[vsnet-alert 11300] red variables in ejaavso 96

[redvars at fastmail.co.uk]

I am writing to protest strongly about the deliberate omission of
provenance and facts in this ejaavso publication.

http://www.aavso.org/publications/ejaavso/ej96.shtml

Within Martin Nicholson's own web pages he fully acknowledges that he
based his procedures and a descriptive email posted by myself some long
time to aavso discussion mail list.  As noted here 

http://www.martin-nicholson.info/1/3ea.htm

read it quickly, such inconvenient things tend to disappear from his
webpages when he is caught out, so I quote the text and give the link he
gives here

"My New Variable Star Discoveries

Although I made a few variable star discoveries in 2005 - as reported in
IBVS and a slightly larger number in the first half of 2006 - as
reported in OEJV - I tended to drift between the different sub-sections
of the hobby in a rather unstructured manner.

I have consistently spend more time on astronomical data mining than on
practical observing and I have had varying degrees of success in the
work I have done. A short note from Northampton based John Greaves
suggested a technique for discovering red variable stars and I have used
his approach, with various modifications, throughout my work and I have
managed to find 1350 previously unreported variable stars in the
archives of the Northern Sky Variability Survey. All my new discoveries
have been through a moderation process and are now listed in the
Variable Star Index maintained by the American Association of Variable
Star Observers."

The aavso discussion archive link in the above quoted text leads here

http://mira.aavso.org/pipermail/aavso-discussion/2005-November/009100.html

That is it is plainly stated by Nicholson on his own webpages that he
follows a procedure he saw myself outline, and that is what gave him the
idea (not that I "invented" this route, it is just basic principles
extended to data trawling).

Yet nowhere in his article does he acknowledge nor reference this fact,
and instead typically the text suggests it was his completely of his own
devising.

Also, the fact that he bases it on a "rationale" of Greaves is stated in
the abstract of this paper in the past

http://var.astro.cz/oejv/issues/oejv0035.pdf

(the full reading of that paper is informative, it sounds at first like
a test case was undertaken to see if the method failed.  The method was
tested and found to be successful.  Thus all his subsequent work in this
area is based on the success noted in this paper and accredited to
Greaves.  However nowhere in the paper does it actually state directly
that the Greaves method was successful or confirmed.  Noises made at the
start about testing it which are couched in strong terms are not
followed up or commented on later, instead the success and skill of the
author on finding new variables becomes the message).

This is horrendous in three respects :-

i) Nicholson runs a succession of blogs and webpages wherein he damns
and villifies me publicly on a regular and persistant basis, accusing me
of delusions of grandeur and being deranged since I first a) revealed he
had fully plagiarised the DIRBE Point Source Catalog for new variables
in an OEJV and b) revealed to the binary star community that a bunch of
half a dozen people demanding some debate on the inclusion of
Nicholson's work in the WDS Catalog were actually all Nicholson often
emailing from the same modem, as evidence with email header logs from
his posts to the mail list binary stars uncensored.  Yet, as in this
instance, despite my apparent thorough uselessness and derangedness and
unhelpfulness that he regularly claims he quite happily takes any work
he has seen me do and follow it, as with common proper motion pairs in
the past, and most recently with OGLE II Galactic Disc photometric data
use, a long extant resource which he had never touched until I recently
publicised its existence via some notes in PZP.

ii) Nicholson likes to claim many astronomic projects and some level of
authority, yet his only meaningful and successful publications can be
seen to follow work that I have done.  Normally he will quote my papers
in his paper and reference them, whilst simultaneously carrying on some
hate campaign against me on some blog or web journal somewhere.

iii) AAVSO are well aware of this, I have informed them often enough, as
I normally conduct such privately, often cc-ing Nicholson so he cannot
claim someone is going behind his back.  I have commented to aavso in
the past about these red variables in the aavso vsx and I am primarily
writing this and making it public via the easiest route simply because I
remember promising that if these were published without the admitted to
idea source I would.  As AAVSO is fully familiar with the past behaviour
of this individual, having seen evidence of his multiple identites use
to bolster his case, sometimes to aavso discussion (in fact moderator
Chris Watson deleted from VSX Discussion mails by him shown coming from
the same modem in the UK he signed his name to yet allegedly sent via
Hannah Varley in Eire, thus again making it difficult for people to
evidence his past behaviour.  It's bad enough when he deletes his own
pages and changes them to hide things, without other people doing it
too).

There seems to be institutionalised lack of ethics within the variable
star community, top to bottom, of late, at times this appears to me to
be deliberate on the part of at least some small few, because if the
very most simple and basic tenets of provenance, of audit trail, of
standard bibliographic referencing, are followed, then the lack of
quoting true provenance would not be possible.  So one is left with the
feeling that possibly the lack of acknowledgement and/or referencing is
at times not an oversight but a deliberate act for whatever reason.

I protest to both Nicholson and AAVSO in this instance with respect to
this occurence.

I promised them both that if this happened with these stars I would
publicly do so.  That if not even the slightest acknowledgement of the
case was not made I would make the issue clear.

Having been moderated off and chucked out of numerous lists, no doubt
rightly so, for making this person's behaviour and self aggrandisement
plain whilst he is still encouraged and even assisted in his twisting
ways (ejaavso 96 was apparently revised twice, and AAVSO, at least two
staff members, had been appraised of how I felt and would react on this,
a loooong time ago), I'm left stuck boring the vsnet listers with it as
they still carry no secure moderation for new posts.  I've no idea why.

As a few of you will know I have given up on the variable star work, as
it seems not to be about stars but about folk claiming fame for
themselves.  Hopefully there is a silent majority out there still
plugging away diligently on stars.  The noisy minority are all about
what they and their group and their
team have done, usually with little new information provided or new work
generated or new people assisted.

SUMMARY

Although I am more than happy for any pale attempt of mine to further
anyone else's studies of matter's astronomic and analysis of stars'
variable, and at most times have not even cared about acknowledgement,
when an individual who publicly attacks me on numerous hate blogs spread
throughout yahoo, google, livejournal and other servers, in the past
often behind my back so I did not know until others informed me, not
only damns me so in public arenas but also takes something of mine to
create something he would otherwise not be capable of creating, as
evidenced by his earlier (pre my aavso discussion mail and pre OEJV 35)
OEJV publications which carried many errors, and by his own admission at
times that his success rate increased immensely since following my
"rationale" then publishes something that insinuates it was all thanks
to his own methodologies (especially when his webpages have abounded
over the years with pseudoscience thus his only partway sensible
projects follow not his own professed ideas but those of others, whilst
his own projects rarely make any sort of sense) and manages to forget
where he got the idea from, and further manages to forget that he's
published on this method before and at those times remembered where he
got the idea from, I will comment.

I protest against this paper, both its author and against the AAVSO when
it is fully aware of this individual's behaviour in the past and has
been made fully aware of the provenance of the methodology used to
generate these umpteen thousand badly classified L: stars.  L: , that's
the GCVS term for not constant, possibly.  What sort of classification
is that?  Lb: if they're suspected red variables surely.  We could all
bung up innumerable lightcurves and tag 'em L: "might be a long term
variability going on but we ain't sure", highly informative.  As Brian
Skiff is so fond of stating, all red stars are probably variables.

John Greaves

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