This is off-topic for Wikipedia specifically, but on-topic for those interested in the reliability of academic sources generally:
There's currently a big discussion in the academic science publishing & library world over the case of M. S. El Naschie, the editor in chief of "Chaos, Solitons and Fractals," an expensive Elsevier journal. It appears he's been using the journal to essentially self-publish his own pet theories (300+ single-author papers), as well as misrepresenting his own academic credentials. This has been going on for years, but someone apparently just noticed now. The journal is typically bundled with subscriptions to other Elsevier journals in big academic libraries, so a fair number of people in the math community have access to it.
* Here's a nice summary: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/11/25/elsevier-math-editor-controver... * the original post that broke the story: http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/11/the_case_of_m_s_el_naschie.html * and the Nature article on all of this: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081126/full/456432a.html
What I find fascinating is that the way the debate is playing out, at least in public blog posts and comments, is very similar to the way such debates in Wikipedia play out (and at least one scientist-wikipedian I know drew the connection, as well) -- accusations of sockpuppetry by Naschie to bolster his own reputation, a sort of walled-garden of self-citations on Naschie's part, accusations of failure to properly oversee the process on the part of Elsevier, and a kind of he-said she-said debate about whether his credentials are proper or not -- not to mention an interesting argument over whether his math is legit or not between various experts in the field ("appeals to authority" don't work when everyone is more or less an authority, though many people seem to be concurring that Naschie's work is nonsense).
Of course, what's interesting and troubling for us is that this is a respected publisher who apparently did all the normal things in setting up an academic journal that is typical of the sort of thing Wikipedia is supposed to use as a "reliable source." But (naturally, I suppose) the academic publishing process is as open to failure as any other publishing or reporting process.* And I can't help but think that in a more open process -- an open access journal, say, or even Wikipedia -- this would not have gone on for so long or played out in the same way.
(At any rate, someone knowledgable might want to check over our own relevant math/physics articles and make sure there's nothing fishy there).
-- phoebe
* Note this is not a rant about [[WP:RS]]; I <3 reliable sources and think we should use more of them whenever possible. But a grain or three of salt is always helpful.
2008/12/1 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
Of course, what's interesting and troubling for us is that this is a respected publisher who apparently did all the normal things in setting up an academic journal that is typical of the sort of thing Wikipedia is supposed to use as a "reliable source."
This is the company that publishes the Journal of Homeopathy. With Elsevier it is pretty much a given that quality will vary to a very large degree.
phoebe ayers wrote:
Of course, what's interesting and troubling for us is that this is a respected publisher who apparently did all the normal things in setting up an academic journal that is typical of the sort of thing Wikipedia is supposed to use as a "reliable source." But (naturally, I suppose) the academic publishing process is as open to failure as any other publishing or reporting process.* And I can't help but think that in a more open process -- an open access journal, say, or even Wikipedia -- this would not have gone on for so long or played out in the same way.
True, though I think the biggest (and long-standing) problem has actually been books, which in many fields (especially in the humanities) are both the canonical "reliable source", and hugely problematic as sources. Academic presses have a peer-review process, but it isn't intended to make sure the book is representative of consensus in the field, unbiased, or otherwise a good source for writing an encyclopedia article. It's more of a minimal level of reviewing to ensure that the author is making a legitimate contribution to the academic debate, not plagiarizing anyone, etc.---even if the result is a highly polemical book contrary to consensus and accepted by nearly nobody, it may be worth publishing as a contribution to the overall discussion, especially if the author is already well known.
This is all fine if books are read with full knowledge of their status in the field---that they represent the possibly idiosyncratic view of one particular writer. But if their claims are then entered into Wikipedia articles, with a citation to the book to justify them, that's more of a problem. This isn't as rare as people might think either; I'd say the *majority* of academic-press books make at least one significant claim that is controversial in its field, often without even admitting that the claim is controversial.
-Mark
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
Of course, what's interesting and troubling for us is that this is a respected publisher who apparently did all the normal things in setting up an academic journal that is typical of the sort of thing Wikipedia is supposed to use as a "reliable source." But (naturally, I suppose) the academic publishing process is as open to failure as any other publishing or reporting process.* And I can't help but think that in a more open process -- an open access journal, say, or even Wikipedia -- this would not have gone on for so long or played out in the same way.
True, though I think the biggest (and long-standing) problem has actually been books, which in many fields (especially in the humanities) are both the canonical "reliable source", and hugely problematic as sources. Academic presses have a peer-review process, but it isn't intended to make sure the book is representative of consensus in the field, unbiased, or otherwise a good source for writing an encyclopedia article. It's more of a minimal level of reviewing to ensure that the author is making a legitimate contribution to the academic debate, not plagiarizing anyone, etc.---even if the result is a highly polemical book contrary to consensus and accepted by nearly nobody, it may be worth publishing as a contribution to the overall discussion, especially if the author is already well known.
Sure, and maybe this isn't even a problem per se -- it's the job of scholarly discourse to present and discuss new ideas, etc. etc. I am thinking more about a failure of scientific publishing as meaning a (theoretically) respectable journal published by a (theoretically) respectable publisher shouldn't really be an unquestioned soapbox for one guy who may or may not be writing patent nonsense.
Same goes for a Wikipedia article, naturally, and this is something we have certainly been fighting against in obscure topics for years... I seem to recall this even led to a to a policy called "No Original Research" once upon a time. Now of course our problems have shifted more into what materials we cite, though, and why we cite them.
This is all fine if books are read with full knowledge of their status in the field---that they represent the possibly idiosyncratic view of one particular writer. But if their claims are then entered into Wikipedia articles, with a citation to the book to justify them, that's more of a problem. This isn't as rare as people might think either; I'd say the *majority* of academic-press books make at least one significant claim that is controversial in its field, often without even admitting that the claim is controversial.
Maybe we need to put more emphasis on "encyclopedia as a tertiary source" -- let other people do the summarizing and the vetting and sorting out of what ideas are going to stick around for the long-term, and focus away from citing original research directly, which helps side-step the danger of representing obscure or untested theory as canonical truth. This might be particularly be true for new scientific discoveries or new ideas in the humanities. (Different perhaps for events in the news, articles about pop culture, etc).
-- phoebe
phoebe ayers wrote:
Maybe we need to put more emphasis on "encyclopedia as a tertiary source" -- let other people do the summarizing and the vetting and sorting out of what ideas are going to stick around for the long-term, and focus away from citing original research directly, which helps side-step the danger of representing obscure or untested theory as canonical truth. This might be particularly be true for new scientific discoveries or new ideas in the humanities. (Different perhaps for events in the news, articles about pop culture, etc).
That's generally what I try to do, at least in cases where high-quality summary sources are already available. IMO, if there are well-regarded survey articles, specialist encyclopedias, etc., on a subject, then it's verging on original research to directly cite even secondary sources (e.g. journal articles with original research) to develop a new summary view. I only really resort to citing secondary sources directly on a pragmatic basis if: 1) no good tertiary sources already exist; and 2) the material is either not likely to be controversial, or I've checked that it's corroborated by multiple independent sources.
-Mark
On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:47 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
Maybe we need to put more emphasis on "encyclopedia as a tertiary source" -- let other people do the summarizing and the vetting and sorting out of what ideas are going to stick around for the long-term, and focus away from citing original research directly, which helps side-step the danger of representing obscure or untested theory as canonical truth. This might be particularly be true for new scientific discoveries or new ideas in the humanities. (Different perhaps for events in the news, articles about pop culture, etc).
That's generally what I try to do, at least in cases where high-quality summary sources are already available. IMO, if there are well-regarded survey articles, specialist encyclopedias, etc., on a subject, then it's verging on original research to directly cite even secondary sources (e.g. journal articles with original research) to develop a new summary view. I only really resort to citing secondary sources directly on a pragmatic basis if: 1) no good tertiary sources already exist; and 2) the material is either not likely to be controversial, or I've checked that it's corroborated by multiple independent sources.
One of the problems with working from tertiary sources, especially other encyclopedias, is that very often all that can be done is to rewrite what they have said, and even that can verge on plagiarism if not done properly. Citing stuff to the Encyclopedia Britannica (compare citing the current edition to citing the 1911 edition), for instance, or citing stuff to the Dictionary of National Biography.
The ideal is a mix of lots of tertiary and secondary sources. We need to use multiple and independent sources to avoid over-representing or copying a single source (in the sense of 'light rewriting' or 'close paraphrasing'), and to produce something that is distinct and different from that single source. Just tertiary sources alone is not really producing a proper encyclopedic article, and using only secondary sources is not great either. If the secondary source used by another encyclopedia can be accessed and confirmed, then that should also be cited in our article.
This "looking up the sources of the sources" is a problem with some tertiary sources that don't cite their sources. It is also a problem with obscure articles that don't have much written about them out there, so when we summarise here, we are not really adding much value in terms of aggregating different sources, but more repeating what someone else has done.
But re-reading what the three of us have written here, I think we are using slightly different senses of primary, secondary and tertiary. Journal articles are, in many senses, primary sources. I think the confusion arises because you can have "secondary literature", which is different from "secondary sources".
But I agree entirely, that in any area where there is controversy or doubt, defer to the best and most authoritative sources that give an overview of an area, a summary, a text that surveys the literature and does the work for us of giving due weight in at least a reasonably objective fashion. This is usually, but not always, the most recent such publication, though sometimes years of research and publications take place before a new overview text emerges.
Carcharoth
Carcharoth wrote:
The ideal is a mix of lots of tertiary and secondary sources. We need to use multiple and independent sources to avoid over-representing or copying a single source (in the sense of 'light rewriting' or 'close paraphrasing'), and to produce something that is distinct and different from that single source. Just tertiary sources alone is not really producing a proper encyclopedic article, and using only secondary sources is not great either. If the secondary source used by another encyclopedia can be accessed and confirmed, then that should also be cited in our article.
In terms of copyright a light rewriting or close paraphrasing can still create a derivative work which can itself be an infringement.
This "looking up the sources of the sources" is a problem with some tertiary sources that don't cite their sources. It is also a problem with obscure articles that don't have much written about them out there, so when we summarise here, we are not really adding much value in terms of aggregating different sources, but more repeating what someone else has done.
True enough. In the former circumstances, by using tertiary sources which do not themselves cite sources there is a risk of inadvertent hyper-plagiarism; maybe we should be stating that we have no idea where this other encyclopedia got its information whenever that is the case.
With obscure articles (or topics?) we can only report what we find. All we can do is report what we find. Aggregating different sources and maintaining NPOV prevents us from synthesizing some new result. If a periodical article is the only article found on the subject we should say that. There is no obligation to engage in a futile search for a counter-opinion that does not exist. Richard Burton's ''Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina'' is evidence for what he saw or believed he saw; and how he interpreted that in his own idiosyncratic way. There are other ways of looking at these things, but we don't need to track them down before we can write anything.
But re-reading what the three of us have written here, I think we are using slightly different senses of primary, secondary and tertiary. Journal articles are, in many senses, primary sources. I think the confusion arises because you can have "secondary literature", which is different from "secondary sources".
In some ways yes, but the reality of peer review would suggest that these are not articles by some rogue mad scientist. Journal articles may in some senses be primary sources, but in other senses they are just as much not. A complete prohibition on primary sources could yield absurd results: A writer on US history would not be able to use the Constitution as a reference because it is a primary source.
But I agree entirely, that in any area where there is controversy or doubt, defer to the best and most authoritative sources that give an overview of an area, a summary, a text that surveys the literature and does the work for us of giving due weight in at least a reasonably objective fashion. This is usually, but not always, the most recent such publication, though sometimes years of research and publications take place before a new overview text emerges.
Better to just write fairly about both sides of a controversy. Giving undue weight to the most recent publications risks giving undue weight to the latest fashions in the marketplace.
Ec
Or: The Continuing Saga of the Disaster That is Notability
[[Fábio Pereira da Silva]] is a player on the first squad of Manchester United - the current European club football champions. This is, by any standard, a big deal. He passes [[WP:N]] trivially, requiring all of 15 seconds to find multiple independent sources. Nobody sane would dispute that he is a notable, high-profile figure.
However, WP:ATHLETE says that athletes can only be included if they compete professionally. he was injured when Man U bought him, and so, despite being a high-profile and much-covered signing, he has yet to appear for the squad. He's listed as part of the squad. He has a shirt number. He's the subject of much media coverage. But he hasn't appeared on the pitch yet. And because of close-parsing of WP:ATHLETE, his article was deleted. (Mind you, I dispute the entire notion that individuals compete in professional soccer. There are no individual trophies. Teams compete, and he is a member of Manchester United)
There is no question that he is a notable figure, by both our idiosyncratic definition and by any common sense definition. There is no question that he is someone we will have an article about. There is no question about the accuracy of the article we had. But because of technicalities, the article is deleted, and plenty of people are willing to wheel war and insist on process over the obvious product.
I will note, my investment in this is that I wanted to know what position he played, and I couldn't find it on Wikipedia. Which is to say, I was acting as a user in this case, looking up a clearly notable person, and was denied because people are insistent on technicality- based argument instead of thinking about usefulness.
The real problem here, though, is that our notability policies expressly encourage this sort of bean-counting instead of considering process. We have reduced inclusion decisions as much as possible to mechanical operations, often because of reasoning about how people will "abuse" discretion and push for bad decisions on AfD. And so instead we have mechanical precision conducting its own abuses with no room for discretion-based oversight.
This remains the most pernicious legacy of deletionism on Wikipedia - the complete rejection of what our users actually want and use the site for in favor of mechanical decision making created because people were frustrated at the number of users who wanted to block their idiocy in specific cases, so they created a general rule that ignored the specific.
I continue to defy anyone to give me one good reason why the complete demolition of WP:N and its associated pages, and the replacement of them with a simple paragraph on the importance of only documenting things of lasting importance would not lead to a better and more harmonious project.
-Phil
On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Or: The Continuing Saga of the Disaster That is Notability
[[Fábio Pereira da Silva]] is a player on the first squad of Manchester United - the current European club football champions. This is, by any standard, a big deal. He passes [[WP:N]] trivially, requiring all of 15 seconds to find multiple independent sources. Nobody sane would dispute that he is a notable, high-profile figure.
However, WP:ATHLETE says that athletes can only be included if they compete professionally. he was injured when Man U bought him, and so, despite being a high-profile and much-covered signing, he has yet to appear for the squad. He's listed as part of the squad. He has a shirt number. He's the subject of much media coverage. But he hasn't appeared on the pitch yet. And because of close-parsing of WP:ATHLETE, his article was deleted. (Mind you, I dispute the entire notion that individuals compete in professional soccer. There are no individual trophies. Teams compete, and he is a member of Manchester United)
There is no question that he is a notable figure, by both our idiosyncratic definition and by any common sense definition. There is no question that he is someone we will have an article about. There is no question about the accuracy of the article we had. But because of technicalities, the article is deleted, and plenty of people are willing to wheel war and insist on process over the obvious product.
I will note, my investment in this is that I wanted to know what position he played, and I couldn't find it on Wikipedia. Which is to say, I was acting as a user in this case, looking up a clearly notable person, and was denied because people are insistent on technicality- based argument instead of thinking about usefulness.
The real problem here, though, is that our notability policies expressly encourage this sort of bean-counting instead of considering process. We have reduced inclusion decisions as much as possible to mechanical operations, often because of reasoning about how people will "abuse" discretion and push for bad decisions on AfD. And so instead we have mechanical precision conducting its own abuses with no room for discretion-based oversight.
This remains the most pernicious legacy of deletionism on Wikipedia - the complete rejection of what our users actually want and use the site for in favor of mechanical decision making created because people were frustrated at the number of users who wanted to block their idiocy in specific cases, so they created a general rule that ignored the specific.
I continue to defy anyone to give me one good reason why the complete demolition of WP:N and its associated pages, and the replacement of them with a simple paragraph on the importance of only documenting things of lasting importance would not lead to a better and more harmonious project.
-Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Actually, you and I are going to agree to some degree here. If the article passes the main notability guideline, it is acceptable, regardless of what a subguideline says. I think, though, that the general guideline has it right. We shouldn't be -subjectively- deciding what's of lasting importance, because my version of "This is of lasting importance" might be your "This means nothing and never will". So we do what we do in all such cases-we don't editorialize and argue on our own opinions. We instead look for verification.
Yes, notability is verifiable! In this case, it's as easy as saying "Have several solid, reliable sources that don't have some vested interest in publishing material about this chosen to publish a significant amount about it?" If the answer is "Yes, they have", our reliable sources are implicitly telling us "Hey, this is important". If they've published no or trivial coverage, they are telling us "This is not that important". The GNG says basically what every other content policy does-when in doubt, look at the references and follow their lead.
I agree that the sub-notability guidelines allow for the exact kind of subjectivity we shouldn't have and need to go, both in deleting things which should be kept and in keeping things that need to be deleted, as the example you brought up illustrates well. If a(n) (athlete|fictional character|book|album|person|porn star|movie|village|foo|bar|baz) has a significant amount of coverage, it's probably a good candidate for an article. If it has some trivial coverage or name drops, it might be a candidate to mention briefly in a different article. If it's not verifiable at all, it stays out. That should be all we look at-not "Do I think a (gold record|pro athlete|etc. etc.) is notable?", but "Do the sources we rely on for our articles think this particular subject is notable, and express that by writing about them a good deal?"
2008/12/7 Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
Or: The Continuing Saga of the Disaster That is Notability
[[Fábio Pereira da Silva]] is a player on the first squad of Manchester United - the current European club football champions. This is, by any standard, a big deal. He passes [[WP:N]] trivially, requiring all of 15 seconds to find multiple independent sources. Nobody sane would dispute that he is a notable, high-profile figure.
However, WP:ATHLETE says that athletes can only be included if they compete professionally. he was injured when Man U bought him, and so, despite being a high-profile and much-covered signing, he has yet to appear for the squad. He's listed as part of the squad. He has a shirt number. He's the subject of much media coverage. But he hasn't appeared on the pitch yet. And because of close-parsing of WP:ATHLETE, his article was deleted. (Mind you, I dispute the entire notion that individuals compete in professional soccer. There are no individual trophies. Teams compete, and he is a member of Manchester United)
Being signed for a big team isn't a big deal if you never play for them - there are plenty of players that are just there because they need someone as backup to the backups if lots of people end up injured. Those players aren't particularly notable. The "must have played competitively" clause is there to stop those players being included. So, the player in question isn't automatically notable by virtue of having been signed by Man U. However, he probably is notable independently of that due to the media coverage he has got. The specific notability guidelines for certain professions, etc., say "X is notable if ..." they do not say "X is notable if and only if ...". You can be an athlete and qualify for notability for some reason other than those mentioned on WP:ATHLETE.
On Dec 7, 2008, at 4:21 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
Being signed for a big team isn't a big deal if you never play for them - there are plenty of players that are just there because they need someone as backup to the backups if lots of people end up injured. Those players aren't particularly notable. The "must have played competitively" clause is there to stop those players being included. So, the player in question isn't automatically notable by virtue of having been signed by Man U. However, he probably is notable independently of that due to the media coverage he has got. The specific notability guidelines for certain professions, etc., say "X is notable if ..." they do not say "X is notable if and only if ...". You can be an athlete and qualify for notability for some reason other than those mentioned on WP:ATHLETE.
I agree, but we have so Taylorized our deletion process that such subtleties are fantastically lost on the regulars. Have a look at the relevant DRV - it's a completely shocking mess of ignoring the specifics in favor of an automatic hard line.
-Phil
From: "phoebe ayers" phoebe.wiki@gmail.com: (...)
Sure, and maybe this isn't even a problem per se -- it's the job of scholarly discourse to present and discuss new ideas, etc. etc. I am thinking more about a failure of scientific publishing as meaning a (theoretically) respectable journal published by a (theoretically) respectable publisher shouldn't really be an unquestioned soapbox for one guy who may or may not be writing patent nonsense.
(...)
If one guy writes patent nonsense in mathematics, then lots of unqualified people can figure that out and call to hav his material flushed or his appointment questioned. In chaos, it is hard to do that without demonstrations or source code. In a journal about chaos, though, the beauty of demonstrations might weigh against dismissal of the author. Vetting his language might be enough. I remember this author of the FOTD (Fractal of the Day) (Jim Muth?). He has a crude manner, in English, of describing his method in the lead-up of his articles, and he provides source code, so you can figure out what he means. And, if you know the tricks in FRACTINT, then you can stuff his execution times into a few seconds, get pretty much the same thing, and then go on to play with his equation.
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:40 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
(At any rate, someone knowledgable might want to check over our own relevant math/physics articles and make sure there's nothing fishy there).
A fair bit of the material in question is patent nonsense of the highest degree, arguably no better than the output of a fairly unsophisticated nonsense paper generator.
I think the event is more of a statement about how often works in specialist publications go pretty much totally unread.
I find it rather depressing:
The popular press frequently prints grievous untruths, statements of uncontested falsehood apparent to anyone with expertise on the subject matter, and they infrequently correct themselves even though the errors are widely seen, known, and discussed... unless the error becomes a scandal of its own. (A recent example: The overwhelming majority of the major media in their depiction suicide of Megan Meier describe the activities of Lori Drew in a manner which is completely at odds with the facts uncontested by both the prosecution and the defence in the trial; Of course, Wikipedia currently repeats these 'verifiable' falsehoods, citing mass media sources which show no evidence of their investigation, sources which are likely just regurgitating older inaccurate stories without validation, or even Wikipedia).
The world knows the mass media sources are of full of errors but they are not corrected.
And on the flip side, the niche publications and scientific journals which gain their value almost exclusively from their reputation as reliable sources apparently do not have sufficient readership to even reliably detect patent nonsense not so far more advanced than Wikipedia "penis!" vandalism.
The reality outside of Wikipedia is not ours to change. But how can we avoid contributing to these problems?
An academic press book MUST make at least one claim that is controversial or it will not be published. In the humanities at least, where scholarship consists of new interpretation and fuller understanding, the entire process is a matter of challenging other people's interpretations and understandings, and their defending it.
As for journals there is no large scale publisher that does not publish journals of varying quality., and no journal which has not published dubious articles. The scientific method leads to secure [progress in knowledge, but that does not apply to the work of any one particular scientist, and certainly no one paper.
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:40 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
(At any rate, someone knowledgable might want to check over our own relevant math/physics articles and make sure there's nothing fishy there).
A fair bit of the material in question is patent nonsense of the highest degree, arguably no better than the output of a fairly unsophisticated nonsense paper generator.
I think the event is more of a statement about how often works in specialist publications go pretty much totally unread.
I find it rather depressing:
The popular press frequently prints grievous untruths, statements of uncontested falsehood apparent to anyone with expertise on the subject matter, and they infrequently correct themselves even though the errors are widely seen, known, and discussed... unless the error becomes a scandal of its own. (A recent example: The overwhelming majority of the major media in their depiction suicide of Megan Meier describe the activities of Lori Drew in a manner which is completely at odds with the facts uncontested by both the prosecution and the defence in the trial; Of course, Wikipedia currently repeats these 'verifiable' falsehoods, citing mass media sources which show no evidence of their investigation, sources which are likely just regurgitating older inaccurate stories without validation, or even Wikipedia).
The world knows the mass media sources are of full of errors but they are not corrected.
And on the flip side, the niche publications and scientific journals which gain their value almost exclusively from their reputation as reliable sources apparently do not have sufficient readership to even reliably detect patent nonsense not so far more advanced than Wikipedia "penis!" vandalism.
The reality outside of Wikipedia is not ours to change. But how can we avoid contributing to these problems?
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
From: "phoebe ayers" phoebe.wiki@gmail.com (...)
(At any rate, someone knowledgable might want to check over our > own relevant math/physics articles and make sure there's nothing fishy there).
(...)
There is a restriction on the definition of chaos in "chaos theory" that I might eventually address, something like "Must be topologically mixing.". I do not know what that means, and I doubt that it applies to [[pseudo-random number generator]]s.
Good fractals are commercially viable, by themselves as artwork, and it seems to me, with a seriously limited background in Physics, that they are more valuable in Art than Physics, so if ElNaschie was self- promoting, well, there's a terrible draw.
Fractals are basically "Advanced Paint By Number", and that was my name for the fractint.org mailing list while I was contributing there as SherLok Merfy. I might go back to that and deliver an FOTW (Fractal of the Week), now that I've worked around some performance issues in DOS under Windows XP. _______ <a href="http://ecn.ab.ca/~brewhaha/">BrewJay's Babble Bin</a>
There's currently a big discussion in the academic science publishing & library world over the case of M. S. El Naschie, the editor in chief of "Chaos, Solitons and Fractals," an expensive Elsevier journal. [...]
Not the first case and not the last case.
[[Ruggero Santilli]] did create a rather large walled garden all by himself.
Amongst the Elsevier journals, [[International Journal of Hydrogen Energy]] is another suspect.
Regards, Peter