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6th January 2015, 03:20 PM | #1 |
Penultimate Amazing
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WTC7: Compilation of Scientific Literature that supports the NIST report and methods
This, in my opnion, is a slam dunk.
Someone posting as "benthamitemetric" on several forums compiled a massive list of scientific writings (refereed papers, sworn affidavits, reports, ...) that all cite the NIST reports about the WTC7 collapse, and support NIST's conclusions or/and methodology. Some are, of course, critical of some details, such as recommendations, but the point is: There exists a very strong body of scientific literature, written by a large number of eminent experts, that basically says "Yes, NIST validly showed that fires most likely brought Building 7 down"; whereas the published works supporting CD are ... few. Here is the link: http://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comm...terature_that/ Scan it, enjoy, bookmark it, and use it often! |
6th January 2015, 03:59 PM | #2 |
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<"truther"mode> The list is all shills that are afraid of
It's really easy to be a "truther". |
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6th January 2015, 04:05 PM | #3 |
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Sorry, I could not resist DGM:
I would really hate losing a loose job. |
6th January 2015, 04:12 PM | #4 |
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"Remember that the goal of conspiracy rhetoric is to bog down the discussion, not to make progress toward a solution" Jay Windley "How many leaves on the seventh branch of the fourth tree?" is meaningless when you are in the wrong forest: ozeco41 |
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6th January 2015, 04:27 PM | #5 |
Penultimate Amazing
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An idea: Could we compile a list of professional engineers and engineering PhDs that author such papers?
A table, basically, AE911T-style, with columns listing... Last name, first name Academic title Degree (B/M/PhD), academic field Country State City PE license, if applicable URL(s) to document endorsing NIST Some flags to check who suppors NISTs conclusions/methods, ... in whole/part, ... other I am particularly impressed by that AEGIS insurance company case, with sworn affidavits by several professors of structural and fire protection engineering. The insurance had to pay a nine-digit US$ amount as a result if the WTC7. Had they been able to show that it fell due to excessive negligence, or even due to criminal deliberation, they could have avoided paying that huge sum. So they were VERY much interested in hiring experts that would destroy the NIST findings and come up with a different story. One of the experts was also the leader of an expert group of the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat which critiqued the NIST WTC7 report in 2008, and also expressedly and in the clearest words possible condemned "the 9/11 truth movement" of not having a whiff of evidence and being a bothersome distraction. |
13th January 2015, 04:22 PM | #6 |
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The No.1 problem with "the official narrative" is its failure to reasonably explain the collapse of 7WTC.
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13th January 2015, 04:33 PM | #7 |
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Failure by whose judgment?
Reasonable by whose standard? The thread asks whether there's a legitimate reason to question the official narrative. You therefore have to make a case that your stated problem meets that standard. |
13th January 2015, 04:41 PM | #8 |
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13th January 2015, 05:36 PM | #9 |
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That's been done many times, by experts and laypeople alike.
To my untrained eyes, the sight of WTC 7 collapsing was not a surprise in the least, after finding out that the fires started on multiple floors, and burned unchecked for as long as it did. I've said it once and I'll say it a thousand times. I knew what took the buildings down practically before they even hit the ground. And I've YET to be proven wrong. You people need a new hobby. Preferably one that doesn't mock the murder of thousands. |
13th January 2015, 08:53 PM | #10 |
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13th January 2015, 09:05 PM | #11 |
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It has!
By and large the collapse of WTC7 was not unexpected by anyone on scene. By and large its collapse primarily due to fire and the specific construction of the building is accepted by the professional engineering community. In addition there is no evidence whatsoever for any alternative to the obvious proximate cause, fire. However, even if one questions specifics of the NIST most probable collapse hypothesis, that by itself is very far from sufficient reason to reinvestigate the events of 9/11. At best its reason to reinvestigate the specifics of how fire led to the beginning of a progressive global collapse of this specific design. |
13th January 2015, 09:08 PM | #12 |
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I'm not sure how it is necessarily invalid. Yes, it's an appeal to emotion and therefore not valid as a logical argument, but the goal of it is not to try to establish fact, but to lay out how important the standard of proof is. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and suggesting that thousands were murdered (no, I don't acknowledge Vic-Sim claims) by a let-it-happen scenario or an inside job perpetrated by people whose job it was to protect them demands a high standard.
But yes, when 13 years elapse with no more than suppositional lines of reasoning for heinous allegations, it's time to call a spade a spade even if it does seem like an emotional argument. That's what makes it relevant. Conspiracy theorists need some way to understand how people view those unfounded accusations who aren't steeped in conspiratorial rhetoric and who have a more balanced understanding of what kind of proof would normally be required for such accusations. And lacking that proof for so long, well there we are. |
13th January 2015, 09:34 PM | #13 |
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It's invalid 'cause no one here is mocking the deaths of thousands of innocent people on 9/11. Suggesting LIHOP or MIHOP is not making a mockery out of the victims whereas saying they were gelatin filled dummies and the figments of people's imaginations/digital creating abilities most certainly is.
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13th January 2015, 10:03 PM | #14 |
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Read his statement carefully. He said making a mockery out of the "murder of thousands." (emphasis added) Not the victims themselves necessarily, but the act and motives.
The accused terrorists weren't sworn to protect and defend those victims. They were malicious and expectedly so. However most of the conspiracy theories require that American officials who had a duty of care over us either abrogated it or flat-out broke it. And for that you need extraordinary evidence, which you don't have. It's the qualitative difference between an accusation that makes sense even if it's unpleasant, and an accusation that is considerably more heinous and has failed to gain a toehold outside the lunatic fringe for its sheer audacity and lack of evidence. When such serious accusations are made largely for the apparent purpose of seeking attention, then it becomes a mockery. But by all means, if you think inventing fanciful stories for how American authorities callously murdered or allowed to be murdered thousands of their citizens is just a bit of innocent fun that doesn't reflect badly on you, keep at it. No skin off my nose. |
14th January 2015, 12:01 AM | #15 |
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14th January 2015, 07:11 AM | #16 |
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14th January 2015, 12:05 PM | #17 |
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Oystein addressed this in another recent thread you may have missed
http://www.internationalskeptics.com...d.php?t=287245 |
14th January 2015, 03:16 PM | #18 |
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Well this sounded worth investigating, so I thought I would start by looking at the peer-reviewed report that lead the pack. Analysis of Structural Response of WTC7 to Fire and Sequential Failures Leading to Collapse The first problem; the report is not free. The second problem, and for me this is a deal breaker, is the only structural engineers listed as authors, are Therese McAllister and John Gross. What is the problem you might ask? *They both are employees of NIST. John Gross in particular is also a well known spokesperson for NIST, most notable for this public statement about what he claims was not observed at 9/11 Ground Zero;
Originally Posted by John Gross, Structural Engineer, NIST
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14th January 2015, 03:22 PM | #19 |
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So you can't dispute the facts in the paper. You can only complain it has a production cost and was created by those who are both qualified and in the employ of a pertinent organisation.
Oh dear. |
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14th January 2015, 03:42 PM | #20 |
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Good excuse. You now must agree that everything Richard Gage says is ineligible because he is an employee of AE 9/11. You have no bias, right? Imagine if you could (or knew someone) that could argue against the content, then the world would know the truth. Maybe you could get the Europeans to listen, or maybe speak for you? Start a new thread with this ground breaking proof. I'll bet it's all the same cherry picking you've been using for years. I'm sorry but, you really need to step it up. This is even lame by your standards. |
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14th January 2015, 04:01 PM | #21 |
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Copies of articles from professional journals are never free unless you're a subscriber. That's not some nefarious 9/11-related plot; it's standard procedure.
When the topic of the paper is the methodology used by certain people to obtain results, how would that paper have any value or authority if it were not written by the people who devised and executed the method? Your objection is silly and blatantly circular. |
14th January 2015, 04:23 PM | #22 |
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Not entirely true. One can often find such articles for free using google or google scholar. Whether or not these are necessarily supposed to be free I'm not entirely sure. However, you are right that it is nothing out of the ordinary for academic articles to cost money.
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14th January 2015, 04:29 PM | #23 |
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Indeed. I often look for papers on the health issues of family members. Most often I can read a synopsis for free but would have to pay to see the whole study. I did buy one ($25 iirc) and found that the bulk of it was basically Greek to me. I understood the basis of the study, and with work on terms, understood the conclusions. The in between parts of the actual study were all but incomprehensible. I lack the knowledge on terms, acronyms, statistical analysis and the minutia of biochemical goings on in the human body. I had no ability to determine the veracity of the conclusions.
I was awestruck at the incredible complexity of the endocrine systems that isn't even hinted at in grade school science programs. Anyone see an analogue wrt structural papers? |
14th January 2015, 04:30 PM | #24 |
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MM, is this the paper you were looking for?
Analysis of Structural Response of WTC 7 to Fire and Sequential Failures Leading to Collapse Therese McAllister, Robert MacNeill , Omer Erbay , Andrew Sarawit, Mehdi Zarghamee F. ASCE, Steven Kirkpatrick, John Gross F. ASCE If this is the one, it seems like you didn't try very hard to find a copy that wasn't behind a pay wall. http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=902588 |
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14th January 2015, 04:34 PM | #25 |
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14th January 2015, 04:37 PM | #26 |
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I am glad you are looking into this
I understand this is a problem for you. It is also a practical problem for me, as I am not going to pay US$ 30 to read something I don't need. But it is not a problem at all in the relevant fields of science and engineering: The relevant experts will have access anyway through subscriptions (universities and engineering firms will typically subscribe to the relevant publucations). This is the NORMAL way that science is published today. Next, you will argue that book citations are a problem because books cost money, right? Wow, I am impressed - you payed attention! And you know what? It's even worse than that! Not only are McAllister and Gross NIST employees, they are even listed in NIST NCSTAR 1A (the NIST report on WTC7) as "Co-Project leader" for the "Structural Fire Response and Collapse Analysis"! Aaaaaaand all the other co-authors of that paper are listed in the NIST report as NIST contractors - hired guns! But why is that NOT a problem? MM, it's not McAllister e.al. that are doing the peer-review that benthamitemetric talks about! It's the peer-reviewers that the Journal of Structural Engineering selected to peer-review the paper submitted by McAllister ed al.! The content of the paper is described in the Abstract, first sentence: "This paper presents the structural analysis approach used and results obtained during the investigation conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to model the sequence of fire-induced damage and failures leading to the global collapse of World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7)."So the paper basically reproduces the structural analysis approach that was actually used in the report - and this structural analysis approach was peer-reviewed by the (independent from NIST) JoSE, and it got a pass from the JoSE peer-reviewers! ETA: This post is not really ironic - I actually learned something from MM's post by checking out his argument. You see, I did not bother to take a close look at this supposed "peer-review of the NIST methodology", I took benthamitemetric's word for it - rather uncritically. And I have to admit I thought the same that MM thought: That the paper is the peer-review! When MM posted this, I felt embarrassed for a brief moment that I had not niticed the authors were from the NIST team, because MM is absolutely correct to point out that NIST-people can't do an independent peer-review of the NIST report. But then I got to thinking, and after almost one minute of thinking, I found the answer |
14th January 2015, 05:16 PM | #27 |
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The incredible complexity of the world in general scares conspiracy theorists. Perhaps they actually feel the need to believe that the world is controlled by "the NWO" or "the Powers That Be", to attribute random, bizarre, and hard-to-explain phenomena to a nefarious, secretive conspiracy that involves people who (they think) are all-powerful. Because the alternative-that the world is far more complex and random and chaotic than human beings can make sense of, let alone "control"-is unbearable. Additionally, perhaps there's a "Hero Complex" at work here: something's wrong with the world, institutions and authorities are hopelessly corrupt (if not outright malicious in intent and actions), and it's up to "ordinary people" to stop it. Or, they could just be trolling us as part of some sick game. That applies to more than a few CT'ers, in my experience. |
14th January 2015, 08:59 PM | #28 |
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14th January 2015, 10:00 PM | #29 |
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Fantastic link Oystein! I've been using it to shut up truthers on political fora who claim there was no peer review of the 'Official Story'.
Sadly, they respond with the predictable cry of, 'the whole academic community is in on it', or similar false generalisations. Yep...it burns |
14th January 2015, 10:27 PM | #30 |
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15th January 2015, 07:33 AM | #31 |
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I don't see how an article of clothing can be indecent. A person, yes. - Robert A. Heinlein If Christ died for our sins, dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them? - Jules Feiffer If you are going through hell, keep going - Winston Churchill |
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15th January 2015, 08:14 AM | #32 |
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15th January 2015, 11:04 AM | #33 |
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Well, the high cost of professional and academic journals in general might be fodder for conspiracy theories in and of itself, but the point is that everything of that ilk lives behind a paywall, not just the stuff related to 9/11. So it's not as if ASCE or any of the other relevant organizations are putting up barriers specifically to discourage 9/11 research.
And yes, I know there are various marginal ways to get journal content for free. I gather students these days download their textbooks from bit-torrent sites as ripped copies of paid e-book sales and rentals, so that's the library photocopier of the digital age. Some of that sort of thing seems blatantly illegal to me, and other of it like what Google does seems at best on the fence but certainly very useful. I understand NIH now requires that studies they fund must be published free within a year after having been published in a paid journal, and that other offices of the government are looking toward adopting that model for publicly-funded work. That is likely why a free draft copy of the paper in question was directly available from NIST. But regardless of how you get the content, the fact remains that NIST put their methodology out there for review and criticism by the relevant practitioners of the industry, and it has been received favorably enough by that body of professionals. That doesn't mean it's utterly beyond criticism. But it does explain why the specific criticism leveled by the conspiracy theorists against it hasn't gained any traction in the relevant field. |
15th January 2015, 12:20 PM | #34 |
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Do you remember college - how much books cost.
Ironic, 911 truth followers fall for the fake paper from Jones and Harrit which Jones had to pay to published. A real journal is not good enough, the 911 truth followers are not able to pay to read. Is 911 truth a movement of the undereducated poor (no, not if Charlie Sheen is in the mix, with lots of money etc, super high school baseball dropout, looks like undereducated is the key), or what. Jones, forced to publishing BS in vanity journal, faked the thermite conclusion, fooled gullible 911 truth followers, and 911 truth followers are upset real journals charge money. |
15th January 2015, 08:12 PM | #35 |
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15th January 2015, 08:23 PM | #36 |
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Your public library can probably get you a copy of that article for considerably less money.
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11th February 2015, 08:24 AM | #37 |
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Bump for MirgageMemories as he is now off of suspension.
MM, have you used the time to carefully study this issue of "NIST peer-reviewed" and realized that you fell for the same misunderstanding that I fell for? See my post #26 upthread. |
11th February 2015, 10:20 PM | #38 |
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12th February 2015, 06:37 AM | #39 |
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Also, my uni has a sub to the journal MM can't access so if he wants a super official pdf of the article, I'm down to share the love.
Sorry if I missed it being discussed but there is a response to the McA and Gross article from the Truther's side. Here it is. I haven't read the actual article so I don't know if the Truther response is groundbreaking or not...I have my concerns. Man I leave for a year and it's a new forum but same ol' Truther claims. Quite bummed am I. |
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12th February 2015, 11:02 AM | #40 |
Penultimate Amazing
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BazBear in post #24 had this link to a free copy of the McAllister et al paper:
http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=902588 Thanks for pointing to the Brookman paper! I missed it, too! |
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