This latest update to shroud.com is a big one, particularly because of the the new St. Louis Conference page which already includes 36 papers and presentations.
Let’s do the ten-thousand view first. Later, we can pick and pull on some specifics and maybe examine each and every paper one at a time.
The easiest thing for you to do is to access the Late Breaking Website News: Updated December 1, 2014. Then from the top read down the page until you arrive at the a headline dated November 6. That’s it; everything below that is old news.
I noticed some things, in particular:
1) First of all there is the new St. Louis Conference page. I imagine this will be the focus for most of us.
2) There is the wonderful news about SEAM’s new home. See Status Update on the New Mexico Shroud of Turin Museum in this blog.
3) I noticed Barrie mentioning “a growing trend by some Shroud researchers to post their papers and articles on Academia.edu, a website that provides a forum for researchers to publish their own work online.”
There was this warning from Barrie: “Just remember that many of these have not withstood the scrutiny of peer review so any claims they make or conclusions they draw have probably not been verified scientifically.”
Fair enough. That is true. But given the state of what sometimes passes for peer review these days with the many new and sometimes predatory open access and vanity journals, I’m not sure it is a big deal. See:
- When it Comes to the Shroud of Turin, Has Peer Review Lost its Luster?
- And you thought you knew all about peer reviewed journals
- Email of the Day
It also raises a big question; is a conference paper a peer reviewed paper? I think many people think so. I don’t.
Give me a break. Most papers on the Stera site aren’t peer reviewed. Shroud conference papers are not peer reviewed. The notion of peer reviewed shroud science has become an embarrassment.
We are the peers, Paulette, you and me and Oskar and Andrea and Yannick and Max and everybody called David and all the rest. Let us get reviewing!
Since my interview with Professor Giulio Fanti is listed in the December 1, 2014 update I have the following to say:
I have not written anything that does not correspond to the truth and, in fact, added a note of caution in the fourth paragraph of the introduction:
https://www.academia.edu/8841978/Professor_Giulio_Fanti_discusses_the_controversies_in_the_realm_of_Shroud_studies
It refers to the dating method developed by Professor Fanti and he himself has said that he leaves it to readers to judge for themselves. From what I could gauge, the research is in the initial stage and more data will be needed to reach really clear-cut results. So, from the scientific point of view also no untruths have been voiced.