Joe Marino writes:
This is very old but I just came across it and it occurred to me that many recent additions to sindonology may not have seen this before. It might be worth a separate posting or maybe I can post as a comment at an appropriate point to another posting.
How about right now? I agree that many people are not be aware of it. It is important.
Joe’s email continues:
It’s from statistician Philippe Bourcier de Carbon, who gave one of the papers at the International Shroud symposium in Rome in 1993.
1. Absence of a formal report of the sampling;
2. Absence of a video archive on the final steps of the samples packaging;
3. In the official reports, contradictions about the cutting and the weight of the samples by people in charge of sampling;
4. Breaches of the protocols initially planned for the operation of dating;
5. Rejection of the usual procedure of double-blind test;
6. Refusal of the interdisciplinary documentation, which is usual in the procedures for radiocarbon dating;
7. Exclusion of acknowledged specialists in the Shroud, particularly American scientists who participated in previous works of STURP;
8. Communication to the laboratories, most unusual, of the dates of the control samples prior to testing;
9. Intercommunication of results among the three laboratories during the job;
10. Disclosure to the media of the first results before the delivering of the findings;
11. Refusal to publish raw results of the measurements (requested also with insistence in its official statement by the Scientific Committee which prepared the Symposium in Paris in 1989);
12. Non-explanation of the unique isolation of the confidence interval of the measures performed by the Oxford laboratory compared to those made by other laboratories;
13. Unacceptable value of 6.4 published in the journal Nature for the chi-squared statistical test on the results of the radiocarbon dosage on the Shroud;
14. Rejection of any cross-debate on the statistical measures performed
15. Rejection, absolutely uncommon, of the publication of the statistical expertise of this operation, officially entrusted to professor Bray of “G. Colonnetti” Institute of Turin (requested also with insistence in its official statement by the Scientific Committee which prepared the Symposium in Paris in 1989). Bourcier de Carbon concludes: “Such a remark of deficiencies remains completely unusual in the context of a truly scientific debate, and one can only deplore this exception to the usual ethics.