Right, so how is this different from most of Western Academia? After all, the only way to get a professorship here is to publish as many papers as possible. Screw the quality of whatever it is you are doing, and how you got your name on most of the papers in your CV. After all, your work will be judged by people outside your own field of work, so all they'll end up doing is counting papers.
There might be some weak taboo here in the West that You Shall Not Be Caught Cheating, but that is as far as I would put the differences between what the article describes, and what is going on over here.
O.k., I understand that the wording in the parent post could be seen as being somewhat insulting to persons like you - I'm sorry for that. But what I meant was that far too few people like you make the transition. And that those who end up teaching in such courses are very often people who, just like you say, never left academia in the first place. Which makes very little sense.
Also, I am speaking from an European perspective. We do not have that much of a gaming industry by comparison (there is of course one, but it is no where near as large as in the U.S.), and there is a considerable salary difference between industry and academia. Which is why it is, sadly, generally quite hard to get well-performing, experienced developers and development team leaders back for a stint in academia. Instead, enter some self-promoting faculty member who proposes a buzzword-laden course about gaming to the university board, and off you go...
Personally, I think youth sports leagues are a very good thing to have. Same as your hobby of coding games - like I said, and even though this is not my own line of work, I think that gaming technology is seriously interesting, and keeping up with this field is a really intriguing challenge.
Any my objections are also not against having "game design", or rather, "game tech" courses at universities in principle. Given the complexity of some of the bread-and-butter gaming technologies out there, one does need quite some background to actually work on a real game engine these days. The question is rather - do we actually need as many game *programmers* as are currently being trained by this mushrooming industry, and do these games courses do a good job of training them?
Consider that even within a games company, not all that many people will end up actually working on the engine. The majority of day to day game dev work is arguably content creation, something which creative colleges are actually better at training people for. And which actually requires a somewhat different skillset than being able to code. So the actual number of *programming* jobs in the game sector tends to be overrated to begin with.
And then there is my main objection - that universities very often do a lousy job of preparing people for development work in a revenue-earning company. In a place like that, the last thing you want are hackers fresh from uni with an affliction of "shiny kit syndrome", who try to cram every technology they can think of into an engine. If you plan on not going bankrupt in the near timeframe, comparative simplicity and reliability win hands down over having the latest SIGGRAPH paper integrated in your engine.
There is no sugar-coating this: for the purposes of such a specialised course, the only sort of person who can both instill a healthy dose of needed realism in young programmers, and at the same time show them at least some relevant tricks that actually work, and make sense in a real environment, are people who have done this in practice. Themselves. Hands on.
But these guys are expensive to hire. So who you get taught by are, more often than not, the existing staff members of a college. Usually, these are of course your average academic, who are very good at writing up their stuff to appear at SIGGRAPH. But perhaps not quite as good at writing code that is not of throw-away quality.
To add insult to injury, the sort of graphics researcher who is capable of producing SIGGRAPH papers is usually not the one who "gets creative", and starts a game developer program to increase his visibility within the faculty. By and large, these guys don't need to do that stuff, so it is more often than not the B-list of graphics research that ends up doing this sort of thing. With all attendant consequences for the quality of the course.
A.
P.S. And in case you want to flame me for being too critical of game dev courses... do consider that I am trying to get my point across, and intentionally use a broad brush for this. There are very nice game dev programs out there, which deliver value to the students who take them. It is unfortunately a non-trivial task to separate the wheat from the chaff in this area.
Yep, it's all about advertisement. With that one word you've hit the nail on the head. Utility to the students... comes somewhere way down on the list of desirable properties of these courses. In a lot of cases, the main reason is so that the one graphics lecturer who is into gaming himself gets some visibility. Remember, the fight for resources at a university is usually beyond feral - and visibility, and the number of students, go a long way in securing them. What you later do with these students, or how good their career prospects are... well, that is very seldom evaluated. To a disturbing degree, working academia is very often about appearances, and little else.
I work as an academic in Computer Graphics, so I sort of know what I'm talking about here... and frankly, there are too many people in this area already who "are into" game developing. Far too many.
Now this is not to say that a) one cannot have a well-paying career in game development, or that b) game programming is technically uninteresting. Nothing could be further from the truth (especially point b). But there is such a thing as catering for the needs of an industry - and then there is also mindless overproduction of graduates with questionable qualifications, just in order to please those academics who have "gaming" on their resumes. And I know of at least on example who actually does "gaming" precisely because it is such a good way of getting students into his working group. And not because he is all that interested in the area as such.
Just look, for instance, at the academic job listings on jobs.ac.uk in the past 24 months. There are lots of small universities starting to offer "game development courses", and are recruiting lecturers for this. In my opinion, there are simply not enough jobs in this line of work to actually offer such a large number of graduates of such a specialised course any sort of perspective, once they graduate. And besides - what do these courses usually teach? And who gets recruited by these smaller universities? Former top-notch developers who can really communicate useful stuff to the students? Or rather guys who did not make the cut at a major studio, and are fed up with freelancing?
At the last Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (one of the smaller, but quite high-quality geek-outs for the rendering community), there was a panel discussion which included a somewhat senior person from the gaming industry. His assessment of the relevance of current real time graphics research was pretty short: guys, it's nice what you are doing at the universities, but most of this is almost totally useless for us in the real world, who have to meet deadlines, and make code work on normal systems.
But what is taught in those "gaming courses"? Usually precisely the stuff the main lecturer gets off on, and that he wrote papers about (and that the guy from the gaming studio described as nice but useless). This is natural, of course, everyone does that thing of teaching about one's research achievements (myself included, in my area), but... if there is one area in Computer Graphics that should be taught by people with industry experience, it is gaming. And this is practically never the case.
Actually, academia is experiencing the same kind of socio-dynamical problem that is plaguing the business world - only with slightly different constraints, and one aspect that actually makes it much worse (more on that further on). Common to both environments is that there appears to be a tendency inherent in the system to select exactly the wrong kind of persons for leading positions.
In academia, you *do* have honest researchers who do not put their name on the publications of everyone else in the lab, regardless of whether they contributed to these. They are just at a significant disadvantage against paper-grabbers, and practically the only thing that can allow honest scientists to proceed along the career ladder are honest *senior* scientists, and professors. But once a particular university has become infected by paper-grabbers, it is very hard to get rid of them again - actually, they will tend to take over the system, once they have gained a foothold (a bit like academic kudzu, if you will).
One defining feature of such individuals is that they do not have much of a scientific vision in their field, but they do know how to game the system. Which means that their only vulnerability is a lack of precisely the qualifications one would expect in an academic - a truly deep understanding of some area in their field of research. This is the reason that the one sort of person those paper-grabbing fast-track "scientists" abhor most within a department are actually precisely the persons who ought to be there - thorough, methodical workers who do *not* brag about their achievements all the time. These guys are the only ones who can actually say "look, the emperor has no clothes!", and as a consequence, are dangerous to them. So the career-minded paper grabber will often try everything he can to get rid of the genuine scientists around him.
For these reasons, the two types of academic usually get on like cats and dogs, but usually, only one of them will advance along the career ladder - no karma points for guessing which of the two this is going to be. Fast forward after a couple of decades of such social dynamics taking place, and presto!, you end up with precisely the sort of universities we have now.
And the peculiar personnel structure of universities means that these effects have a much worse effect on the overall organization than they have in the corporate world.
In practically all cases, corporations have a dedicated career track for management, so there is at least a small chance that the lurid social dynamics of leadership promotion will only damage the ethos and effectivity of management. At least in theory, the actual productive part of a company can go on doing its thing, even if management are at each other's throats.
In academia, you do not have a second career track for the weasels. Once academic kudzu has spread to the top of the hierarchy, there very often is nobody senior left to do actual high-level work that is genuinely useful - so all sorts of improper things start to happen as part of everyday routine. PhD Comics, here we come...
So what makes anyone think that this sort of behaviour is confined to the corporate world? Just consider academia. I mean, if there wasn't exactly the same kind of thing going on there, there would be no PhD Comics (a.k.a. "Dilbert for Academics"), right?
Not quite. The A350 is basically on the same technological level as the A380, which is something that Airbus seem to have finally mastered quite well. The A350 is just slightly smaller, and has some aerodynamic gizmos that the A380 doesn't have, or doesn't need.
If the A350 is late, then because of other screw-ups on the part of Airbus, but the technology (which seems to have been the major stumbling block with both the A380 and the 787) should be there already.
The 787 is new. Most of the time if you're doing a construction project, you're doing something basically the same or very similar to something you've done before, so you can estimate it well. When this doesn't hold, construction projects end up estimated just as poorly as IT projects.
Right. Which is why you never, NEVER, EVER, bet your company on a product that is critically dependent on technologies you have not entirely mastered yet.
Airbus actually have much more experience with using composites in commercial wide-body airliners, and guess what? They opted *not* to build the entire airframe of the competing product, the A350, in huge sections. They are doing it in a much more conservative way. I wonder if these guys knew something that the good chaps at Boeing should have known before committing to the current 787 design?
The Catholic church and aliens is a topic that has been "covered" in literature. One really good example is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell; it tells the story of a failed Jesuit mission to an alien world, and, all sci-fi trappings set aside, is also a very interesting book from a theological viewpoint. A number of philosophical/theological points that the author tries to make in that book will probably only be comprehensible to Catholics (or at least practising Christians), but for those it makes a fascinating read. And for all others it might even provide some insight into the moral and ethical quirks of our worldview.
Ah, and what makes you think that these "brilliant professors" who were just "unable to communicate" were, in fact, as brilliant as they pretended to be?
After 10 years in academia there is one sad fact that I've learned the hard way: no matter how good someone's reputation is, and how massive their ego - if they cannot properly communicate what they are doing, they very often are not brilliant scientists who are "just" unable to communicate.
Very often, these are the people who were just able to successfully play the system to get a plushy job as a tenured professor, and who have never had an original thought in their lives. In most disciplines of academia, you can get amazingly far by just pretending you are super-smart, and that your "research" (whatever that may be) is of essential importance. You of course need an ego of psychotic proportions to pull something like that off over many years, but unfortunately, these are not exactly in short supply in academia.
And the current culture of "everything goes" at western universities does not help, either: in academic circles it is very hard to tell someone that his or her work is, in fact, worthless. It starts with the students - you are not allowed to be "too harsh" in your gradings, lest you might hurt their personal feelings. And ends at academic conferences - at such events, I've never seen anyone get up and tell someone who just presented something "excuse me, but what you just showed us was a load of garbage" - even if the stuff that was being presented was, in fact, nothing short of applied idiocy that would have gotten a student kicked out of a seminar. As soon as a "reputable name" is on the paper, no-one will lift a finger. And even if stuff gets rejected - well, there is always some other conference and journal, and at the end of the day, all that counts is the length of your paper list, and not its contents.
And as soon as someone is tenured... Well, that person is set for life, irrespective of any qualifications. Usually there is no-one at the same university who is actually capable of judging the work done by a professor, and even if there was - saying something negative about a colleague is next to impossible amongst faculty. Even if the guy in question is really a complete fluke.
And how does one get tenured without any qualifications? Well, the same basic problem at work: if a university is trying to recruit someone in a certain field, chances are that they do not have someone (yet) who is actually capable of judging the candidates that apply. And bringing in external specialists is not necessarily a lot of help, either: in any given discipline, there exists at least one cabal of people who watch their respective backs, and who look after their former pupils if and when they are looking for their own professorships. And who gets full backing by such a cabal (the members of which would invariably be contacted as external experts due to their visibility) is not determined as much by competence, but rather by secondary politics (i.e. who was a good boy, and sucked up to the luminaires in the field during their PhD days).
The power of admin users is all fine and dandy, and Server 2003 ist a good, stable workhorse system.
However, the fact remains that there is something missing here: you - as Joe Average - should have an easy way to talk to a service (daemon in UNIX parlance) which will do a job for you that requires more privileges than you actually have.
Right, which is why you don't have to type in the admin password every time the scheduled defrag runs.
BUT: why doesn't a mechanism exist that allows you - as normal user - to trigger such a privileged defrag run? As far as I can see, there is no compelling reason why it could not have been done that way.
Well, YOU (the user who obviously lacks such privileges) should not be the one doing the defrag anyway.
Defrag in the technical sense should be done by an entity in the system that is both capable and trustworthy, i.e. a trusted executable, or privileged daemon, or whatever.
All YOU do is to request that a defrag operation take place - the privileged centralised entity listens to the request of the unprivileged users, and then does its thing and performs the operation. Defrag is an operation that, in itself, cannot be harmful on a global level, so unprivileged users can request it - no admin password needed. All you have to make sure is that the entity that twiddles around the actual blocks in the filesystem is trustworthy.
THAT would be a sound design (one of many, and probably not a particularly good one - just the first one that came to my mind) that does not hassle its users, and that still prevents Joe Average from fiddling with the ACLs.
Atmosperic wave phenomena have been known for ages, and are hardly inconspicious in those places where they regularly form.
The main "customers" for them are probably glider pilots; as far as I remember, all recent altitude records for soaring have been made using waves formed in mountain regions (14+km), and the current distance record by Klaus Ohlmann (insane 3000+km in one day) was also flown in the waves over the Andes. Thermal updrafts are toys by comparison.
The one thing that you have to hand to the NASA guys is that they indeed caught some very fine specimens there, and in an unusual place, too. Normally, waves are induced by the flow of wind over a given, usually hilly, terrain. Gravity waves from thunderstorm activity are certainly a lot more esoteric, and what they are saying about them being catalysts for storms sounds really intriguing.
"Informatics" is a horrible word - it's certainly not English, and was probably derived/invented/whatever by some kind of acedemic lameass who did not have English as a first langugae.
"Computer science" is not a perfect name, but at least it does not make native speakers cringe every time someone mentions it.
as an occasional iTunes customer, I can't say that I really object to that kind of thing being done. There probably is no need for it, but it's not really problematic, either.
After all, if I buy music online, I really do not buy it to put those files on a P2P network - but for my personal use. And, maybe, to occasionally share one or two songs with friends, probably to give them a sample of some new album I bought and like. But beyond that? Why should I care that all the audio files on my playback and storage devices have my name imprinted in them?
Especially if I can get rid of that information in the files if I really want to?
This is really not a "big brother" type of situation, at least not as long as the iTunes application does not start snooping around for "probably stolen" non-DRM files. But for various reasons I'm fairly sure Apple knows better than trying to pull something like that off. The backlash would be destructive, to say the least.
The root cause of all this is probably mass stupidity - first it took them ages to acknowledge that our current attitude of "burn all fossil fuels we can find" and "generate as much garbage as we can" is not really sustainable.
Now that the collective has slowly started to cotton onto this (some 40 years after the Club of Rome first pointed out the bloody obvious - after all, it's not like we shouldn't be making some changes to out lifestlye...), they are making a real show of screwing up Part 2 of Fixing a Problem: Finding a Solution (tm). At least for now.
Back-of-the envelope sanity check calculations - like the stuff you do in your post about the airline industry - are an absolutely essential tool for any engineer to survive. Yet in large parts of the enviro crowd a lingering air of resentment against "all things formal" and "all things technical" seems to persist.
This attitude of "your ways and methods got us into these problems, so sod off with your stupid math!" towards engineering and good old logic is of course not exactly conductive to changing our lifestyle and economy to a sustainable system with minimal disruption.
As much as I agree with their ultimate goals as far as the environment is concerned, at least here in Europe the so-called Green movement is for the most part a travesty of what a politically active environmental group should be. An uncomfortably large percentage of the functionaries in this movement have at best a sketchy grip on current technology (with all the problems this brings w/r to participating in an informed debate on any such topic), and are instead mostly concerned with furthering the causes of True Socialism (tm), or whatever society-changing crap they are currently focusing on.
This left-leaning attitude of the enviro folks is not just detrimental to them - it is actually a huge obstacle to getting anything done. Given the leftist pedigree of All Things Green in contemporary Europe, Big Business is - quite understandably so - wary of touching anything these guys say with a ten foot pole.
Which is a shame, since the one thing the corporate world should realise is that a switch to a sustainable economy is going to mean a huge amount of work, with pratically no end in sight. Everyone is going to need a new car that runs on renewable energy, a heating system for their houses, eco-friendly food transport and sale systems (with re-useable packaging), and so on for all all 6-8 billion folks on the planet. Creating a truly sustainable economy is going to be the biggest business venture ever - it's about time the Republicans started to cotton onto this...:-)
You have a very good point about math generally not being taught as well as it could be.
Not in the sense that the curricula should be dumbed down in any way - this would not work out well in the long run.
But there definitely is a streak of the beloved "if it was hard to code, it should be hard to understand" mentality to be found in mathematics.
Introductory math courses at universities usually do not have concepts of such bewildering complexity on the curriculum, that they should be considered to be as "hard" as they turn out to be for everyone.
However, they still are the bane of undergrads everywhere, and sometimes I wonder if the obtuseness of these courses is not just an in-joke perpetrated by the mathematicians.
If you are not smart enough to "get it" in the arcane way the stuff is being presented, you woul not hack it further down the road anyway - at least not in pure math, and they are not inclined to have pity on anyone who could not have gone down that road in the first place.
Or so the reasoning might go, when mathematicians are amongst themselves...:-)
Note that the remarks in this posting mostly apply to the teaching of the kind of "working math" that an engineer might use, which (to put it mildly) can still be pretty involved in terms of complexity, but always has a goal-oriented quality to it that pure math does not necessarily share. This residual "grounding in reality" usually makes the teaching of even advanced concepts much easier - a potential bonus that (at least in my opinion) is not used nearly as often as it could be.
I would argue that scientific papers of someone who claims to have lived past lives (or who exhibts any other seemingly bizarre personal trait not directly connected to the matter at hand) still have to be evaluated fairly, and in the same way as papers submitted by anyone else. Doing anything else would make a mockery of the process.
Some of the best scientists of all times were rather bizarre individuals - think Henry Cavendish, or Nikola Tesla. Just because someone makes wild claims and acts like a weirdo is - unfortunately, since dealing with such persons can be pretty tiresome - no reason to dismiss their claims outright.
People like Mr. Cremo are easy, though - he apparently regularly goes out on a limb by so far, that any decently competent archaeologist can easily find a large number of valid arguments to rebut his claims (or so the professionals claim).
A much biger problem are those who are a) weirdos, b) cannot communicate properly and c) turn in convoluted papers which are not easily identifiable as bogus or genius.
Peer-reviewing such papers is a major task - for the science community, people like that are what the kid with the illegible handwriting is to a schoolmaster. Simply painful.
I fully agree with you in that the work of Illig has definite merit. Not as a valid scientific finding by itself, but because he indirectly pointed out several large and small gaps in "conventional" historical understanding of the high mediaeval period.
For instance, he builds a whole chapter around the observation that the number of wars fought by Charlemagne (quite a lot, according to the few known chronicles) becomes a bit dodgy, if one attempts to consider the economic basis, that such widespread campaigning would have needed to be sustainable over so many years.
He uses this line of reasoning as a supporting argument to propose that Charlemagne himself is a fabrication - a claim that (to put it mildly) stands on pretty weak legs.
However, what he did show, indirectly, is that Historians did not know nearly as much as they should about the socio-economic structure of the empire that Charlemagne built. Few of the rebuttals of his theory were able to directly counter the claim, that something about the chronicles in question is probably not entirely correct.
The question "how could you recruit, pay and feed so many soldiers in such a sparsely populated empire over so many years" was apparently something that few professionals had seriously asked themselves before.
Being just an interested layperson I might of course have missed some relevant publications, but as far as I know, historians - at least at the time Illig published his book - were not able to conclusively say how Charlemagne could have sustained such an apparently extremely ambitious level of campaigning over so many years. At least not, if the chronicles were taken face value - which professional historians maybe never did in the first place, but if they really had their doubts, they apparently never bothered to share them with the "interested layperson" fringe that Illig belongs to.
It is precisely this kind of poking at established knowledge that gives rogues like Illig some sort of justification.
But back to Mr. Cremo, and your theory that investigation of ideas such as his would mean "instant death" to any academic career.
Unfortunately, such things do really happen all the time on a smaller scale. Good ideas are not pursued, and hypes followed instead, because younger researchers see more chances of tenure and survival by going with the herd. And even older researchers are rarely in a position where they can truly do whatever they want - they still have to pass annual reviews and the like.
So doing outlandish stuff - which, if done properly, in all probability takes more time than the trodden path, even if only because you have to be more thorough because you're on your own - is a risky career proposal at best. Small wonder, then, that so much inoriginal research is done and published.
But I still contend that something of the magnitude of Mr. Cremo's claims should be tractable by interested parties in the scientific circus if there is any merit in it. And that it would eventually sneak into the mainstream if a minimum of solid, supporting evidence can be found - if only because of the volatile social dynamics of academia.
The enmity of Shiites vs. Sunnites in Iraq is nothing to some of the feuds amongst factions within academia, which are very often waged over totally unscientifc issues (such as the eminent Professor A hating the guts of eminent Professor B, and so on). To portray "academia" as a solid group of persons which is capable of dismissing someone's valid claims with one voice, is to miss several important points at once, the inherent factionalism of academia being one of them.
A really large number of researchers have their reputation staked solidly on the fact that evolution happened exactly the way it is taught at school (at least, at schools outside Kansas).
Many of these are bound to have, over the years, made enemies of all sorts within the wider science community. This is simply human nature at work.
You did not. You said there is the possibility he is a nutjob (your term) when you could have just said there is a possibility he is wrong. I objected to you labeling him a drooling idiot.
Drooling idiot is a term I did not use, and I did say that "it is a possible that he is a nutjob", but still - point taken. Even the word "nutjob" did not have to be there, to make the point I wished to make.
Personally I find his narration in "Forbidden Achaelology" vastly compelling and the way I understand it he is making a strong case for modern humans existing millions of years ago.
If you do not know it already, I would recommend the book "The Phantom Time Hypothesis" to you. Basically the author claims that a significant part of mediaeval European history was made up by a bunch of monks after the fact, and that almost three hundred years were inserted into the calendar at some point to cover up this fake.
The whole theory is only made remotely plausible by the paucity of written records from the time in question, but at the end of the day it is of course total rubbish.
But the book also makes for pretty fascinating reading, because he argues his case in a highly compelling manner. You have to know quite a bit about history to spot the weak points in his line of reasoning.
Why am I mentioning this here? Because a compelling book - taken by itself - is not a sufficient criterion to judge whether something is true or not.
I'd say the archaeologists of this world (like so many of us in their respective fields) do not want these things up for fear of loss of funding and tenure.
Knowing a bit about academia in general, I'm not so sure about this.
Mainly because I would argue that no interconected group of professional archaeologists exists, that could conspire along these lines.
All you have is a large number of specialists that are scattered across the globe, and who work for a wide variety of institutions with differing goals. Universities are not the only places that employ fully trained and professionally respected archaeologists - there are also independent historical societies in many places (such as the National Trust in Britain), and in Europe most (if not all) states employ official historians and archaeologists.
All these people would have to co-operate, to intentionally suppress something worthwhile, while every single one could gain a lot from breaking ranks.
Since the first one to side with the new idea would be the first "real" archaeologist to look at the problem, it would even be worthwhile if the idea had originally been proposed by a seeming crackpot.
Does that conspiracy still sound likely to you?
To illustrate this further, consider the following: if (that is a big IF) archaeological proof of some hitherto unknown, ancient and advanced civilisation were discovered - don't you think that professional archaeologists would be all over this like vultures? I mean, that would be *the* biggest discovery of the past 100 years at least, and if that lost civilisation were advanced enough, it could significantly alter our whole worldview.
This would be a godsend for them - why would anyone want to suppress the one thing which would suddenly create huge new amounts of research funding for the entire field? Archaeology has not exactly been a science on the forefront of human endeavour for some time now - much of the focus has shifted to things like cosmology, physics and genetics.
My personal bet is that a lot of professional archaeologists are *praying* for a conclusive fossil record of exactly the kind these fringe theorists are describing - something like that would finally bring the whole discipline to the headlines again.
And if you still think that indeed a consipracy of sorts is keeping theories like those proposed by Mr. Cremo from being accepted: just again consider for a moment the situation of the average profe
I did *not*, on a professional level as a historian, say that I consider Mr. Cremo to be wrong - I am (as you correctly observe) not qualified to do that, since I am an engineering scientist.
My disparaging remarks come from the angle that his arguments do not sound particularly credible to me *without* being a specialist in the field. Which means that I might overlook obvious things that would mark his statements as being true to an open-minded historian, but not to outsiders like myself.
However, it is one of my beliefs that a correct theory should at least sound plausible to outsiders without having to resort to conspiracy arguments ("the archaeologists of the world do not want these things to be known" - oh, come on, please!)
The history of science is rife with examples where the scientific establishment went out of its way to discredit correct new theories. Take plate tectonics, for instance. Derided as junk science right until the 1960ies. (!)
But history is *also* rife with bizarre theories which thankfully never gained much of a following, such as Hoerbiger's Welteislehre, to name one particular, delightfully bizarre example (which, incidentally, did gain quite a following of sorts in its day - go figure).
Personally, I believe that we are still in for a huge number of surprises as far as ancient history is concerned. However, this does not mean that everyone who finds a "pyramid" outside his hometown is automatically the next Heinrich Schliemann. Again, note that I do not rule out that the thing they found in Bosnia *is*, in fact, a pyramid. Personally, I just do not think that this is very likely - exciting as it would be, if this turned out to be true.
Finally, one more thing why I'm not comfortable with the style of Mr. Cremo:
Academic respectability is an ephemeral thing, but unfortunately very necessary for those working within academia (and not entirely without reason, either).
People who sound off on a grand scale like Mr. Cremo ("conspiracy of archaeologists") can seriously hamper the proper investigation of whole new ideas, because professional researchers will - perhaps foolishly - not want to endanger their careers by becoming associated with someone like him.
And, as a consequence, would not want to touch anything he proposes with a ten-foot pole.
This is not the way science should work, but properly verifying (or falsifying) any theory is probably just as much work for these guys as it is for us engineers.
With the finite amount of time any scientist can invest in the actual working on problems - well, good luck trying to explain having spent so much time on what everyone else considers a crackpot theory to your tenure comittee... if all you ever got from this was a negative result... (as in "we now conclusively know that this is not the case")... especially if the guy who proposed the whole idea in the first place sounds less than 100% convincing most of the time.
Again, the last paragraph is not meant to say that Mr. Cremo is wrong - it just attempts to give you an idea why the scientific mainstream does not need a centralised conspiracy to avoid a formal investigation of his ideas.
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Right, so how is this different from most of Western Academia? After all, the only way to get a professorship here is to publish as many papers as possible. Screw the quality of whatever it is you are doing, and how you got your name on most of the papers in your CV. After all, your work will be judged by people outside your own field of work, so all they'll end up doing is counting papers.
There might be some weak taboo here in the West that You Shall Not Be Caught Cheating, but that is as far as I would put the differences between what the article describes, and what is going on over here.
Just my 0.2$E-32
A.
O.k., I understand that the wording in the parent post could be seen as being somewhat insulting to persons like you - I'm sorry for that. But what I meant was that far too few people like you make the transition. And that those who end up teaching in such courses are very often people who, just like you say, never left academia in the first place. Which makes very little sense.
Also, I am speaking from an European perspective. We do not have that much of a gaming industry by comparison (there is of course one, but it is no where near as large as in the U.S.), and there is a considerable salary difference between industry and academia. Which is why it is, sadly, generally quite hard to get well-performing, experienced developers and development team leaders back for a stint in academia. Instead, enter some self-promoting faculty member who proposes a buzzword-laden course about gaming to the university board, and off you go...
Personally, I think youth sports leagues are a very good thing to have. Same as your hobby of coding games - like I said, and even though this is not my own line of work, I think that gaming technology is seriously interesting, and keeping up with this field is a really intriguing challenge.
Any my objections are also not against having "game design", or rather, "game tech" courses at universities in principle. Given the complexity of some of the bread-and-butter gaming technologies out there, one does need quite some background to actually work on a real game engine these days. The question is rather - do we actually need as many game *programmers* as are currently being trained by this mushrooming industry, and do these games courses do a good job of training them?
Consider that even within a games company, not all that many people will end up actually working on the engine. The majority of day to day game dev work is arguably content creation, something which creative colleges are actually better at training people for. And which actually requires a somewhat different skillset than being able to code. So the actual number of *programming* jobs in the game sector tends to be overrated to begin with.
And then there is my main objection - that universities very often do a lousy job of preparing people for development work in a revenue-earning company. In a place like that, the last thing you want are hackers fresh from uni with an affliction of "shiny kit syndrome", who try to cram every technology they can think of into an engine. If you plan on not going bankrupt in the near timeframe, comparative simplicity and reliability win hands down over having the latest SIGGRAPH paper integrated in your engine.
There is no sugar-coating this: for the purposes of such a specialised course, the only sort of person who can both instill a healthy dose of needed realism in young programmers, and at the same time show them at least some relevant tricks that actually work, and make sense in a real environment, are people who have done this in practice. Themselves. Hands on.
But these guys are expensive to hire. So who you get taught by are, more often than not, the existing staff members of a college. Usually, these are of course your average academic, who are very good at writing up their stuff to appear at SIGGRAPH. But perhaps not quite as good at writing code that is not of throw-away quality.
To add insult to injury, the sort of graphics researcher who is capable of producing SIGGRAPH papers is usually not the one who "gets creative", and starts a game developer program to increase his visibility within the faculty. By and large, these guys don't need to do that stuff, so it is more often than not the B-list of graphics research that ends up doing this sort of thing. With all attendant consequences for the quality of the course.
A.
P.S. And in case you want to flame me for being too critical of game dev courses... do consider that I am trying to get my point across, and intentionally use a broad brush for this. There are very nice game dev programs out there, which deliver value to the students who take them. It is unfortunately a non-trivial task to separate the wheat from the chaff in this area.
Yep, it's all about advertisement. With that one word you've hit the nail on the head. Utility to the students... comes somewhere way down on the list of desirable properties of these courses. In a lot of cases, the main reason is so that the one graphics lecturer who is into gaming himself gets some visibility. Remember, the fight for resources at a university is usually beyond feral - and visibility, and the number of students, go a long way in securing them. What you later do with these students, or how good their career prospects are... well, that is very seldom evaluated. To a disturbing degree, working academia is very often about appearances, and little else.
I work as an academic in Computer Graphics, so I sort of know what I'm talking about here... and frankly, there are too many people in this area already who "are into" game developing. Far too many.
Now this is not to say that a) one cannot have a well-paying career in game development, or that b) game programming is technically uninteresting. Nothing could be further from the truth (especially point b). But there is such a thing as catering for the needs of an industry - and then there is also mindless overproduction of graduates with questionable qualifications, just in order to please those academics who have "gaming" on their resumes. And I know of at least on example who actually does "gaming" precisely because it is such a good way of getting students into his working group. And not because he is all that interested in the area as such.
Just look, for instance, at the academic job listings on jobs.ac.uk in the past 24 months. There are lots of small universities starting to offer "game development courses", and are recruiting lecturers for this. In my opinion, there are simply not enough jobs in this line of work to actually offer such a large number of graduates of such a specialised course any sort of perspective, once they graduate. And besides - what do these courses usually teach? And who gets recruited by these smaller universities? Former top-notch developers who can really communicate useful stuff to the students? Or rather guys who did not make the cut at a major studio, and are fed up with freelancing?
At the last Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (one of the smaller, but quite high-quality geek-outs for the rendering community), there was a panel discussion which included a somewhat senior person from the gaming industry. His assessment of the relevance of current real time graphics research was pretty short: guys, it's nice what you are doing at the universities, but most of this is almost totally useless for us in the real world, who have to meet deadlines, and make code work on normal systems.
But what is taught in those "gaming courses"? Usually precisely the stuff the main lecturer gets off on, and that he wrote papers about (and that the guy from the gaming studio described as nice but useless). This is natural, of course, everyone does that thing of teaching about one's research achievements (myself included, in my area), but... if there is one area in Computer Graphics that should be taught by people with industry experience, it is gaming. And this is practically never the case.
Just my 0.2E-32$
A.
Actually, academia is experiencing the same kind of socio-dynamical problem that is plaguing the business world - only with slightly different constraints, and one aspect that actually makes it much worse (more on that further on). Common to both environments is that there appears to be a tendency inherent in the system to select exactly the wrong kind of persons for leading positions.
In academia, you *do* have honest researchers who do not put their name on the publications of everyone else in the lab, regardless of whether they contributed to these. They are just at a significant disadvantage against paper-grabbers, and practically the only thing that can allow honest scientists to proceed along the career ladder are honest *senior* scientists, and professors. But once a particular university has become infected by paper-grabbers, it is very hard to get rid of them again - actually, they will tend to take over the system, once they have gained a foothold (a bit like academic kudzu, if you will).
One defining feature of such individuals is that they do not have much of a scientific vision in their field, but they do know how to game the system. Which means that their only vulnerability is a lack of precisely the qualifications one would expect in an academic - a truly deep understanding of some area in their field of research. This is the reason that the one sort of person those paper-grabbing fast-track "scientists" abhor most within a department are actually precisely the persons who ought to be there - thorough, methodical workers who do *not* brag about their achievements all the time. These guys are the only ones who can actually say "look, the emperor has no clothes!", and as a consequence, are dangerous to them. So the career-minded paper grabber will often try everything he can to get rid of the genuine scientists around him.
For these reasons, the two types of academic usually get on like cats and dogs, but usually, only one of them will advance along the career ladder - no karma points for guessing which of the two this is going to be. Fast forward after a couple of decades of such social dynamics taking place, and presto!, you end up with precisely the sort of universities we have now.
And the peculiar personnel structure of universities means that these effects have a much worse effect on the overall organization than they have in the corporate world.
In practically all cases, corporations have a dedicated career track for management, so there is at least a small chance that the lurid social dynamics of leadership promotion will only damage the ethos and effectivity of management. At least in theory, the actual productive part of a company can go on doing its thing, even if management are at each other's throats.
In academia, you do not have a second career track for the weasels. Once academic kudzu has spread to the top of the hierarchy, there very often is nobody senior left to do actual high-level work that is genuinely useful - so all sorts of improper things start to happen as part of everyday routine. PhD Comics, here we come...
So what makes anyone think that this sort of behaviour is confined to the corporate world? Just consider academia. I mean, if there wasn't exactly the same kind of thing going on there, there would be no PhD Comics (a.k.a. "Dilbert for Academics"), right?
A.
Not quite. The A350 is basically on the same technological level as the A380, which is something that Airbus seem to have finally mastered quite well. The A350 is just slightly smaller, and has some aerodynamic gizmos that the A380 doesn't have, or doesn't need.
If the A350 is late, then because of other screw-ups on the part of Airbus, but the technology (which seems to have been the major stumbling block with both the A380 and the 787) should be there already.
A.
The 787 is new. Most of the time if you're doing a construction project, you're doing something basically the same or very similar to something you've done before, so you can estimate it well. When this doesn't hold, construction projects end up estimated just as poorly as IT projects.
Right. Which is why you never, NEVER, EVER, bet your company on a product that is critically dependent on technologies you have not entirely mastered yet.
Airbus actually have much more experience with using composites in commercial wide-body airliners, and guess what? They opted *not* to build the entire airframe of the competing product, the A350, in huge sections. They are doing it in a much more conservative way. I wonder if these guys knew something that the good chaps at Boeing should have known before committing to the current 787 design?
A.
The Catholic church and aliens is a topic that has been "covered" in literature. One really good example is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell; it tells the story of a failed Jesuit mission to an alien world, and, all sci-fi trappings set aside, is also a very interesting book from a theological viewpoint. A number of philosophical/theological points that the author tries to make in that book will probably only be comprehensible to Catholics (or at least practising Christians), but for those it makes a fascinating read. And for all others it might even provide some insight into the moral and ethical quirks of our worldview.
A.
Ah, and what makes you think that these "brilliant professors" who were just "unable to communicate" were, in fact, as brilliant as they pretended to be?
After 10 years in academia there is one sad fact that I've learned the hard way: no matter how good someone's reputation is, and how massive their ego - if they cannot properly communicate what they are doing, they very often are not brilliant scientists who are "just" unable to communicate.
Very often, these are the people who were just able to successfully play the system to get a plushy job as a tenured professor, and who have never had an original thought in their lives. In most disciplines of academia, you can get amazingly far by just pretending you are super-smart, and that your "research" (whatever that may be) is of essential importance. You of course need an ego of psychotic proportions to pull something like that off over many years, but unfortunately, these are not exactly in short supply in academia.
And the current culture of "everything goes" at western universities does not help, either: in academic circles it is very hard to tell someone that his or her work is, in fact, worthless. It starts with the students - you are not allowed to be "too harsh" in your gradings, lest you might hurt their personal feelings. And ends at academic conferences - at such events, I've never seen anyone get up and tell someone who just presented something "excuse me, but what you just showed us was a load of garbage" - even if the stuff that was being presented was, in fact, nothing short of applied idiocy that would have gotten a student kicked out of a seminar. As soon as a "reputable name" is on the paper, no-one will lift a finger. And even if stuff gets rejected - well, there is always some other conference and journal, and at the end of the day, all that counts is the length of your paper list, and not its contents.
And as soon as someone is tenured... Well, that person is set for life, irrespective of any qualifications. Usually there is no-one at the same university who is actually capable of judging the work done by a professor, and even if there was - saying something negative about a colleague is next to impossible amongst faculty. Even if the guy in question is really a complete fluke.
And how does one get tenured without any qualifications? Well, the same basic problem at work: if a university is trying to recruit someone in a certain field, chances are that they do not have someone (yet) who is actually capable of judging the candidates that apply. And bringing in external specialists is not necessarily a lot of help, either: in any given discipline, there exists at least one cabal of people who watch their respective backs, and who look after their former pupils if and when they are looking for their own professorships. And who gets full backing by such a cabal (the members of which would invariably be contacted as external experts due to their visibility) is not determined as much by competence, but rather by secondary politics (i.e. who was a good boy, and sucked up to the luminaires in the field during their PhD days).
Just a short rant...
A.
that this website gets promoted heavily and posted to Slashdot just as the submission deadline for the annual SIGGRAPH conference is approaching.
No WAY this could have anything to do with promoting the visibility of a project that might be described further in a paper that gets submitted there.
Just my 0.2E-32
A.
The power of admin users is all fine and dandy, and Server 2003 ist a good, stable workhorse system.
However, the fact remains that there is something missing here: you - as Joe Average - should have an easy way to talk to a service (daemon in UNIX parlance) which will do a job for you that requires more privileges than you actually have.
Right, which is why you don't have to type in the admin password every time the scheduled defrag runs.
BUT: why doesn't a mechanism exist that allows you - as normal user - to trigger such a privileged defrag run? As far as I can see, there is no compelling reason why it could not have been done that way.
Well, YOU (the user who obviously lacks such privileges) should not be the one doing the defrag anyway.
Defrag in the technical sense should be done by an entity in the system that is both capable and trustworthy, i.e. a trusted executable, or privileged daemon, or whatever.
All YOU do is to request that a defrag operation take place - the privileged centralised entity listens to the request of the unprivileged users, and then does its thing and performs the operation. Defrag is an operation that, in itself, cannot be harmful on a global level, so unprivileged users can request it - no admin password needed. All you have to make sure is that the entity that twiddles around the actual blocks in the filesystem is trustworthy.
THAT would be a sound design (one of many, and probably not a particularly good one - just the first one that came to my mind) that does not hassle its users, and that still prevents Joe Average from fiddling with the ACLs.
Just my 0.2E-32 cents
A.
Atmosperic wave phenomena have been known for ages, and are hardly inconspicious in those places where they regularly form.
The main "customers" for them are probably glider pilots; as far as I remember, all recent altitude records for soaring have been made using waves formed in mountain regions (14+km), and the current distance record by Klaus Ohlmann (insane 3000+km in one day) was also flown in the waves over the Andes. Thermal updrafts are toys by comparison.
The one thing that you have to hand to the NASA guys is that they indeed caught some very fine specimens there, and in an unusual place, too. Normally, waves are induced by the flow of wind over a given, usually hilly, terrain. Gravity waves from thunderstorm activity are certainly a lot more esoteric, and what they are saying about them being catalysts for storms sounds really intriguing.
A.
Digging up Sid Vicious just to make a Computer Game.
This kind of thing just shouldn't be allowed...
"Informatics" is a horrible word - it's certainly not English, and was probably derived/invented/whatever by some kind of acedemic lameass who did not have English as a first langugae.
"Computer science" is not a perfect name, but at least it does not make native speakers cringe every time someone mentions it.
Just my 0.2E-32 EUR
A.
as an occasional iTunes customer, I can't say that I really object to that kind of thing being done. There probably is no need for it, but it's not really problematic, either.
After all, if I buy music online, I really do not buy it to put those files on a P2P network - but for my personal use. And, maybe, to occasionally share one or two songs with friends, probably to give them a sample of some new album I bought and like. But beyond that? Why should I care that all the audio files on my playback and storage devices have my name imprinted in them?
Especially if I can get rid of that information in the files if I really want to?
This is really not a "big brother" type of situation, at least not as long as the iTunes application does not start snooping around for "probably stolen" non-DRM files. But for various reasons I'm fairly sure Apple knows better than trying to pull something like that off. The backlash would be destructive, to say the least.
A.
You're touching a sore spot there.
:-)
The root cause of all this is probably mass stupidity - first it took them ages to acknowledge that our current attitude of "burn all fossil fuels we can find" and "generate as much garbage as we can" is not really sustainable.
Now that the collective has slowly started to cotton onto this (some 40 years after the Club of Rome first pointed out the bloody obvious - after all, it's not like we shouldn't be making some changes to out lifestlye...), they are making a real show of screwing up Part 2 of Fixing a Problem: Finding a Solution (tm). At least for now.
Back-of-the envelope sanity check calculations - like the stuff you do in your post about the airline industry - are an absolutely essential tool for any engineer to survive. Yet in large parts of the enviro crowd a lingering air of resentment against "all things formal" and "all things technical" seems to persist.
This attitude of "your ways and methods got us into these problems, so sod off with your stupid math!" towards engineering and good old logic is of course not exactly conductive to changing our lifestyle and economy to a sustainable system with minimal disruption.
As much as I agree with their ultimate goals as far as the environment is concerned, at least here in Europe the so-called Green movement is for the most part a travesty of what a politically active environmental group should be. An uncomfortably large percentage of the functionaries in this movement have at best a sketchy grip on current technology (with all the problems this brings w/r to participating in an informed debate on any such topic), and are instead mostly concerned with furthering the causes of True Socialism (tm), or whatever society-changing crap they are currently focusing on.
This left-leaning attitude of the enviro folks is not just detrimental to them - it is actually a huge obstacle to getting anything done. Given the leftist pedigree of All Things Green in contemporary Europe, Big Business is - quite understandably so - wary of touching anything these guys say with a ten foot pole.
Which is a shame, since the one thing the corporate world should realise is that a switch to a sustainable economy is going to mean a huge amount of work, with pratically no end in sight. Everyone is going to need a new car that runs on renewable energy, a heating system for their houses, eco-friendly food transport and sale systems (with re-useable packaging), and so on for all all 6-8 billion folks on the planet. Creating a truly sustainable economy is going to be the biggest business venture ever - it's about time the Republicans started to cotton onto this...
Just my 0.2E-32 Cents...
A.
I have traveled around the world, and every nation is thinking how it can model [intellectual property governance] after the U.S.
should probably read
every nation that we can strong-arm into accepting our rules is modelling its IP governance after the U.S.
If he were honest, that is.
But not being a particularly honest person was probably a job requirement for his position, though.
A.
You have a very good point about math generally not being taught as well as it could be.
:-)
Not in the sense that the curricula should be dumbed down in any way - this would not work out well in the long run.
But there definitely is a streak of the beloved "if it was hard to code, it should be hard to understand" mentality to be found in mathematics.
Introductory math courses at universities usually do not have concepts of such bewildering complexity on the curriculum, that they should be considered to be as "hard" as they turn out to be for everyone.
However, they still are the bane of undergrads everywhere, and sometimes I wonder if the obtuseness of these courses is not just an in-joke perpetrated by the mathematicians.
If you are not smart enough to "get it" in the arcane way the stuff is being presented, you woul not hack it further down the road anyway - at least not in pure math, and they are not inclined to have pity on anyone who could not have gone down that road in the first place.
Or so the reasoning might go, when mathematicians are amongst themselves...
Note that the remarks in this posting mostly apply to the teaching of the kind of "working math" that an engineer might use, which (to put it mildly) can still be pretty involved in terms of complexity, but always has a goal-oriented quality to it that pure math does not necessarily share. This residual "grounding in reality" usually makes the teaching of even advanced concepts much easier - a potential bonus that (at least in my opinion) is not used nearly as often as it could be.
A.
Concerning your point A):
I would argue that scientific papers of someone who claims to have lived past lives (or who exhibts any other seemingly bizarre personal trait not directly connected to the matter at hand) still have to be evaluated fairly, and in the same way as papers submitted by anyone else. Doing anything else would make a mockery of the process.
Some of the best scientists of all times were rather bizarre individuals - think Henry Cavendish, or Nikola Tesla. Just because someone makes wild claims and acts like a weirdo is - unfortunately, since dealing with such persons can be pretty tiresome - no reason to dismiss their claims outright.
People like Mr. Cremo are easy, though - he apparently regularly goes out on a limb by so far, that any decently competent archaeologist can easily find a large number of valid arguments to rebut his claims (or so the professionals claim).
A much biger problem are those who are a) weirdos, b) cannot communicate properly and c) turn in convoluted papers which are not easily identifiable as bogus or genius.
Peer-reviewing such papers is a major task - for the science community, people like that are what the kid with the illegible handwriting is to a schoolmaster. Simply painful.
A.
I fully agree with you in that the work of Illig has definite merit. Not as a valid scientific finding by itself, but because he indirectly pointed out several large and small gaps in "conventional" historical understanding of the high mediaeval period.
For instance, he builds a whole chapter around the observation that the number of wars fought by Charlemagne (quite a lot, according to the few known chronicles) becomes a bit dodgy, if one attempts to consider the economic basis, that such widespread campaigning would have needed to be sustainable over so many years.
He uses this line of reasoning as a supporting argument to propose that Charlemagne himself is a fabrication - a claim that (to put it mildly) stands on pretty weak legs.
However, what he did show, indirectly, is that Historians did not know nearly as much as they should about the socio-economic structure of the empire that Charlemagne built. Few of the rebuttals of his theory were able to directly counter the claim, that something about the chronicles in question is probably not entirely correct.
The question "how could you recruit, pay and feed so many soldiers in such a sparsely populated empire over so many years" was apparently something that few professionals had seriously asked themselves before.
Being just an interested layperson I might of course have missed some relevant publications, but as far as I know, historians - at least at the time Illig published his book - were not able to conclusively say how Charlemagne could have sustained such an apparently extremely ambitious level of campaigning over so many years. At least not, if the chronicles were taken face value - which professional historians maybe never did in the first place, but if they really had their doubts, they apparently never bothered to share them with the "interested layperson" fringe that Illig belongs to.
It is precisely this kind of poking at established knowledge that gives rogues like Illig some sort of justification.
But back to Mr. Cremo, and your theory that investigation of ideas such as his would mean "instant death" to any academic career.
Unfortunately, such things do really happen all the time on a smaller scale. Good ideas are not pursued, and hypes followed instead, because younger researchers see more chances of tenure and survival by going with the herd. And even older researchers are rarely in a position where they can truly do whatever they want - they still have to pass annual reviews and the like.
So doing outlandish stuff - which, if done properly, in all probability takes more time than the trodden path, even if only because you have to be more thorough because you're on your own - is a risky career proposal at best. Small wonder, then, that so much inoriginal research is done and published.
But I still contend that something of the magnitude of Mr. Cremo's claims should be tractable by interested parties in the scientific circus if there is any merit in it. And that it would eventually sneak into the mainstream if a minimum of solid, supporting evidence can be found - if only because of the volatile social dynamics of academia.
The enmity of Shiites vs. Sunnites in Iraq is nothing to some of the feuds amongst factions within academia, which are very often waged over totally unscientifc issues (such as the eminent Professor A hating the guts of eminent Professor B, and so on). To portray "academia" as a solid group of persons which is capable of dismissing someone's valid claims with one voice, is to miss several important points at once, the inherent factionalism of academia being one of them.
A really large number of researchers have their reputation staked solidly on the fact that evolution happened exactly the way it is taught at school (at least, at schools outside Kansas).
Many of these are bound to have, over the years, made enemies of all sorts within the wider science community. This is simply human nature at work.
In all probability, not all of these e
You did not. You said there is the possibility he is a nutjob (your term) when you could have just said there is a possibility he is wrong. I objected to you labeling him a drooling idiot.
Drooling idiot is a term I did not use, and I did say that "it is a possible that he is a nutjob", but still - point taken. Even the word "nutjob" did not have to be there, to make the point I wished to make.
Personally I find his narration in "Forbidden Achaelology" vastly compelling and the way I understand it he is
making a strong case for modern humans existing millions of years ago.
If you do not know it already, I would recommend the book "The Phantom Time Hypothesis" to you. Basically the author claims that a significant part of mediaeval European history was made up by a bunch of monks after the fact, and that almost three hundred years were inserted into the calendar at some point to cover up this fake.
The whole theory is only made remotely plausible by the paucity of written records from the time in question, but at the end of the day it is of course total rubbish.
But the book also makes for pretty fascinating reading, because he argues his case in a highly compelling manner. You have to know quite a bit about history to spot the weak points in his line of reasoning.
Why am I mentioning this here? Because a compelling book - taken by itself - is not a sufficient criterion to judge whether something is true or not.
I'd say the archaeologists of this world (like so many of us in their respective fields) do not want these things up for fear of loss of funding and tenure.
Knowing a bit about academia in general, I'm not so sure about this.
Mainly because I would argue that no interconected group of professional archaeologists exists, that could conspire along these lines.
All you have is a large number of specialists that are scattered across the globe, and who work for a wide variety of institutions with differing goals. Universities are not the only places that employ fully trained and professionally respected archaeologists - there are also independent historical societies in many places (such as the National Trust in Britain), and in Europe most (if not all) states employ official historians and archaeologists.
All these people would have to co-operate, to intentionally suppress something worthwhile, while every single one could gain a lot from breaking ranks.
Since the first one to side with the new idea would be the first "real" archaeologist to look at the problem, it would even be worthwhile if the idea had originally been proposed by a seeming crackpot.
Does that conspiracy still sound likely to you?
To illustrate this further, consider the following: if (that is a big IF) archaeological proof of some hitherto unknown, ancient and advanced civilisation were discovered - don't you think that professional archaeologists would be all over this like vultures? I mean, that would be *the* biggest discovery of the past 100 years at least, and if that lost civilisation were advanced enough, it could significantly alter our whole worldview.
This would be a godsend for them - why would anyone want to suppress the one thing which would suddenly create huge new amounts of research funding for the entire field? Archaeology has not exactly been a science on the forefront of human endeavour for some time now - much of the focus has shifted to things like cosmology, physics and genetics.
My personal bet is that a lot of professional archaeologists are *praying* for a conclusive fossil record of exactly the kind these fringe theorists are describing - something like that would finally bring the whole discipline to the headlines again.
And if you still think that indeed a consipracy of sorts is keeping theories like those proposed by Mr. Cremo from being accepted: just again consider for a moment the situation of the average profe
Some comments on this:
I did *not*, on a professional level as a historian, say that I consider Mr. Cremo to be wrong - I am (as you correctly observe) not qualified to do that, since I am an engineering scientist.
My disparaging remarks come from the angle that his arguments do not sound particularly credible to me *without* being a specialist in the field. Which means that I might overlook obvious things that would mark his statements as being true to an open-minded historian, but not to outsiders like myself.
However, it is one of my beliefs that a correct theory should at least sound plausible to outsiders without having to resort to conspiracy arguments ("the archaeologists of the world do not want these things to be known" - oh, come on, please!)
The history of science is rife with examples where the scientific establishment went out of its way to discredit correct new theories. Take plate tectonics, for instance. Derided as junk science right until the 1960ies. (!)
But history is *also* rife with bizarre theories which thankfully never gained much of a following, such as Hoerbiger's Welteislehre, to name one particular, delightfully bizarre example (which, incidentally, did gain quite a following of sorts in its day - go figure).
Personally, I believe that we are still in for a huge number of surprises as far as ancient history is concerned. However, this does not mean that everyone who finds a "pyramid" outside his hometown is automatically the next Heinrich Schliemann. Again, note that I do not rule out that the thing they found in Bosnia *is*, in fact, a pyramid. Personally, I just do not think that this is very likely - exciting as it would be, if this turned out to be true.
Finally, one more thing why I'm not comfortable with the style of Mr. Cremo:
Academic respectability is an ephemeral thing, but unfortunately very necessary for those working within academia (and not entirely without reason, either).
People who sound off on a grand scale like Mr. Cremo ("conspiracy of archaeologists") can seriously hamper the proper investigation of whole new ideas, because professional researchers will - perhaps foolishly - not want to endanger their careers by becoming associated with someone like him.
And, as a consequence, would not want to touch anything he proposes with a ten-foot pole.
This is not the way science should work, but properly verifying (or falsifying) any theory is probably just as much work for these guys as it is for us engineers.
With the finite amount of time any scientist can invest in the actual working on problems - well, good luck trying to explain having spent so much time on what everyone else considers a crackpot theory to your tenure comittee... if all you ever got from this was a negative result... (as in "we now conclusively know that this is not the case")... especially if the guy who proposed the whole idea in the first place sounds less than 100% convincing most of the time.
Again, the last paragraph is not meant to say that Mr. Cremo is wrong - it just attempts to give you an idea why the scientific mainstream does not need a centralised conspiracy to avoid a formal investigation of his ideas.
A.