[Stoves] Reproducibility of intellectual collaboration and renewability of brains (re: Cecil)

[Traveller]

Cecil:

Except for you and Crispin, it does not matter how the credits for
intellectual collaboration are shared. As a beneficiary of other such
experiences, I can appreciate the joys and benefits of intellectual
collaboration leading to unexpected breakthroughs in insight.

Combustion science is but one of the issues in design and operation of
thermal systems - cookstoves to power plants.

While many examples can be found of cross-disciplinary innovations and
cross-cultural communications, it is well-near impossible to plan such
ventures with very specific goals. Getting the right people is much more
than getting the right mix of degrees.

Indeed, it is the multi-credentialed potpourri that gave us GBD, WHO IAQG,
GACC EBCC project, now this EHP Implementation Science blather. Throwing a
jumble of 20 or 2000 authors can produce small advance  and sometimes not
even that. IPCC is a sterling example. There are many cottage industries
with high indoor air pollution that has now also polluted the outdoors,
GACC creating its own "brown cloud".

You ask "stop messing around." Why? When messing around has been a lifelong
career (myself included)?

Saving forests and averting premature mortality may take decades; in the
meantime, we are treating children's brains as renewable, disposable
biomass.

We need liberation theology. To throw off the Vatican of Washington.


Nikhil

------------------------


Message: 14
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2017 02:09:15 -0500
From: cec1863 at gmail.com
To: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>,
        "'Stoves (stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org)'"
        <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Sets of tests and the CoV of results - various
        methods
Message-ID: <20170128070915.5398613.13734.32909 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear Fellow Stove Researchers?,

I think Crispin is too generous with his recognition of my small role in
communicating to him what I observed happening in real time in a few
instances of cooking a meal in the kitchens of rural households in Central
Java. What is truly remarkable is that Crispin was sufficiently open minded
to use my qualitative field observations of the exquisite, almost ballet
like beauty of the stove operators' ?hands as describing the ?behavioral
skills and timing required by the operator of a technologically limited
stove to get the cooking performance wanted within an acceptable window of
time.?

The collaboration Crispin and I achieved in Java and Mongolia? is an
example of the potential benefit when a combustion scientist in the lab and
a social scientist in the community communicate well and invent a meta
language. Such a meta-language makes it possible to discover and
objectively describe patterns of stove use and preference by cooks and the
performance characteristics of different types of traditional and
innovative stove/fuel systems (including agricultural and commercial
applications).?

To his great credit Crispin found ways to translate my qualitative
observations of different patterns of timed stove use into quantifiable
properties of different types of cooking devices in the field. He converted
our lab/field collaboration into "embodied" performance characteristics of
particular stove technologies considered as physical stoves (operated in a
standard way).

It is obvious we can greatly improve ?the collaboration between hard ware
stove scientists and cultural/behavioral stove "scientists". As Nikhil
never tires of reminding us further progress in the small stove world
depends upon seriously defining and operationalizing the human and physical
stove attributes and dynamics separating between desirable and undesirable
candidate stoves. ?

IMO we will not progress much until professionally competent
multi-disciplinary teams are formed and held accountable for predicting and
rating probable demand for competing stoves by different stove using
publics.?

It is time to stop messing around and start financing serious collaboration
between what CP Snow long ago described as the incompatible cultures ?of
physical sciences and cultural ?studies (humanities). Understanding,
testing, desiging, and predicting improved domestic stoves requires a
respectful and balanced ?collaboration of these two cultures. If Crispin
and Cecil can unify lab and community science processes others can find
their own ways to collaborate.?

Our collaboration has advanced the cause of science and technology in the
public interest. Ralph Nader's Science for the Citizen, the former
Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the NSF's forgotten
Research Applied to National Need (RANN), and the OEO initiated and Gandhi
and Schumacher inspired National ctr for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) are
historical examples of past efforts to harmonize the two cultures.?

In search,
Cecil the Cook

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(India +91) 909 995 2080
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