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Author Topic:   A scientist talks on the invention of email, GMOs and peer review
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 1 of 6 (797059)
01-10-2017 3:26 PM


I've been listening to a segment of Infowars with David Knight interviewing a fascinating scientist with four degrees who has quite a range of experience in many aspects of the scientific world, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai who discusses a number of issues in the interview:
1) how he invented email at age fourteen and it was stolen from him. I'm sure this has some eyes rolling if the history is not familiar, but he's very credible.
2) and his scientific work in biology that has shown dangers in GMO food, which ought to be good for some EvC ranting.
3) I was also fascinated to hear from him how Einstein objected to the process of peer review, since peers aren't in a position to assess a truly new scientific invention or argument. (Ayyadurai's stuff is peer-reviewed by the way.)
I expect the reaction at EvC to be first of all some kind of ad hominem debunkery based first on the fact that the source is Infowars and second on prejudice against the content which will brand Ayyadurai as some kind of fraud without bothering to look at the interview. I hope for better but we'll see.
Unfortunately there's more than one topic here, the stealing of somebody's invention (email), the dangers of GMOs and how the public is deceived about that -- he goes very specifically into the science of GMOs and why it's dangerous; and the limits of the value of peer review.
I gather that Infowars does a four-hour broadcast in hourly segments hosted by a variety of contributors, starting at 11 central, which is 9 am for me, and then repeats the whole four-hour block around the clock until the next day's broadcast. So if anyone wants to hear Ayyadurai his segment should be repeated this afternoon at 5 central, 3 PST etc.
I'd like to get all these issues out there, and see what people have to say about them, so it's hard to boil this down to a single one. Also I'm in no position to discuss the scientific questions, although I probably absorbed enough from the interview to keep up the discussion on that level.
In other words I don't know how to present this as a new topic or where it should be posted. Thanks for advice etc.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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 Message 3 by Admin, posted 01-11-2017 8:48 AM Faith has replied

  
AdminNosy
Administrator
Posts: 4754
From: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Joined: 11-11-2003


(1)
Message 2 of 6 (797063)
01-10-2017 4:10 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Faith
01-10-2017 3:26 PM


Topics
How about splitting this into the topics you listed so they can be discussed separately?
You'll need to supply some information to work with for each.
The dangers of GMO food could be an interesting coffee discussion since it has not much to do with EvC.
Peer review discussions could go into "Is it Science".
(as an aside I can tell you that his claim about email is bogus because I was using email in the mid and late '70's at IBM (internal only). We had the "sun" network (sun because the sun never set on it like the British Empire). It was an adhoc layer of software that the techies snuck onto many of the internal servers to allow them to talk to each other.)

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Admin
Director
Posts: 12998
From: EvC Forum
Joined: 06-14-2002
Member Rating: 2.3


Message 3 of 6 (797082)
01-11-2017 8:48 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Faith
01-10-2017 3:26 PM


Faith writes:
1) how he invented email at age fourteen and it was stolen from him. I'm sure this has some eyes rolling if the history is not familiar, but he's very credible.
This claim should raise one's eyebrows. The origin of email is well known, see Origin of Email. It was already an established technology in 1974 when I began sending email on the Arpanet, the Internet's predecessor.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Replies to this message:
 Message 4 by Faith, posted 01-11-2017 10:55 AM Admin has seen this message but not replied
 Message 5 by AdminModulous, posted 01-11-2017 3:00 PM Admin has replied

  
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


Message 4 of 6 (797085)
01-11-2017 10:55 AM
Reply to: Message 3 by Admin
01-11-2017 8:48 AM


The guy isn't stupid. He would have known about email precursors and taken all that into account, meaning his claim was about inventing a different form of email that became standard. Unfortunately I didn't get to listen to the interview a second time as I'd intended to, and wasn't listening carefully enough the first time to grasp his evidence. So I'm not going to try arguing that topic unless I get more information.
I don't think I care enough about the peer review comment to make a thread out of it. There really isn't any more to it than that Einstein objected to it anyway.
As for GMOs I've been considering putting together a Coffee House OP on it as Nosy suggested, but I think I'd have to know more about Ayyadurai's study to do that. I may yet do something along those lines, or may end up just abandoning this proposal.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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AdminModulous
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Posts: 897
Joined: 03-02-2006


Message 5 of 6 (797101)
01-11-2017 3:00 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by Admin
01-11-2017 8:48 AM


This claim should raise one's eyebrows. The origin of email is well known, see Origin of Email. It was already an established technology in 1974 when I began sending email on the Arpanet, the Internet's predecessor.
To provide the context Faith can't remember properly:
Ayyadurai says all that stuff from RFC561 up to RFC 733 (where everything was tied together to have cc bcc reply-to and so on) was 'electronic messaging', but he wrote a program that mimicked an office mail system with inbox, outbox, sent mail folders (stored in a RDB rather than just files) coupled with a word processor for usability. I'm not sure if he was the first, but as a 14 year old it was certainly an impressive program - but it was only for a local network.
Here is a summary on his, modestly named website:
The Inventor of Email | History of Email
Ayyadurai may have also been the first to use the name 'email' to refer to the idea, but history of words like that is always a bit murky.
Edited by AdminModulous, : No reason given.

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Admin
Director
Posts: 12998
From: EvC Forum
Joined: 06-14-2002
Member Rating: 2.3


Message 6 of 6 (797107)
01-11-2017 3:45 PM
Reply to: Message 5 by AdminModulous
01-11-2017 3:00 PM


Thanks for the information, very interesting.
I do want to make it clear for Faith why her claim about Shiva Ayyadurai and email is false. Faith claimed that "he invented email at age fourteen and it was stolen from him." Whatever his accomplishment at age 14, it cannot be true that what we know as email today was stolen from him because the roots of modern email predate his "invention." Even if his "invention" is uniquely distinct from what came before, which as you mentioned is RFC 561, today's email systems evolved from RFC 561 and not from anything Ayyadurai wrote.
Ayyadurai may have also been the first to use the name 'email' to refer to the idea, but history of words like that is always a bit murky.
I don't recall when we started calling electronic mail "email", but I do remember that it was part of a general trend at the time to put "e" in front of words, the same way we later started putting "i" in front of words. I do also recall contrasting electronic mail with "snailmail", which might have begun before the term "email" came into usage, but I don't recall exactly.
Edited by Admin, : Remove duplicate sig.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

This message is a reply to:
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