(at)

Subject: 
From:    at <HARTMANN%MSUPA.BITNETPSUVM.PSU.EDU>
Date:    Sun, 20 Sep 1992 22:46:00 -0400

Al,

        Your message of 20 Sept suggests a procedure known as 'claim
staking,' which is generally good, for the reasons you mention, unless it's
abused by someone who stakes too many claims before doing the actual work,
or who stakes unrealistic claims.

        The particular concern about prior claims in psychoacoustics is
that it is easy to conceptualize novel experiments to look for particular
effects, but in practice, anticipated effects are often turn out to be
obscured by other effects. I suggest, therefore, that claim stakers try to
meet "standards of good taste," which means that they have generated the
stimuli, listened to them, and got a few data points from at least one
listener (could be an experimenter) before telling the world about the
project. [Your particular experiment, with different groups of listeners
biased in different ways, is complicated enough that one might relax the
standards.]


Best, Bill