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Hate Mail - Define Peer Review for Zeitgeist

Sender: Henry Hansen (hhansen) [IMFT] <hhansen@imftech.com>
Subject: Define Peer Review for Zeitgeist
Type: Corrections
Added: Apr 04, 2010
Sent to: Edward L Winston

Edward....shame on you....your links to books on Amazon do not meet the definition of peer review. Being lazy and not even pulling information out of books that should have multiple references for honest peer review makes almost everything you do shades of being dishonest. Shame on you. If you are going to be putting yourself out as an expert in your rebuttal of Zeitgeist you need to have references meet the definition below. To do otherwise is just wrong.

Do it over the right way or dont do it at all. Some people may not understand that you are not an expert and that you dont do peer review on your links.


Peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish; and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Although generally considered essential to academic quality, and used in most important scientific publications, peer review has been criticized as ineffective, slow, and misunderstood (see anonymous peer review and open peer review).

Pragmatically, peer review refers to the work done during the screening of submitted manuscripts and funding applications. This process encourages authors to meet the accepted standards of their discipline and prevents the dissemination of irrelevant findings, unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations, and personal views. Publications that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals.

By pointing out amazon.com links, you're ignoring 99% of my other sources. The reason I linked amazon.com was to source the book and also provide people with the ability to buy it if they wanted, and some cases, you can view parts of the book. I'm not sure if you're hip to the fact that it's against the law to republish someone else's material, so I can't do that. Where possible I link to google books instead so people can read it themselves, but that's not always possible. These days I rarely ever do amazon links, I typically just reference in the classic way with title, author, page number, ISBN, etc.

I'm not putting myself as an expert on the rebuttal of Zeitgeist, that's a definition only my critics have used -- people like yourself, because normal people aren't that stupid.

The purpose of my site -- which you obviously weren't aware of -- is to find out if, based on known evidence, a claim a conspiracy theorist makes it true. I'm not making scientific experiments, I'm not going out in the brush and re-researching what's been done. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to have peer review for referencing an encyclopedia, accurately quoting the bible, or properly sourcing the same material the movies claim to.

I can use multiple sources for every single thing I say, and sometimes I actually do that, but many times they're not available, and in fact most researches in the world don't use multiple sources for everything. I'm sorry the world can't live up to your strict, imaginary standards. Perhaps next you should send out mass emails to every author of the last century who fits my profile as an anti-expert.

By the way, I can't recall where I said my work was peer reviewed, but I'm sure you can't point it out to me, because I've never said it.

PS. Please quit sending me emails, you obviously have no idea what you're talking about, you're wasting everyone's time.

I don't make up the rules about peer review. It's there for a reason. It's called science. Check wiki yourself.
Your bio says you are all about science.
So live up to what you preach or disclose up front that you can't do peer review with (*) on the ones you can't.
I can find 10 books or experts that can disagree with you. That's why we have peer review. Daaaaaa.
I am just saying be honest.
The movie does not have peer review and I don't stand up for it either.
I like it for its entertainment value and an alternative view. Why you feel you have to debunk it is beyond me....did you do it for Avatar too?

I am about science, you're confusing references -- which people make all the time -- with having an entire experiment peer reviewed, you don't seem to understand the difference at all. Does this mean you ignore every book ever, except engeneering journals, because they're not peer reviewed? I've sourced peer reviewed papers. It just boggles my mind that you seriously can't comprehend any difference there.

Why you feel the need to email me about your own personal confusion is beyond me. Yes, I'm going to debunk Avatar next, because they're obviously the same thing.

I like how you ignored my pointing out what the purpose of my site is, just to ramble on about peer-review some more.

Please don't send me any more emails unless you get them peer-reviewed first. You can't seem to separate belief in science from believing your blog to be peer-reviewed.