place shows some…interesting…results.
Obviously the management of Il Giardino have never heard of L’effet Streisand!

This is amusing reading too – http://www.computerworld.com/article/2476378/social-business/zut-alors-seo-outlawed-in-france-so-avoid-il-giardino-in-cap-ferret.html

In my experience, if a person has a good meal out, they’ll tell someone. If they have a bad meal out, they’ll tell everyone!

I am assuming peer review of a scientific work by other scientists. Not some overweight underintelligent overpromoted underpaid pencil pusher who doesn’t even understand what they are reviewing.

Alas the cases I’ve been talking about are ones where the ‘peer reviewers’ are academic scientists with good reputations in their communities. The problem is that becoming ‘established’ and ‘well regarded’ may simply mean ‘have adopted the conventional wisdom, and with axes to grind’. That can mean conventional thinking, pigeonholed ‘knowledge’, etc. There are certainly exceptions, but alas they tend to be people who focus on doing the science rather than sitting on committees. And have found their own ways around the system.

As you say, applications and papers phrased in the right kind of bafflegab tend to be well received. Its the old joke about “He must be very clever, I didn’t understand a word he said!” :-)

Alas its all too easy for well ‘established experts’ to assume that they know more than they do. Whereas the point of the academic scientific method is to find the errors and omissions in what we think is so. Its not always a comfortable process explaining to someone that they might be wrong. Particularly when ‘reputation’ matters a great deal to careers. IMHO Good scientists welcome the possibility that they have something new to discover. But in terms of building a career others may feel that it is ‘what you know’ that helps you, not what you admit you’ve misunderstood or missed. And its quite human to feel after years of work that you know about something and to like being regarded as an expert.

Jim

That can mean conventional thinking, pigeonholed ‘knowledge’, etc.

Example of this from personal experience: The grant requests I put in over the years often ran into a basic problem. What ‘committee’ of the Research Councils should they go to? They tended to be based on using ‘mm-wave’ signals (roughly 30 GHz to about 500 GHz, say). During the 80s and 90s the main people doing that were radioastronomers. So I kept finding my applications went to an astronomy board. Who threw them back because the instrument and purpose had nothing to do with astronomy.

The aims were actually in fields like vulcanology or electron spin resonance or measurements on electronic devices, etc. However the committes for things like vulcanology had no clue about mm-waves or how that would help them get info on volcanoes. So they also tended to reject them because they couldn’t make sense of them or decide if the money would be well spent.

The clubs and committees form around established areas of knowledge. New fields don’t have anyone able to fund them in that way. So you end up having to find other ways forward.

Now, both the vulcanology and ESR fields have many people using such kit. But it was a struggle to get going and included being told some ideas were ‘impossible’ along the way – which now work nicely for people who pay lots for the instruments in question. :-)

Given that I’m ancient I can quote an older example:

When I started as a research student in ‘far infrared’ astronomy there was a struggle to get money. Apart from the Sun and Moon and Mars and (just) Jupiter, no-one had detected anything astronomical at these wavelengths. We kept being asked variations on “So what astronomical objects will you observe?”

The correct answer, scientifically, was, of course, “If we knew, we wouldn’t need to look!” But of course committees have to justify splashing the cash. We felt quite sure that we’d see new things no one expected. (And indeed in the end we found many things.)

The log jam was largely broken by one basic interest. To observe the Cosmic Background at about 3 mm wavelength where it peaks. That acted as a lever to get people interested. And as we started making better detectors, etc, taking them to (cheap) telescope sites, we found objects and the field took off.

But when it started there was no one really around as ‘expert committees’ who the research councils could have asked to judge on the basis of experience. So the astronomy panels tended to spend cash on other things. Chicken and egg.

A few decades later there were the funding committees, but they’d formed their own clubs, etc.

Jim

‘expert committees’

Ex ==> “has been”
Spert ==> misspelling of spurt which is “a drip under pressure”

I hate being labelled an expert. Principally because I’ve learned enough to know how little I know, but also because so many people who know little or nothing¹ claim to be experts.

¹ Usually nothing