Source: http://coldfusioncommunity.net/identification-friend-or-foe/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 08:11:19+00:00

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IFF. Apparently we need one of these thingies.
This post is terrible. Slow news day. I followed sigmoidal’s link to a Monty Python farce, causing extensive brain damage. Anyway, here it is.
As you say, what comes next.
LF moderation has not figured out how to handle trolling and outspoken people with emotional responses. Dewey is called by Planet Rossi the “ventriloquist,” though there is nobody speaking with his voice but him. He is the only participant in LF discussions who has direct knowledge of Rossi v. Darden, and of Rossi going back years. Others are depending on what they have read, except possibly for the Rossi Socks or Puppets, of course; if they are Rossi or are getting information directly from him, they would represent the “other side.” Dewey is actually an investor in IH, apparently going back to the original stock offering in 2012, so he has suffered a direct effect from Rossifiction. He is, for some matters, an eyewitness, and for others he has more direct access through people he knows.
This thread goes dead with only trolls posting and even the few OCDs like me find it boring repeating the factual troll-spray too often.
It is like nasty hospital bugs, the anti-troll facts lose potency after a while cos they are indisputably true and everyone ignores them and looks for something else to argue about.
More facts = more troll-spray. It will come.
There are common Planet Rossi tropes that have been repeated over and over. They have been countered with fact, but that does not stop them from being re-introduced. What happens when a forum goes this way is that normal people stop reading it. On-line fora, over time, if not managed well, become havens for some particular point of view, as espoused by the most attached and fanatic.
As I have been going over and over case documents, I’m finding myself less and less motivated to continue the study and analysis. The appearance to me is that I’m becoming so familiar with the body of evidence that “what happened” becomes quite obvious — whether or not it is so decided by a judge or jury. I have definitely spent more time with the evidence than the Judge. There are plenty of unresolved details, but the core, underneath, is not at all a mystery.
Some things that are of great concern to those arguing tenaciously and furiously will not be resolved by the case, unless someone pulls a Wabbit out of the hat, and this late … that is probably not going to happen. Rossi v. Darden is not going to prove that Rossi has Heat, and it is not going to prove that he does not have Heat. Rather, the concerns of the Court and Jury will be the contract, the alleged presence of fraud in how the alleged Guaranteed Performance Test was set up, and possibly about how that Test was conducted.
The initial Rossi claims of fraud on the part of Darden and Vaughn seem to have no evidence behind them and were legally very shaky to begin with, as David French pointed out in his early interview on the case.
I think THH may have been talking about the “facts” dumped on the discussion by Ahlfors, see Misc Mash. But there are many others who create confusion. There are others who simply err, and the Forum format does not create correction of errors, generally. There is no culture that demands accuracy. Some will correct their errors, some not, but the posts then stand forever. And if the effect that THH suggests does arise, the topics become toxic. The last word is not always the best, and there is no process for determining an overall community consensus, which, if there were enough participation, might actually be meaningful.
Dewey, if you and your affiliates are the future of LENR than LENR has no future is my opinion.
Trolling. Evidence-free, provocative and insulting opinion. Watch what develops!
CALM DOWN ALL OF YOU! TAKE THIS AS A WARNING TROLLS ARE NOT WELCOME, NO MATTER WHAT THEIR POV.
Anonymous trolls don’t care about warnings, thetruemonty is a trollname, and Alan Smith does nothing but shout, all caps yet!
The way the Forum works, people read posts in sequence and the page layout often means that they have not seen further responses. So if someone sees the trolling post, they may not see the “warning” and exhortation to calm down coming after it. The Forum software makes managing this difficult, but it could still be done with clear procedures and a self-restraining administrative community — and that works best with transparency in almost all situations.
I see you have strong views about Dewey. Other than his combative stance here what gives you the info to say whether IH is helping LENR or not? Do you diasagree with the guys they have invested in? Are you claiming somehow they are not going to put whatever money is left after Rossi’s lawyer-fest into LENR? What?
If thinking Rossi is a flake disqualifies you from working in LENR then most of the LENR scientists are on your hit list as bad for LENR. Who is left? Bob Greenyer?
Trolls do not care about logical consistency. Their purpose is to poke and prod, not to negotiate some intellectual consensus. TTM’s insinuation was not in response to any specific claim about IH and “the future of LENR.” I might as well introduce this here, the Maryanne Macy coverage of Rossi v. Darden, early on.
As you can tell from that article, Macy has had extensive contact with Rossi, from early on. It appears that she met Rossi in Rome at the time of ICCF-15 (2009). I met Macy at ICCF-18, with her husband, Michael Melich, and we have talked on the phone; unfortunately, as one might easily understand, much of the conversation was confidential; by the time I talked to her, I knew more about Rossi v. Darden than she did (because I was focusing on this), but, of course, she has depth and history. Her article is well worth reading and considering carefully, and if you don’t know what praeteritio is, look it up.
She knows Rossi and she knows Darden and Industrial Heat. The article ends with a review of existing work in LENR. There are many initiatives described, and Industrial Heat is either supporting them, or, where possible, they know what is going on with them. If there is promising research that needs funding for development, they are a major source, but not the only source.
So anyone accusing Rossi to be a scammer should be able to prove that in Court.
Writing that Rossi is a scammer “by evidence” or with generic or ill based statements have no sense.
Again, an obsession with “proof” is associated with Rossi and his legal offense and defenses. “Anyone,” however, is not subject to the jurisdiction of the court. If someone libels another — which is often misunderstood as well — they can be sued for damages, if there are any. Law on this is complex, but, bottom line, someone calling Rossi a scammer in LF discussions is at minimal risk of being sued successfully.
The only people who will be convinced by ele’s arguments are those who are firmly attached to Planet Rossi.
Try as they might – Planet Rossi cannot re-write history. Rossi is a CONvicted criminal.
Funny how history tends to repeat itself.
Now, the problem. This is provocative, even though it appears to be true. Rossi has often claimed that the convictions were all set aside and fines refunded, or the like, but this is not supported by Mats Lewan’s account, nor have I ever seen evidence showing his being cleared.
I suspect that IH knows more, they may have actually sent an investigator to Italy. This is largely irrelevant, “scammer” is justified by the facts that have come out in Rossi v. Darden, facts acknowledged by Rossi (most of them) and supported by documentary evidence. Rossi lied. He might also have perjured himself, but that’s much more difficult to prove. He obviously led — or attempted to lead — IH to believe that the “real customer” was Johnson Matthey, and for obvious reasons.
Many people? Fine, please name three then. Two?
Fifteen or 20 I guess. People in the U.S. government, NASA, I.H. and places like that. You can learn their names easily enough. Just about everyone I know who had the misfortune of working with Rossi hates his guts.
The “mild-mannered academic types” are not likely to allow their names to be announced, and “hates his guts” is a very extreme reaction, more or less in line with Jed’s common melodramatic style. Jed, of course, in 2011 and later, was writing his opinion that Rossi had something real, basing this on comments from people he knew who had seen demonstrations and who were convinced.
So Dewey what comes next ? which new facts can you report if any ?
You say that (IH) had a Vision but in fact I have not seen any Industrial or Business Plan from IH. Can you show us one ?
There is no Plate called Rossi. That is your mere invention, and actually was probably invented by a PR company .
Planet. Dewey did invent the term, but it serves an obvious purpose. The “PR company thing” is a Planet Rossi trope, it takes a special mindset to think that someone would be spending good money to guide blog commentary in the present context (where public image will have almost zero effect on anything important). That would be good money after bad, because “Planet Rossi,” as a term, will generate no cash value for IH, and if anything, Dewey’s comments could be doing more harm than good. He is not speaking for IH, but for himself.
I use “Planet Rossi” because it is short and conveys a clear meaning: the complex of ideas that are idiosyncratically related to Rossi and RossiSays, and, then, the people who predominantly express those ideas. “Idiosyncratic,” by the way, doesn’t mean wrong. Rossi seems to have thought so when I pointed out his usage of kWh/h as a unit of power. He went so far, then, as to claim that kW (cancelling out the “hour” units) was wrong, and then he cited a physicist as someone to read to understand this. The fellow he cited made the same point, and Rossi’s expert Wong did the same.
Just about everyone I know who had the misfortune of working with Rossi hates his guts.
Sic. Ele’s English seems to vary greatly in quality. I suspect more than one person may be involved with the account. (Perhaps he has become more senstitive to the sock puppet arguments, so he has someone assist him, sometimes.) Ele is here posting non sequiturs, irrelevancies. What people in “Sweeden” are doing is irrelevant to those whom Rothwell knows. It is, again, a Rossi practice to assert an irrelevant argument when challenged, and this shows up in the arguments over the Motions for Summary Judgment. People working on “Rossi Technogy” in “Sweeden” is RossiSays. Maybe. Maybe not.
NASA has cited Rossi technology as promising.
and “People in the US…..” is to generic please specify.
Jed wrote “People in the U.S. government, NASA, I.H. and places like that.” What someone might have said in the past would not be relevant to what they feel now. Rothwell merely made a statement about how some people feel, who had worked with Rossi, and IH worked more intensely with Rossi than any other example I can think of. I still don’t think they “hate his guts.” Dewey might possibly feel that way, but he is not “Industrial Heat,” he merely works with and for them, in a certain capacity. Not as a blogger, I think.
It is definitely not against the law! That would be a violation of free speech.
There is no need for a trial. Every sensible person can see that Rossi is a scammer, and in every free society anyone is free to say that.
The domain http://www.lenr-forum.com is registered in the US (San Francisco CA.) maybe that there is another law, but I would prefer that no person, cooperation, or organisation is accused here as long as there is no judicial verdict.
Jed is an American and is referring to U.S. law. See the Wikipedia article on Defamation. Jurisdiction can be a problem with the internet, but aside from that, most of the U.S. does not establish defamation as a crime; it is a civil offense, i.e,. someone can be sued. Truth is a defense. The issue here: “scammer” could be defamation, but remember that Pons and Fleischmann sued a newspaper in Italy over being called frauds or the like, and lost.
Accusation of others on LENR Forum of reprehensibility has been common. I think Rends has done it, but it’s not important enough to spend time trying to find it.
Jed responded to this, not quite correctly. In some states, libel is still a criminal offense. However, “criminal offense” requires mens rea, the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing. For a civil offense, mens rea is not necessary.
Why does nobody mention that big daddy O’Sullivan wiped the last straw of IH just off table!
All spoliation (destroy of evidence, e-mails…) claims (as predicted to 100%) were burried and the final Jury date has been agreed on.
This would also not be the “last straw.” Spoliation may still be asserted at trial. Rossi may have great difficulty convincing a jury that there was a megawatt heat exchanger that he removed without informing IH and giving them an opportunity to inspect it.
Rends was incorrect about the domain registration. The registrar is in Denmark. The site is, however, hosted on Cloudflare.com, which appears to be in San Francisco. The owner, David Nygren, is in Sweden (which does have criminal defamation laws).
Wyttenbach dug his hole deeper, insisting that O’Sullivan was “the Court.” Because O’Sullivan is labelled “the Court” in hearings, I’d guess. He speaks for “the Court” in his hearings, but his decisions may be appealed to Altonaga, and we have already seen her overrule him. Wyttenbach speaks with great confidence in his correctness. That’s a hazard of having a PhD, and assuming that because you did well in one field, you must be really smart in others as well. Maybe. Often, not.
As a Jury I would decide to run the plant in a certification LAB and if any COP measured is higher than the contract asks for, IH has to pay.
Wytte (not) has no clue about what juries do. He may be accustomed to an inquisitorial legal system, where a judge might do something like that, but the contract simply was not followed, so COP is irrelevant. Rossi could buy back the Plant and sell it to someone else, if IH consented, and it could work spectacularly, and this would not change anything about the lawsuit.
Yes “the playground” is a stupid idea and it definitley encourages trolling.
I don’t go on Lenr forum much because of all the mindless arguing and the playground brings the level down even more. There’s a post with a picture of a tank here https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/3261-the-playground/?pageNo=70 with very rude name-calling at Dewey Weaver – and it has been allowed to stand! Its incredible.
“What happened” has been pretty obvious for quite a while. Whereas Rossi’s measurements do not permit us to absolutely prove one way or the other whether he’s ever had anything, it’s an engineering certainty that he hasn’t. In using the term “engineering certainty” I’m stating that that’s the way a working engineer would bet when a lot depends on him/her being correct. Real life doesn’t often allow hedging such decisions. The best evidence that Rossi had *something* was Ferrara, where the optical measurements were checked with a thermocouple, but given Rossi’s involvement with those measurements there’s still the chance that he messed up the input power measurements or did *something else* that produced the false measurements he wanted. We’re after all dealing with a magician here who has assistants helping to maintain the illusion. At any critical point we find Rossi has handled the data or the samples. We can’t know what the truth is, but I’d bet on fraud all the way.
This is of course somewhat of a problem for those that are trying to replicate Rossi’s claims. Since some of the ideas published by Rossi are however logical things to try, and because there is no solid information about details so the “replicators” have had to generate further extensions to the techniques used, it’s still possible that the “replicators”may succeed where Rossi obviously didn’t. Alan or me356 may have been led down the garden path by Rossi’s claims, but by going beyond where Rossi stopped they could find some reaction. Maybe….
Meantime, we find that Brian Ahern (at http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg114231.html ) says his Thermacore replication was a null result and he’ll be trying again. That’s more interesting news. I’d assumed it hadn’t succeeded because of the lack of news that it had, but it’s nice to know he’s still going forward. Though this may not convince sceptics even if it works, it would be an encouragement to those pinning their hopes on Ni/H as a cheaper way to LENR and may produce solid data (ash) that would help in working out what’s happening. Of course, if like Pd/D there’s some “catalyst poisoning” by touching the materials with bare fingers, then it could take extreme precautions to get something that works. While we don’t know why it works or why it doesn’t work, there could be any number of reasons why a particular experiment returns a null result (including that the initial premise is wrong). Incidentally, for Titanium-based aircraft that are faster than sound, there’s a prohibition of touching the bare metal with bare fingers, since it etches the surface a bit and can cause failures under stress – it’s not limited to LENR.
Engineering “certainty” is very substantial “preponderance of the evidence.” It isn’t true, though, that engineers cannot hedge. They can and do keep alternate possibilities open, but if investigating a possibility is expensive, and a single engineer has limited time regardless, and a company has a limited staff, the truth of your comment is that they must make choices based on probability estimates.
Looking at the Ahern mail to vortex-l, I notice that there is an Ni-H investigation published. Were I Industrial Heat, I would consider giving them (Budko and Korshunov) samples of fuel processed according to Rossi instructions. (That would not necessarily reveal the IP.) NiH has always been fringe, on the edge. That doesn’t mean “wrong,” but it means “unconfirmed.” Some people are going to investigate and some of these will run into calorimetric artifacts. Parkhomov ran into several, and his thermometry contradicted his evaporative calorimetry. So he ignored the thermometry and announced the evap. It’s a big world, with many who will attempt replication, and only a few who are truly competent in the field. Just being a physicist isn’t enough.
(I was quite excited by Parkhomov’s results when he first announced. It looked good. Until I looked closely. Then it fell apart, blatantly. To see that I had to reconstruct the Parkhomov protocol, he had not completely specified it, but his input powers obviously were quantized. Plotting temperature vs input power revealed the problem. There was no sign of excess heat in the temperature data. (This did not rule it out, but set an upper bound that was far below what Parkhomov was claiming.) An exception was at the very end, but that showed a number of signs of thermocouple failure and then the heater also burned out. Indications were that the evap calorimetry was hampered by water bumping out of the cooling reservoir from the very irregular boiler Parkhomov had made, and he took no steps to prevent that (and water was reported on the lip of the pot by MFMP). So the effect appeared as boiling increased. Instead of repeating the experiment to investigate and demonstrate cause for his results, he kept “improving” it. That was leapfrogging, goal-oriented, not sane scientific practice. Parkhomov could do the field a great service by repeating his earliest work with more care; but his protocol was quite sloppy, irregular, cooling rate of the reactor poorly controlled. Still, he’d be the ideal person to follow up on that work. This is what genuine scientists will do, and will publish causes for “failure,” to support future generations of researchers. Rather, Parkhomov was playing, and clueless about the serious consequences of his results. He imagined that nobody would notice his harmless little creation of a temperature record for periods where his system wasn’t recording it. I.e, fake data. He never did fully explain this. He had a reason for doing that, an aspect of his experiment that he didn’t want to reveal, because it could create more suspicion of error. At least that is my suspicion. To avoid a small problem he created a large one.
I see that Bob Higgins has commented on Budkov and Korshunov.. Yes. All too-common with negative replications, they were not replications. This was a partial exploration of the parameter space, apparently outside the space of reported heat. Long shot. Long shot missed. Surprise? Attempting to “confirm” secret results is probably a great waste of time, this is what happened with the original FP results in 1989. SRI has a replication procedure that will attempt to avoid that. They start with a monitored replication by the original experimenter.
That won’t work with someone like Rossi because he would not allow it. He only allowed IH to do what they did because they bought the IP. If the IP transferred actually worked — ever — he didn’t transfer it, it would appear. No sign has appeared of any suppression of results. They did see massive heat when they used Rossi measurement techniques, which then can explain much. Rossi fooled even himself, but must have been greatly frustrated by those pesky failures. The damn Russians! So he needed to set up conditions where he could completely control the test. Hence Doral, in his mind the gain for the world (cheap energy! Think of the children!) was worth the minor detail of lying to IH. Rossi wasn’t the first inventor to do that. Or it was all a deliberate scam from the beginning and I know of no clear way to tell, because there is no clear boundary visible between “partial scam” and “full-on con.” Because of Rossi v. Darden, Rossi’s reputation is toast, burnt, practically incinerated. Because of the massive expenses of a futile lawsuit, not to mention possible IH recovery, Rossi may walk away bankrupt.
Abd – I was also initially hopeful with Parkhomov. Though his techniques were on the primitive side, the errors were not immediately obvious and he appeared genuine. He was maybe overwhelmed by the attention and tried to cover up some of the messy bits rather than admit to them. He did however cooperate with people trying to replicate, and thus the effect went away. I think Parkhomov started with an honest mistake and compounded it by telling the world before he was sure.
There are many ways to get measurements wrong, so we’re always trying to avoid known errors – why it’s useful to have a team rather than go it alone. It’s also useful to have those sceptics around who can point out inconsistencies and errors.
For Rossi, we’ve seen so many examples of bad measurements (thermocouples in wrong place, not enough steam visible, assumptions of black-body spectrum, etc.) that it’s a very short step to assuming that all measurements were wrong. Maybe he fooled himself, but he also tried very hard to fool everyone else too. Though I find it hard to think that anyone would put so much time into a scam without having seen something that they thought was real, I’m unfortunately aware of quite a few examples both currently and through history who have done exactly that, and just wanted to fool people. From my point of view, I’d place all the “big names” in Free Energy in that category, since they must know that their various devices don’t do what they claim and that the books they publish on “how to get free energy” are more useful to light a fire with – at least you’d get some energy out of that. Given all those examples, the hypothesis that Rossi started with nothing real, and collected ideas that sounded plausible with which to continue the scam, seems a good explanation when we also figure in the “bait and switch” of bringing out a new configuration every year. Still, we’ll never know for sure, I think. Rossi isn’t going to tell, though maybe he could publish a book about it and make some money that way.
It looks to me that Plan B is likely to be the quickest route to achieving a usable LENR. Edisonian experimentation, when we don’t know why it happens, may produce a result – but not when those experimenters assume that Rossi had some reality under the scam.
Yes, in fact what I meant about facts was that the process of Discovery gave us real new insight into the Rossi/IH relations, and Rossi’s behaviour. Unprecedented. Now that is finished and well digested that is not much new for the content-led posters to say or read and so the trolls come out and play. Ahlfors was so obscure and weird I did not read him.
Yeah. It was a little obscure. However, as I wrote, slow news day, that’s my excuse. It was a piece of work to track down all his sources. Ahlfors could be, as Weaver suspected, Rossi. Someone like Rossi will lie with facts; that is, cherry-picked facts can present an impression that would disappear with more information, happens all the time. The Fabiani thing was new, but … what did all this have to do with Rossi v. Darden Developments? Moderators are slow to recognize this kind of trolling.
and why did Ahlfors point to a Google cache rather than the real thing? A cache in Italian, of all possibilities, while implying he was Swedish? Gee, I wonder why?
What the real cold fusion community needs is facilitation, not weak moderation. It is not about censorship, at all. A community may decide not to permit certain kinds of offensive behavior, and one of the dumber LF ideas was the Playground, an open invitation to trolling. But LF has no clear concept of its mission. Discussion threads should be held to topic. Side-issues may be brought up, but only as side-issues, and an active moderator would keep focus narrow, moving off-topic content to its own thread, unless it is completely off-forum-topic.
And why did Mary Yugo start up a new account? Possibly the new account is not Mary Yugo, but a troll. Anyone could do that and if “Mary” isn’t watching any more, it might pass unnoticed. Maybe I’ll ping him.
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