Ari and I are now in the process of performing this test. It is our intention to submit a paper for publication at some time. For me it will be the first time that I have ever submitted a paper to a peer review journal, so a big learning experience. Many thanks to all those who have taken part in the thread, your comments and suggestions have assisted with my astronomical education, though at age 60 I am a little slower to pick up new things than I once was.

If there are any astronomers who have experience of publication and are willing to look at our paper and make comments (from a either a standard or alternate cosmology perspective or whatever) when we have it generally assembled, then I would appreciate that. You may contact me by email at ray(at)tomes(dot)biz as this thread will automatically close in a couple of days time. You could decide after we finish whether you want to be acknowledged for advice or not ;-)

The first half of my previous response (about redshift completeness) is what you are after. The second half of my response was just to let you know that what you are after (the redshift completeness) is dependent on the magnitude of the objects of interest.

I really suggest you read the Colless et al. paper (it is linked to in the website from my previous post). There is a lot there about fibre allocation, parent photometric catalog etc. Failing that, there is a website here which allows you to extract images and photometric catalogs around objects of interest by inputting coordinates. You could obtain catalogs around each of your objects and cross correlate with the 2dF catalog to determine the redshift completeness around each of your objects.

Who knows?

At one level all I am asking is how you intend to cover BAO in your test, given that it shows up in quasar-galaxy (and galaxy-galaxy and ...) (cross-)correlation investigations, and is predicted in LCDM cosmological models. If you don't explicitly cover it, then your 'test' of any LCDM cosmological model is incomplete.If you haven't already done a literature search, then how do you know it's a new test?

Especially the 'Big Bang Theory' part.

You may consider it a worthwhile investment of your time to actually read, carefully, some of the papers on related topics (or chat with someone who has published papers) ... I think you'll find most journals all but demand that you have done an appropriate literature search, and include pertinent results, in your draft paper. If your draft obviously lacks this (and that's obvious to the relevant professionals), then I doubt you'd get anything more than a 'tick the box' rejection letter (if that).
See above.Huh?!?

I wasn't aware that anything Arp wrote could be called a 'cosmology'!

Which of his papers - choose just one - would you say presents his 'cosmology'?

As I understand it, the convention for published scientific papers is that the authors are claiming the work presented in the paper is theirs and theirs alone, apart from where they explicitly acknowledge otherwise.

It is also true, generally, that mis-representations, of all kinds, don't go down well ... and that it may be very easy to lose your credibility if it is perceived that your paper includes significant mis-representations. Note that you may claim till you are blue in the face that any such was unintentional, the damage will have been done (if you are serious about your paper, you should have checked that it didn't contain any such boo-boos before you submitted it for publication).

To the extent that your paper, when it is finished, does owe something significant to the input of BAUT members (good, bad, or indifferent, es macht nicht), it may be a good idea to acknowledge that input ... especially as this would be your very first paper.

I don't follow how you get from Ray's statement to this. All he's saying is that if anybody wants to give advice, they can decide when he's finished with the paper whether or not they want to be acknowledged for any advice they gave. Giving advice is not the same thing as doing the analysis or writing the paper and does not make one a co-author.

What sort of misrepresentations specifically? ... and how do you get to bringing that up from the quote you selected?

Obviously the authors check for "boo-boos". The referee's job is to see if they missed anything and make suggestions for improving the paper - including correcting mistakes - whether the mistakes be a typo, calculation error, omission of an important reference ... It is not standard practice for referee's to assume such mistakes are intentional. I don't see how you come to bring that up from Ray's statement.

Whether it is his first paper or his 1000th paper it is important to acknowledge/thank people that had significant input on the paper. However, the acknowledgement should be to the real person, not some anonymous handle on BAUT.

__________________
"The scientist who asks the right question reconnoiters a new patch of the unknown, and may, with luck, bring it within the constricted but expanding boundaries of the known."

~Timothy Ferris (The Red Limit) 1982

It seems that what I wrote was misleading to at least one BAUT member; let me try to clarify, by use of a specific example.

Here is a part of the last page of a recent preprint (before the references; I added some bold):In addition to the papers (etc) explicitly referenced, the authors of this preprint have acknowledged (thanked, expressed gratitude, ...) inputs from people (named or anonymous), funding agencies, observatories/institutions, etc.

That still doesn't clarify your meaning. I don't need a lesson in what an acknowledgements section looks like. The most recent paper I submitted had an acknowledgements section 1 page long.

Ray described his plan, but not exactly in these words - although I think it is clear that this is what he meant:

1. He's working with Ari to conduct this analysis and then write a paper.
2. He stated that if any members of BAUT would be interested in commenting on the paper and giving advice they may contact him via his e-mail.
3. He suggested that once the paper is finished - including revisions, people that gave advice may indicate whether or not they wish to be acknowledged for offering advice.

My question for you was how do you get from that to talking about the paper being "the authors work alone" and there being "mis-representations" and statements that any claims he make that these hypothetical mis-representations would be "unintentional" would not be looked upon favorably?

What stream of logic leads you from his statement to all that?

Now if you had said something about it being the author's choice whether or not to acknowledge someone else's help, I could understand that. But you didn't say that. You went off on some tangent about "boo-boos" and "misrepresentation". Can you explain how you went off into boo-boo/misrepresentation land?

As for Ray's suggestion that the advice giver can indicate whether or not he/she wishes to be acknowledged, I think that makes a lot of sense in this case and is the responsible thing to do. The topic of the paper is going to be controversial. They might post it on arXiv. Certainly, it is not inconceivable that some researchers would be willing to give advice, but would prefer if their name was not associated with the paper in any way - even in the acknowledgements.

__________________
"The scientist who asks the right question reconnoiters a new patch of the unknown, and may, with luck, bring it within the constricted but expanding boundaries of the known."

~Timothy Ferris (The Red Limit) 1982

For Nereid's sake
The smiley was meant to indicate that someone shouldn't hold back on offering to have a look at our work for fear that we will acknowledge them. ;-)

Ray, you have my closest co-conspirators (collaborators) at your back. We have been working for a couple of years on a project that I hope will make you smile. There are mainstreamers who ducked out of the "Arp et Al" thread that should be asked to hold themselves to the same standards that the ATM posters had to adhere to. Ain't going to happen.

__________________
The ether of general relativity therefore differs from that of classical mechanics or the special theory of relativity respectively, in so far as it is not 'absolute', but is determined in its locally variable properties by ponderable matter.

Albert Einstein, "On the Ether", 1924