Gavin Menzies
Peer review was established to ensure quality and accuracy of academic research and publications. As one university library tells students,
“Peer review ensures that an article—and therefore the journal and the scholarship of the discipline as a whole—maintains a high standard of quality, accuracy, and academic integrity. When you consult peer-reviewed sources, you are tapping into a wealth of established, verified knowledge.”
Does this mean non-peer reviewed materials have no value? What happens if academics refuse to peer review? Are they the only arbiters of quality and accuracy?
Dr. Tim Ball
Few people outside of academia know what peer review is or how it operates. Like most ideas and methods, peer review has evolved from its original purpose in ways that academics never anticipated – for example, the scandals involving climate science and the perversion of scientific and academic method. While peer review has mostly been thought of as the way ideas get their credibility, in fact, peer review has become an incestuous system that often invites corruption and territoriality so that most of the realm of new discoveries can’t make their way to the world. The peer review process is often antithetical to innovation and perpetuates prevailing knowledge. We need a new and better process and paradigm because of the implications for the betterment of all of society.
Gavin Menzies, the author of 1421 and 1434 and Dr. Tim Ball, a climatologist, teacher, and writer from Canada, lay out what we need to know about peer review to think of other ways of empowering discovery in the modern world.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Dear Ms Greenhouse
I stumbled upon your web site by following a link from Gavin Menzies’ site. I was quite impressed with the criticism of the practices of the IMF, but I then clicked on your climate link and listened to you interview with Dr Lawrence Solomon.
Please do not base your opinions on just one carefully crafted book followed by an unchallenged interview with the author. May I suggest a couple of web sites that argue global warming points cogently from a scientific standpoint. They are the rigorous http://www.realclimate.org and the more popular http://www.skepticalscience.com.
Enter Lawrence Solomon to search the RC site and you will find critiques of his book and many references to him where his claims are destroyed.
Keep up the GOOD work.
Mike Hughes
He you guys checked out http://www.1421exposed.com/ ?
Gavin Mendez would seem not a good guy to interview in tandem with in my opinion, the wholly veritable Dr. Tim Ball.
Established detractors (and otherwise) of both men apply entirely different criticism methods to each. Please have a look.
The http://www.1421exposed.com Mendez detraction method = Really is full of seemingly ‘fact’ based criticisms.
Where as,
Detraction methods largely applied in Ball’s case are ad hominem in nature.
This climate scam being perpetrated is so important, and not to be allied with ‘junk history’ providers.
No offense to host or guest BUT…
I came to listen to this interview again after seeing and entering into a discussion on YouTube regarding vaccinations where those against vaccinations of children were being attacked for their lack of science and their danger to other children. I was having an honest discussion with one pro-vaccine poster when a second pro-stander attacked me saying I needed “a slap on side of head”. The guy with whom I was discussing the topic had asked for reference or proof that science was being corrupted & I chose to include this interview (discussion) and the one on peer-review with Tm Ball (I listened to both interviews again before suggesting them as examples of science’s exclusion of open debate).
The chap (whom I did not address or give your two site addresses to watch) chimed back “Hey look, you provided links to a pseudoscience batshit insane website”. He did so within minutes of my post so obviously hand’t watched them.
Kim, I keep saying this but it can’t be said enough! Your site and the others that follow much the same lead by questioning accepted truisms in science, are what makes the internet and indeed YouTube as important as has been the Gutenberg press. Open minds, with honest critical study, are to progress what wings are to aeroplanes. Without them progress in science would halt and flying would be made terribly difficult.