You Too Can Be a Peer Reviewer!

Apparently things are so bad over at the mostly defunct Journal of 911 Studies that Frank Legge is now begging for reviewers.

There are two papers in need of review for submission to the Journal of 9/11 Studies.

One is by David Chandler and myself. It provides evidence that the witnesses to the path of the plane approaching the Pentagon, who stated that it passed north of the Citgo service station, must have been mistaken. The paper concludes that the only plausible description of the approach is that the plane did not deviate round the service station but flew virtually straight and hit the Pentagon, as described by the vast majority of eye witnesses.

The other is by John Wyndham. Here is the abstract of his paper:
Abstract: The widespread belief among those who question the official account of 9/11, that a large plane did not hit the Pentagon on 9/11, is unsupported by the evidence. The failure of the 9/11 truth movement to reach consensus on this issue after almost a decade is largely due to a failure to rigorously apply the scientific method to the evidence as a whole. This paper, by so applying the evidence to each proposed theory, shows that a large plane hitting the Pentagon is by far the most plausible theory.

Great, so after 10 years of cutting edge research and truthseeking they finally figured out what the rest of us knew that Tuesday morning. And they wonder why nobody takes them seriously?

J.O.N.E.S. Back from the Dead

The Journal of 9/11 Studies, which at one time announced that it was no longer going to publish, since truthers supposedly had made so many inroads to mainstream scientific journals that it had worked itself out of a job, has posted its first paper in 9 months. This paper, brace yourself, argues that AA77 hit the Pentagon. Gasp. Leave it up to the truthers to take 9 years to come up with the conclusion that everyone else figured out within about 20 minutes of the event. Next up on the horizon, a scientific study concluding that water is wet, and the Pope is Catholic....

All kidding aside though, I am not one for predictions, but I will predict that the next year or two in the nutjob community will evolve into a Civil War between the no-planer CIT, Rob Balsamo Pilots, David Ray Griffin, Loose Change crowd and the Planer Journal and 911 Blogger crowd, with the reality agnostics like Gage's group switching sides like a fickle Afghan warlord whenever the balance of power suits them.

Hey, at least schisms are entertaining. These guys have been pretty boring lately.

Update: I suppose I should also point out, since troofers will inevitably argue that Legge is one of the rational scientific fact-based members of the truth movement, that in a previous paper he, among other things, argued for those magical invisible GI Joe anti-aircraft systems hidden in the roof of the Pentagon. The paper has since changed of course, since even after passing "peer review", the paper underwent 7 rounds of revision.

The Truth Version 4.0

Geez, the troofers have more bug fixes than Microsoft. Frank Legge, one of the editors of the supposedly peer-reviewed Journal of 9/11 Studies, has now published the 4th version of his paper on the Pentagon, and says he might come out with a 5th. Now wasn't this paper supposed to be peer-reviewed before the first version? The thing is, it is still stupid.

Version 4. This version further developed some issues and corrected some errors. It also added thepreface to clarify the purpose of the paper and to answer some unfounded criticisms. Version 3 expanded the implications of publicly accepting or rejecting the official position that a 757 hit the Pentagon. I am very grateful for the help provided. All significant alterations have been identified and discussed in footnotes.

Update: I figured I should throw this in, as it is related to this paper. After the first version came out, I e-mailed Legge asking him a question about a statement he had made. Here is part of the exchange:

JamesB
Are you familiar with the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy?

"Why did the plane aim for the reinforced section, which still had few occupants due to the recent renovation? Would al Qaeda have wanted to minimize casualties? Why did it not hit the relatively weak roof? There were auditors in the damaged section who were investigating the loss of trillions of military dollars. Most of the auditors died, which has led to considerable speculation regarding motive. Who would wish to kill auditors?"

I am not asserting that this event is proof, but that it relates to the probability of foul play. So there is no fallacy.

It is just one more element in the list of odd things. The one I am most interested in is the use of explosives in the towers and WTC7. One could assert that al Qaeda placed the explosives so even that is not proof, but it relates to probability.
FL

JamesB

That is not what you said. You claimed that they aimed for that particular spot because of an importance that you placed on it after the fact. In fact the most probable explanation is simply because that is the side of the Pentagon the plane happened to be flying in from. Your argument is so incoherent even you cannot follow it.

Incidentally this whole "missing" $2.3 trillion thing has been widely misrepesented. It has nothing to do with Bush or Rumsfeld, and in fact was first mentioned in the press in March 2000, during the Clinton administration. You would think a peer-review would catch things like that.

Before going into any further details I have a couple of questions for you. What is your opinion about the twin towers? Were they brought down by explosives? If so, is that not rather odd, given that the NIST report denied the use of explosives?

JamesB

I thought we were talking about the Pentagon. You can't defend your paper from more than 2 questions without having to switch to an entirely different subject? Some peer-review.

And no. I do not believe the towers were brought down with supermagicinvisiblesilentnanotherm*te. The truth burn guys couldn't even figure out how to bring down a 6 foot tall sign with thermite.

Glad I asked you that. Saves me a lot of time. Pointless to defend the Pentagon paper.

The section of his paper that I quoted at the beginning is actually no longer in the paper, it having disappeared somewhere in the last 3 versions. Legge gives no explanation for this. The conversation, unbelievably goes on from there and his logic gets even more strained.

Journal of 9-11 Studies Closes?

How else to interpret this announcement on their front page:

It is now our belief that the case for falsity of the official explanation is so well established and demonstrated by papers in this Journal that there is little to be gained from accepting more papers here. Instead we encourage all potential contributors to prepare papers suitable for the more established journals in which scientists might more readily place their trust.

They go on to say that they will continue to publish, but don't expect a quick response:

We will continue for the time being to provide a service for researchers who wish to present a new finding or a new point of view but who feel that their contribution would not be suitable for a mainstream journal. We will also be happy to receive sound, substantial work which has nevertheless been rejected by others. However, due to the volume of work, there may be substantial delays in publication here in the future. Thank you for your interest in careful research.

What "volume of work"? Since March, they have published one paper, a four-page article on probability. In March they published a 27-page paper on the economic impact of 9-11 that James caught several errors in, and which still contains floaters (see correction below) like this:



That's only off by three orders of magnitude; close enough for "Truther" work.

Correction: My bad, those numbers are correct. They did have them wrong before.

What the Hell Kind of Paper is This?

The Journal of 9/11 Studies, has not been very prolific lately, with up until now only that single atrocious economics paper since January. I am starting to think that they aren't even trying though, with the most recent post being yet another "paper" by Frank Legge.

If one could actually call it a paper. It is only 4 pages long, and is put together with such bizarre logic and scholarship, that I really am speechless.

If we compare these two explanations for the collapse of the towers it is immediately apparent that they are different in a particularly significant way: the fire based official explanation is a series of events,21 like links in a chain, while the explosive based explanation is a parallel set of scientific studies of evidence. When challenged they behave in very different ways:

If an explanation is in the form of a chain it is only necessary to prove one link wrong todestroy the case. In contrast, with a parallel set of explanations it is only necessary to prove one explanation correct to establish the case. What do we find?

It has already been pointed out that links 2 to 6 of the official explanation are incorrect and link 1, about the fireproofing, has been strongly disputed

Bizarrely though, despite being so short, Legge can't even keep consistent. For example, on page 2 he argues that the steel was not hot enough.

NIST reports that very few samples of steel showed evidence of having been at temperatures higher than 250oC. 3 For collapse to become a possibility the steel would have to be over 650oC and at that temperature it would be red-hot,11 yet no red-hot steel was observed prior to collapse.

By page 3 though, it was.

It was observed that localized heating to temperatures far higher than can be achieved by the burning of jet fuel and office materials occurred in the south tower. Incendiary materials are implicated.

Unbelievable.

We Don't Need No Stinking Academic Integrity

Earlier I pointed out the abysmal economics paper published at the Journal of 9/11 Studies and how despite the fact that it had undergone 3 rounds of "peer-review" still was of such poor quality as to barely live up to a freshman class in microeconomics. Now apparently it is undergoing yet more rounds of peer-review, as they are changing parts of it.

From the PDF I downloaded when it was originally posted:

The same section now:

I don't know what is more pathetic, the fact that even after 3 rounds of peer-review that they still have to change stuff, completely without noting it in the paper, or the fact that even now they still have numerous idiotic mistakes:

Yet, expenditures climbed due to the fighting of two wars as part of the government’s War on Terror policy, going from $301,697 billion in 2000 to $546,018 billion in 2006.

Hey, Who Said That JONES is not Peer Reviewed?

There has been much discussion over whether Steven Jones' Journal of 9/11 Studies was in fact "peer-reviewed". This month another paper was posted in said journal, from an international studies professor (a PhD, although I am not sure from where) which doesn't even allege a government 9/11 conspiracy, but appears intended to bolster their rather weak academic standing. It starts with the following disclaimer:

Original Submission: June 12, 2007
(Revision#3: March 3, 2008, based upon reviewer’s critique received Feb. 15)

Well from this then, one would assume that after 3 revisions this paper meets the highest of academic standards. Or... well at least they corrected the most obvious errors and typos, right?

Well.... no. These are the errors that I discovered from a SINGLE reading of the paper. I don't feel like reading it again just to find more. If someone wishes my opinion on the actual argument of the paper, I will do so in the comments, but right now the quality is so low that I do not feel it worth my time.

Page 6:

In fact, the longest closure during WWII was for only one week in September when Germany attacked Poland on [sic] September 1939, with the NYSE rising following that event.

The New York Stock Exchange rose? What, like on stilts?

It seems that 450,000 shares of American Airlines stock involved ‘puts.’ Still, “…what raised the red flag is more than 80 percent of the orders were ‘puts,’ far outnumbering ‘call’ options, those betting the stock would rise.”

OK, there were 450,000 shares of stock that were involved, except they weren't involved because they were put options, and 80% of those "orders" (for put options presumably) were put options which outnumbered the call options. Yeah, OK, that sentence makes sense.


Page 9:

However, by 2004, the US economy grew by 4 percent in real dollars, the highest growth rate to occur since 1989’s similar 4 percent growth.

The only problem is, if you flip forward to page 24, where the good professor lists the US economic growth rate in a table, you will see that the US grew by 4 percent every year from 1996 to 2000. Apparently the author could not bear to read this paper any more than the "peer-reviewers".

Page 12:

As such, Federal Reserve Chairman at that time Alan Greenspan projected, based upon this consensus report of federal Reserve Board governors and bank presidents, that real GDP growth was expected between 2 and 2.5 percent in 2001.23

E.E. Cummings does economics, and who needs commas anyway?

Furthermore, according to Johannes Lapre, President of the northern European area for economic consulting Data Resources, Inc.-Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates (DRI WEFA, now known as Global Insights, Inc.),

Could someone please diagram that sentence for me?

Page 18:

Keep in mind that such reductions were eminent in the wake of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

I do not think that word means what she thinks it does...

Yet, expenditures climbed due to the fighting of two wars as part of the government’s War on Terror policy, going from $301,697 billion in 2000 to $546,018 billion in 2006.

Wow, that is a lot of money!

Note, however, that deficits existed from 1992 (-$365.6 trillion) to 1997 (-$66.1 trillion). Only during the 1998-2000 period was there a surplus ranging from $37.9 trillion in 1998 to $159 trillion in 2000. While the 2001 deficit following the attacks ballooned from -$39.3 trillion in 2001 to -$529.7 trillion by 2003, the deficit appears to be on the decline, and by 2006 (-$344.8), shows it falling below 1992 levels (-365.6).

I had no idea it was so bad. The Leo Wanta thing is starting to make more and more sense...

Page 22:

Cuban Missile Crisis, 1958-1962

Odd, I seem to recall it being limited to October 1962. Perhaps someone should let Kevin Costner know...

Page 24:

Clinton Administration, 1992-2000

Clinton was president in 1992? Who knew?

Well, I am glad they have preserved their academic standards, at least.

A Statistical Summary of the JONES Papers

Earlier, both Pat and I had discussed how Steven Jones had been bragging about the number of "peer reviewed" papers that had been published at his self-styled journal, and how the true number was only a fraction of what he claimed. We did not address the type and quality of the papers though, so I fired up my copy of Excel and did some low-grade data mining (send me an e-mail if you want to see the data set) and categorized the papers listed on their main page.

There are actually 45 papers listed, they claim 43, but two of them are actually interviews, so I am assuming they are omitting those. That is just a guess though, you could reasonably not count many other papers for similar reasons. Four of the papers are not actually original works, but correspondence, including a response from NIST, who I seriously doubt was interested in being submitted to such a prestigious publication.

In any case, out of those remaining 43, Frank Legge was the most prolific author, with an amazing 7 papers, or 16% of the total. Legge is actually one of the more educated authors, with a PhD in chemistry, although oddly enough, none of his papers are within his speciality, a trend that continues throughout most of the papers. The next two most prolific authors are Steven Jones and Kevin Ryan who appear on 5 and 4 papers (two of them are on the same paper) respectively. Why are these names significant? Well, look at the JONES homepage:

Our mission is to provide evidence-based, peer-reviewed research that furthers the cause of truth and justice. More about our efforts toward this goal can be found at the website for Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice.

Sincerely,
Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, and Frank Legge co-editors

They are the editors of the "journal". Fourteen of the 43 papers, or nearly a third of the papers accepted by the editors, are written by the editors themselves.

It gets even worse if you look at the qualifications of the authors. Of the 43, only 23 were at least partially authored by someone with a PhD. Note, this still does not imply that the author even has experience in the field they are writing on, as I pointed out, 7 of those 23 are by Frank Legge, and not in the field of chemistry. Once again, it is mostly the editors, of those 23 PhD level papers, 12, or 52% are by our two PhD editors (Kevin Ryan only has a bachelor's degree). Even worse, 3 of these papers are rebuttals to the no plane theories. While they ironically are among the best work published, they are about as scientifically relevant as publishing a paper arguing that the dinosaurs were not made extinct by the eating habits of Fred Flintstone. If we take these papers out of the count, that brings the number up to a ridiculous 60%.

Explain to me once again how this is a "peer reviewed" academic journal? I am now going to e-mail this post to Steven Jones, and see if I can get it accepted as a paper in his journal.

Update: This could go on forever, but I forgot to mention that 1 of those PhD level papers is a rebuttal by Dr. Frank Greening to a previous paper, and 3 of them are by theology or English professors. So in summary, of the original 43 papers, the numbers of papers written by someone with a PhD in a science, who is not one of the editors of the journal themselves, and who is not merely rebutting another previously held conspiracy theory comes out to a grand total of... 4, or a mere 9%.

And Now It's 100 Papers Published

James pointed a few months ago to the fact that Professor Jones was trumpeting 70 papers published in his vanity publication; now the century mark has been reached. Of course, we all know that the actual number of papers published is 43 (it even says that at the top of their webpage), and the only way they get to 100 is by including letters.

And even the 43 number is pretty dubious before we get into the quality of those papers. The first issue included the notorious "Elephant Plane" paper, which turned out to be a thorough fiasco, debunked within JONES itself by a letter. Several papers have been dedicated to debunking the "No Planes" theories, and the laser beam from space crowd. Another took the unremarkable stance that the fires weren't hot enough to melt steel, something even Rosie O'Donnell knows.

The paper that put them over the 100 mark is particularly minimalist. Although Dr. Jones describes it as "concise and packs a punch in just three pages", in fact it's about a page and a half, contains no calculations, and basically concludes that as the steel sagged, it should have gotten stronger.

Heckuva a job you're doing there, Jonesy!

Could They Get Any More Ridiculous?

The Urinal of 9-11 Stundies publishes the most breathtakingly fatheaded "peer-reviewed" letter that I can recall seeing over there since the "Flying Elephant" paper back in their initial edition, which was eventually rescinded (heckuva a job you're doing there, Jonesy!).

The author, who shows at least one working synapse by declining to be identified, goes through a fairly trivial set of calculations to estimate how much jet fuel remained inside the buildings and on the impacted floors (i.e., excluding the fireballs outside the building and the amount that flowed down through the vertical penetrations (elevator shafts and stairwells), based on NIST's own estimates. He comes to the conclusion that roughly 3500 gallons remained on the impacted floors in the North Tower and 3,000 gallons in the South Tower.

Then, ludicrously, he presents some visual aids to show us the amount of room that jet fuel would take up. Why, that would only fill a standard office cubicle to 9 feet high, or a small backyard pool, or a U-Haul truck! Obviously that tiny amount of fuel could not possibly have brought down the towers!

Piling hilarity on hilarity, he then visually shows the relative size of each tower to a cubicle, a U-Haul truck and a swimming pool. Now it's tempting to point out that it's unfair to compare the fluid that remained on roughly 6-8 floors of each tower to the entire tower, but even if he'd compared the jet fuel volume to only those 6-8 floors, it would be an asinine comparison. Why? Think about a large house and a tiny match. Clearly by the "logic" used by the anonymous writer, that tiny match could not possibly destroy that large house.

It's not the jet fuel, it's what gets ignited by the jet fuel. It's not the match, it's what gets ignited by the match. Un-freaking-believable!

Update: Here's a challenge for Dr Jones. We know that the 8 stories of the North Tower that were impacted by Flight 11 contained approximately 350,000 square feet of area. Divided by 3500 gallons, gives us a ratio of 100 square feet per gallon. Let's assume that Dr Jones' home is, oh, say 2500 square feet. What I propose is that he pour out 25 gallons (one gallon per 100 square feet) of kerosene (virtually the equivalent of jet fuel) in his house and light it on fire and let it burn for an hour and 45 minutes. If his house is still standing at the end of that time, I will concede the point.

More Great Editing at JONES

I had to chortle a bit at this intro to a letter from Reprehensor over at 9-11 Blogger to Jane Harman, Congresswoman from California:



How about that? I had no idea that Reprehensor was the Chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Intelligence, etc. Way to dangle that modifier! Note as well, the ridiculous salutation, "Dear Jane Harman".

That Peer-Review Process Over At Journal of Nine-Eleven Studies

Doesn't seem to be working (what a shock!). Dr Frank Legge submits an incredibly weak paper purporting to prove that WTC 7 came down by controlled demolition. It's short (five pages including a page of footnotes), spurious and contains almost no factual material. But even the Troofers found boneheaded mistakes:

The statement that the fires did not break windows on the north side of WTC7 is wrong, as can be clearly seen in this video. Hoffman and Griffin get this wrong too.

If the professor is aware of the fact that no plane hit Building 7, why would he use jet fuel in his arguement (sic)? It's a crossover quote from WTC 1 & 2 research, not the result of independent study.

The secondary fuel load in WTC 7 has been attributed to DIESEL fuel that was in a ConEd back up generator storage tank housed in the building.

This isn't dis-info, but it's weak research. Better clean this paper up if you plan on going anywhere with it. We don't need any built-in Straw Men.

I haven't read the whole thing to the end yet, but from what I have read one gets the impression that defenders of the official theory resort to a "fire alone" argument. Of course, NIST is likely to postulate both structural damage from falling debris and fire as the cause.

Heck of a job you're doing there, Jonesy!

The Psychology of Lying

For the most part I have grown bored of reading the papers published at the 9/11 denial echo chamber known as the Journal of 9/11 Studies. Every once in a while though, I read something that amaze me in its idiocy, and it is worth a post. For example a psychology grad student has now written a paper describing the "psychological barriers to 9/11 truth". Apparently the problem is not that they don't have any evidence to support their claims, but that the entire country is in a state of denial.

Amazingly though, this paper manages to even lie about something as abstract as this, once again misrepresenting the poll asking people whether they thought pre-9/11 intelligence was ignored. The author, Laurie A. Manwell writes on page 19:

An Angus-Reid poll comparing responses from 2002 and 2006 found similar results, and that in 2006, only 16% of Americans believed that the government is telling the truth about the events of 9/11 [16].

The problem with this being of course, she is lying. Her footnote takes the reader to a PDF of the poll. The poll question she is referencing, number 81, does not ask people at all whether they believe the "government is telling the truth about the events of 9/11" it asks (emphasis added):

When it comes to what they knew prior to September 11th, 2001, about possible terrorist attacks against the United States, do you think members of the Bush Administration are telling the truth, are mostly telling the truth but hiding something, or are they mostly lying?

The question is not whether they are lying about the "events of 9/11" but whether they are lying about what they knew about warnings prior to 9/11. It is even more absurd to use this as proof for 9/11 deniers when you consider that the question presupposes a foreign terrorist attack, something that they argue never occurred. This is even more apparent when you read the poll in context. The previous two questions ask whether the Bush and Clinton Administrations paid enough attention to terrorism before 9/11. 77% and 67% of those polled respectively, said that they did not pay enough attention to terrorism.