Cancer Posted November 14, 2012 Report Share Posted November 14, 2012 Re: The Last Word Light and dark ... I give you ... The equation of radiative transfer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 14, 2012 Report Share Posted November 14, 2012 Re: The Last Word Good to have if you want to design hyper-realistic Space Hero weaponry! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted November 14, 2012 Report Share Posted November 14, 2012 Re: The Last Word Even I think that's too extreme a Simulationist thing, though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 14, 2012 Report Share Posted November 14, 2012 Re: The Last Word Perhaps some GURPS players might be interested? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted November 14, 2012 Report Share Posted November 14, 2012 Re: The Last Word Well, the stuff they'd really want to know ... radiative transfer of UV laser light through living tissue or through armor plate or any of a number of other game-useful things ... well ... it's actually classified. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted November 15, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word Bummer... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 15, 2012 Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word Welp, time to get researchin' ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted November 15, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word Already, done Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 15, 2012 Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word Have you published your results yet? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted November 15, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word don't need to. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 15, 2012 Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word But how will you get peer-reviewed? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted November 15, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word who says that being peer-reviewed is necessary? as I understand it, and to be pejorative, it means another person confirms what you have done/gives second opinion. peer-reviewed is useful, sure; but if a tree falls in the forest and only one person hears it, can this be peer reviewed? If not, did the original experience occur? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 15, 2012 Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word Other people can listen to other trees. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted November 15, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word you miss my point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 15, 2012 Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word Well, I don't believe the world is wholly subjective. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted November 15, 2012 Report Share Posted November 15, 2012 Re: The Last Word who says that being peer-reviewed is necessary? as I understand it, and to be pejorative, it means another person confirms what you have done/gives second opinion. peer-reviewed is useful, sure; but if a tree falls in the forest and only one person hears it, can this be peer reviewed? If not, did the original experience occur? Yes, a reported observation by a solo observer can be peer-reviewed. There is this misconception that peer review is nothing but a punishment meted out from an anonymous elite club, a hazing ritual the existing power elite forces you to go through for no reason other than to feed the egos of those already in the club. (That is an amalgamation of comments I've heard from a number of people, none of whom, BTW, seem ever to have been through a genuine peer-review process themselves.) Bluntly, in my experience, there are far more jerk authors than there are jerk referees. Authors all too often lose perspective and come to a "that's my baby, isn't it beautiful" sort of attachment to their manuscripts. You see this in fiction, too. Fanfiction rarely gets published because fans usually don't want to submit a real editing process. Functions the referee performs: She confirms that the work done has been done right, insofar as it's possible to tell. This sometimes means that the referee asks sharp questions to draw a more complete description of the event or experiment. It may also serve to winnow out flawed observations, e.g., a reported treefall that (as it turns out) was made within a hundred meters or so of a film crew making a Paul Bunyan movie where sounds of treefalls were played on the set as part of the action. Included in this, of course, is detection of fraud or gross incompetence, though the referee never begins by assuming either of these ... the initial assumption is that the submitted work is honest and conscientious. He ensures that any claim of novelty and/or primacy (the first to do a particular piece of work, or reach a particular conclusion under the relevant circumstance, etc.) is correct. I have been told, for instance, that Physical review gets approximately one submitted paper a year from some (hopefully) well-meaning but unwilling-to-do-the-library-work physicist who has worked out the the Schuster-Schwarzschild model for radiative transfer all by themselves ... Schuster's paper was published in 1905, and Schwarzschild's related work in 1916, so it's already been done for nearly a hundred years. Nice work, but nowhere as interesting as the guy might think, and not worthy of publication in Phys Rev if that's all he's done. Personal experience: As a referee, I once expressed the opinion that a manuscript be rejected because it claimed a new result ... and the conclusion reached by he author was among those published in a paper that come out before I was born (I provided the citation to the 1950 paper). She tries to get the authors to relate their work with other reports and theoretical work in the field. Rarely is a measurement or observation free of scientific context; understanding how an observation fits in with what is already known and believed about the subject is important when trying to get the maximum of information out of the work done or observation made. He provides another set of eyes to go through a manuscript looking for garbled or ambiguous wording, from the perspective of someone who has done this sort of thing before and knows some of the pitfalls in the field. She suggests related questions of interest that the authors might examine in their manuscript. In your example of the report of a tree falling, speculations about why it fell are proper, provided other details of the observation are in the report. Was it windy? Had it been raining heavily? Was there a wildfire going on? Were there logging operations in the area? Was the forest known to be infested with parasitic bark beetles, or Dutch Elm disease, or beavers, or some other agent known to fell trees or kill them and make them more likely to fall? He makes sure that the limits of the observation or measurement are included in the report. This is much more important than most laymen grasp. Note those last five points are things that most laymen stumble over, and may not even recognize as relevant. But they are central to the point of refereed publication. It's all supposed to be new, and checked, and aware of the relevance to the wider community, and sincere in describing how robust the measurement is. The purpose of the referee is to ensure the authors have extracted the maximum information from their work, and eliminated as many errors of omission or commission as possible, and expressed it in a succinct, unambiguous way that doesn't waste time and space with irrelevancies or repetitions. The goal is a great paper ... and the paper has the author's name on it, not the referee's, and the author reaps the credit from it, not the referee. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted November 27, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 27, 2012 Re: The Last Word oh bummer didn't reply to this. will have to today sometime. not now though Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted November 27, 2012 Report Share Posted November 27, 2012 Re: The Last Word Rats, here I was hoping I'd won. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted November 27, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 27, 2012 Re: The Last Word Maybe I'll go evil in my reply, just for that comment. Guess we will see. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 27, 2012 Report Share Posted November 27, 2012 Re: The Last Word "There's no right, there's no wrong, only popular opinion." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bazza Posted November 28, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 28, 2012 Re: The Last Word "There's no right' date=' there's no wrong, only popular opinion."[/quote'] lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted November 28, 2012 Report Share Posted November 28, 2012 Re: The Last Word Hmm. I usually think of public opinion as wrong. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 28, 2012 Report Share Posted November 28, 2012 Re: The Last Word You individualist! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted November 28, 2012 Report Share Posted November 28, 2012 Re: The Last Word That's a politer term than I'm used to, actually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 28, 2012 Report Share Posted November 28, 2012 Re: The Last Word ... Solipsist? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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