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Originally Posted by dgruss23
Hypothetically a person can give an opinion before looking at the details because Bell&McDiarmuid are proposing an ATM ...  ... idea - which means that their statistical analysis must be flawed. It is a wise course of action to load up on Vitamins BB, DE and DM before reading any ATM papers. It helps to keep your immunity to ATMuenza strong.
Tang and Zhang - on the other hand - have provided a statistical analysis supporting the mainstream ...  ... position. Their statistics must therefore be right and will provide a healthy dose of mainstream fiber to keep your system properly functioning. So you see - just based upon what they are claiming it is very clear who will of course be right.
That would be one reason that you might give an opinion without having looked at the papers in detail - but there can certainly be other equally legitimate reasons. I'm just offering up one that comes to mind and may happen in some cases - although that is in no way an implication that that is what is happening here. |
Let's run the first few comments here through a special filter ...
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Hypothetically a person can give an opinion before looking at the details because Tang&Zhang are proposing an anti-Arp ... ... idea - which means that their statistical analysis must be flawed. It is a wise course of action to load up on Vitamins BB, DE and DM before reading any anti-Arp papers. It helps to keep your immunity to Mainstreamastronomuenza strong.
Bell and McDiarmid - on the other hand - have provided a statistical analysis supporting the Arp ... ... position. Their statistics must therefore be right and will provide a healthy dose of Arp fiber to keep your system properly functioning. So you see - just based upon what they are claiming it is very clear who will of course be right.
That would be one reason that you might give an opinion without having looked at the papers in detail - but there can certainly be other equally legitimate reasons.
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Of course, it might also be instructive to see what
Nereid actually said about the Bell & McDiarmid paper:
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The Bell and McDiarmid paper is a valiant attempt to tease out a periodicity in the SDSS QSO z data, and address the Tang and Zhang analyses. I feel this second paper falls short of achieving its stated objective, not least because it addresses selection effects inadequately (I also think their statistical analyses are less robust than Tang and Zhang's, but haven't looked at it in sufficient detail to say for sure).
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A quick test of the likely robustness of statistical analyses (in modern astronomy, using datasets the size of the SDSS QSO datasets) is the use of standard terms that you would expect to find in describing such analyses (of course, the use of such terms doesn't mean the analyses are good, but the absence of such terms suggests that the authors are unfamiliar with some of the well-known tips and traps of doing good statistical analyses on large astronomical data sets).
In this case all the following are found in the Tang and Zhang paper: windowing, Hann function, bootstrap, weighting, (a test of the statistical code, against a "known" dataset - in this case "the 290 QSOs in Karlsson and Napier & Burbidge’s data sets"). None of these are found in the Bell & McDiarmid paper.
A similar 'sanity check' can also be applied wrt the robustness of the analyses of selection effects.
It may well be that the Bell & McDiarmid paper reports a powerful statistical analysis ... is any BAUT member prepared to make that case?
Ditto, wrt selection effects?