Subject: Re: Aural photography
From: [email-masked] (James J. Lippard)
Date: 30 May 1994 13:11 MST
Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage,sci.engr.lighting,alt.meditation,sci.skeptic,sci.med.psychobiology,bionet.plants,bionet.general,alt.binaries.pictures.d,alt.devilbunnies

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Mark S. Bilk) writes...
>  To summarize: CSICOP published a scientifically false report.  They 
>  blocked all attempts by a member of their own Executive Council to
>  inform members that the report was false.  When their own selected
>  referees agreed the report was false, they suppressed the referees'
>  report.*

I neglected in my previous response to address the issue of referees'
reports.  Since Bilk never bothers to distinguish the _Humanist_-sponsored
and Gauquelin-conducted Zelen Test from the CSICOP-sponsored and Rawlins-
conducted U.S. test, it's not clear which referee reports are being referred
to here.
   With regard to _The Humanist_, statistician Elizabeth Scott read and
evaluated the Zelen, Kurtz, and Abell response to the Gauquelins' report
on the Zelen Test.  She felt that their analysis was misleading, and said
so in both a letter to and phone calls to the authors.  She was ignored,
and her remarks were not published.
   With regard to the U.S. test, there were five or six people who
refereed the whole package of papers from Rawlins, the Gauquelins, and
the Kurtz/Zelen/Abell team.  Ray Hyman wrote up a report which criticized
the post hocery by KZA and the Gauquelins, and praised Rawlins' paper as
the best of the bunch.  He also recommended that _SI_ go ahead and
publish the whole package, as is, in order to avoid criticism for delays
since the results were already being discussed by pro-paranormal
publications.  And that's what happened.  Unfortunately, the post hocery
led to even more criticisms.  (BTW, several of the "referees" were people
who simply gave yea-or-nay votes on whether the whole package--including
all of the data--was appropriate to be published in _SI_, and were
certainly not competent to produce detailed evaluations of the
statistics involved.  This led to some later disputes about whether they
were actually "referees" of the paper at all.)

Jim Lippard              [email-masked]
Dept. of Philosophy      [email-masked]
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721