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Old 03-13-2011, 08:11 PM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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If I'm not mistaken you said that the study's would be all over the internet, if so some surly should come up using search engines. But thanks for the link, however I don't see any actual published study's. I see a list of 156 titles, and after clicking on more than 10 of them, each only state an objective and an a approach. All they seem to be is a list of funding requests, outlining what they want to accomplish and how they plan to go about it. But no actual study's.

Yahoo (as I usually use), Google and Bing etc. don't publish the information, they just supply links to the information on the web, and use the advanced search to narrow searches to .edu possibly .gov websites. As well as use quotation marks around specific words and phrases, and the plus sign to include specific words in the phrase to narrow down the results.

Anybody can get a .com and now even a .org website, and can publish anything they want regardless of validity. I prefer to use sites that have a much higher probability of having accurate information. Websites that anyone can get, and post anything they want like .com and .org, just don't have nearly as high of a probability of being accurate. That's not to say that a .com website wont have creditable information, but it's unwise to just assume so. And before deeming anything from any .com and/or .org website creditable, I would also need to research the website, the source the website got the information from, the background of the person that wrote it, and make sure it wasn't altered by the website before publishing it.

Even though .edu and .gov website information can still be flawed (as with any information anywhere can be) , especially if it's dated. You cant just post anything you want. The agency's and educational institutions don't post things from unknown people, they post things from people who work for them, and/or colleagues they closely work with. Therefor they have already checked into their backgrounds and are satisfying with their credentials before posting anything from them.

It would be nice if there was a collective university and/or gov database, however if there is I'm unaware of it. I am aware of many government and university sites such as:

Cooperative Extension System Offices
U.S. Department of Agriculture Home Page
Bradford County Extension Office – Solutions for Your Life - UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences
Clemson University
School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences | Home
Montana State University Extension - Bozeman Montana
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
North Carolina Cooperative Extension: Home
UNL | Extension Horticulture
Introduction - General - Information - Ohio State University Hydroponic Crop Program
Small Farms / Alternative Enterprises - Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Extension
EDIS - Electronic Data Information Source - UF/IFAS Extension
The Alabama Cooperative Extension System
Protected Agriculture Greenhouse Project

And that's just a short list of what I already have bookmarked. Searching the sites individual is not really productive in my experience. I usually just come up with either a long list of vaguely relevant results, or nothing at all. And unless you know the exact title of of what you are looking for, that's what just what winds up happening 80%-90% of the time (even when the spelling is correct). You need the spelling to be correct, or you get nothing at all. Unlike a search engine, where if the spelling is incorrect, it gives you alternatives. And the fact is, I'm terrible at spelling.

They don't have an advanced search (that I know of) but they do usually show the url of the original document before you click on it. And I often also use pdf search engins like these to search specifically for pdf. files. I really like pdf's because I can easily save them to my computer, as well as organize them on my computer to find them easier. I also like to print them out (I find things easier to read through that way).

Free PDF Search Engine
GreatPDF - The great PDF document and ebook search engine.
PDF, DOC, PPT, eBook Search Engine.

Quote:
Also, if one relies upon purely university and government studies to make a determination of credibility of information, and you don't perform those exact same experiments yourself to judge their validity and publish your own results, one isn't in a position to judge what is or is not credible, at all.
So then what's the point of even looking for and reading any research? Simply saying that nothing is accurate (regardless of where it's published) unless you run experiments to verify the results is extremely impracticable. I have read that gorge Washington crossed the Delaware, but I don't have a time machine to go back in time to verify that he actually did, so I guess that bit if information cant be trusted. Sorry but I don't have millions of dollars to redo all the study's that have already been done, just to corroborate their results.

The best I can do (and try my best to do), is find multiple study's from as creditable of sources that I can find, and compare their results with each other. Even if I published my own results, that wouldn't make my findings creditable, nor does it make anyone's else. There are hundreds of thousands of books published in hard copy every year that have no validation, and there are many more websites on the internet that do the same. But each person that publishes it feels their information is creditable. And determining something creditable doesn't involve just agreeing with it.

I know that you keep referring to your facility, and their experiments, as well as the research as if that's supposed to impress me. No offense, but your just a stranger to me, just another person posting in a forum. There are lots of people that say a lot of things, and it isn't hard to find pictures online, copy them, and post theme in a forum or website, then clam anything about them they want. That wouldn't even be original. You may just believe what anyone says in a forum, and consider it creditable (as you mentioned I should do before), but I on the other hand am more realistic.

If your research facility is top secret, as well as all the experiments and research it conducts. Well then it's useless to me, and not validation of anything. Nor can I deemed any of what you say the results of it are, as creditable now can I. It just isn't realistic to deem research that cant be verified as creditable, and deem research that can be verified as not creditable. It just winds up being the say so of a stranger in a forum. All I can do with it is just keep it in mind, and maybe someday I will run across a creditable source of information that gives it some validation. Unfortunately that's the reality. And going by your earlier statement, sense I don't have the money to conduct my own study's to verify your so called research facility's results (even if they were published), so therefor I wouldn't be "in a position to judge what is or is not credible, at all," now am I. So if something can only be creditable if you conducted an experiment to validate the results, I guess it would still be useless information to me, wouldn't it. Or is there a double standard here.
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