The Tim Ball Nominees

Readers of this blog will realize that it is the Award Season. In past years, the Bunny Blog has asked for nominations for the S. Fred for Climatology Incoherence and Eli hisself was awarded second and fourth in the Bag of Rocks sponsored by cohenite. Now in past years, Eli has admonished Marc Morano, by giving him the Gold Plated Mouse, for lazy cut and paste posting. Marc works as Sorcerers Apprentice to Wizzer Inhofe, but Marc has a little list he keeps adding to. Last year there were 400 folk who are scientists, might have met one once, or has played golf with one. Now there are 650

Thus, the Tim Ball Award for Resume Stretching. Tim, you may remember, was the former First Ever Climatologist in Canada who got called and stomped on by Dan Johnson, for, well, resume stretching.

Morano is in charge of nominations and, thanks to his strenuous cut and pasting, and quality decontrol, we have some new high quality nominations.



Tim Lambert and friends do the dozens on Louis Hissink, one of the Aussies who is very, very grumpy because people only laugh at him. Bernard J at #21 had it pretty well

Hissinkfit's efforts though eclipse everything that we ever came up with, and they are all the more flabbergastingly hilarious for the fact that he apparently has a Masters, and that he genuinely believes in what he concocts.
Some science historian in the future is going to review the two sides of the climate change debate that is currently percolating, and when that person analyses the fruitcake that is the body of current denialist dogma they will shake their heads in disbelief.

Tuvalu Marc has the touch. Eli found an interesting one straight off

“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” - Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

Now James is retired from a job in the defense industry and earns his keep as a webmaster in Middlebury and a part time, garden troll flourishing in a CO2 rich environment, and at the bottom put his qualifications

James A. Peden -better known as Jim or "Dad" - Webmaster of Middlebury Networks and Editor of the Middlebury Community Network, spent some of his earlier years as an Atmospheric Physicist at the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and Extranuclear Laboratories in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, studying ion-molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere. As a student, he was elected to both the National Physics Honor Society and the National Mathematics Honor Fraternity, and was President of the Student Section of the American Institute of Physics. He was a founding member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His thesis on charge transfer reactions in the upper atmosphere was co-published in part in the prestigious Journal of Chemical Physics (JCP). The results obtained by himself and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh remain today as the gold standard in the Astro Chemistry Database. He was a co-developer of the Modulated Beam Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer, declared one of the "100 Most Significant Technical Developments of the Year" and displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Tim Ball, could learn from this guy. The web, being the world wide web, this gets taken a bit apart in yahoo questions, with Peden dropping in for amusement value. They quickly find out that he has two papers (you turn up a couple more reports in Google Scholar) that one of them has no cites and the other 31. More about that later. d/dx + d/dq + d/dz actually reads Peden's climate blather and remarks

That's two more papers than I surmised by reading part of the article. There are more errors in the paper than I want to list, but the first few are:

and he lists them closing with

I find it difficult to conceive of a practicing scientist making so many blunders. Is Peden actually alive, or is someone else abusing a name taken from a tombstone? If he were dead that would explain the lack of papers.

Eli wants to take some time to show you the little guy hiding behind the curtin. The first clue is that the last author of the JCP paper was Wade Fite, the founder of Extranuclear, a company that made the best quadrupole mass analyzers. The bit about "co-published" means that some of the results from Peden's thesis appeared in an article in JCP, which is a good journal, but still "published in the prestigious" is insecure overkill. The paper has three authors. Peden's advisor, Wade Fite is the third author, the place where group leaders generally go in these things. What is important to note is that Peden is the second author, which means that his contribution was less than that of the first author. This is unusual for something based significantly on a student's thesis, which indicates that it was not or that he pissed Fite off, or something. (Steve Bloom says in the comments that there is no evidence that Peden has a doctoral degree so he may have a Masters. That is consistent with the evidence. The research division of Bunny Labs is looking in to this.) The American Society for Mass Spectrometry was founded in 1969, when Peden was a student of Fite's so he may have joined when it was founded, but it is a bit hard to believe he was one of the founders. One of the first members, yeah, but WTH that goes with the style.

Fite and Brackmann used modulated beam mass spectrometry in 1959 while they were at General Dynamics, so Peden may be slightly exaggerating his role, again, in keeping with the general trend. He probably worked on the instrument while with Fite.

The listing of undergraduate clubs and honors is one of those things you do to get into graduate school, but not much thereafter, again a sign of insecurity. The Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh was a center for students studying the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, or health areas related to the aerospace field at the University of Pittsburgh that was opened in 1962. It's hard to say for sure, but being an Atmospheric Physicist sounds a lot like doing graduate research in the building. He might have post-doced a bit( check above on degrees) , aka couldn't get a job elsewhere, those were tough times for science jobs

As a service Eli rewrote the bio

James A. Peden -better known as Jim or "Dad" - Webmaster of Middlebury Networks and Editor of the Middlebury Community Network, did his graduate research in atmospheric physics at the University of Pittsburg Space Research and Coordination Center and Extranuclear Laboratories. He studied ion-molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere under his adviser, Wade Fite. As an undergraduate Peden was elected to honor Physics and Mathematics societies at XYZ College . He has been a member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His (Masters??) thesis was on charge transfer reactions in the upper atmosphere, parts of which were published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. The results of that work are still used. At Extranuclear he assisted Fite in commercializing the Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer. It was declared one of the "100 Most Significant Technical Developments of the Year"* by xxx magazine and displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Peden left atmospheric chemistry in the 1970s to work in the defense industry, from which he recently retired.

There is a trend here folks, you just have to read the self-descriptions of the ignorati**, Hissink, Gray, Courtney and this guy, to see it. Eli is but a simple Rabett.

* Vaguely Eli has it between his ears that the award was for the commercializing of the quad, not the modulated beam part. It may have been the IR100 awards. Eli is a VERY old bunny

** They who are to be ignored, any other meaning is strictly in the minds of the gentle reader, for which Rabett Run assumes no liability.