User:Stoft
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From the wiki guide to user pages: Think of it as ..., and also a way of helping other editors to understand with whom they're working.
Professional credentials I am an energy economist with a PhD in economics and an undergraduate degree in engineering math, both from UC Berkeley. I was the expert economics witness for the Californian PUC and Electricity Oversight Board in their case before Federal Regulatory Commission attempting to recover part of the $40 billion spent during the crises on electricity purchased at double the normal price. (We recently won the appeal on this case before the 9th Circuit Court.) I have assisted the Market Monitoring Unit at PJM, the country's largest electricity market, since its formation in 1999. I co-designed the capacity market for ISO New England, the electricity market covering Maine through Connecticut. I am the author of one of the best selling (in a very small field) books on electricity markets, and it has now been translated in Chinese and Russian. My profession web)
Current professional interest My current work is a small collaborative investigation into hydrogen for the EU. (This is the group I'm collaborating with EU energy policy blog.)
Background and motivation From my undergraduate days at Berkeley, when I worked get Ron Dellums elected to the Berkeley City Council, I have been interested in social policy issues. Although I first studied physics, then math (at UC Berkeley) and then attended graduate school in Astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, my interest in social change led me into teaching (Jr. and Sr. high) and then into economics--how else to unite social policy and mathematics?
Development of zFacts.com Four years ago, I started zFacts.com in response to the idiocy of the Iraq war. My idea was to bring something like I.F. Stone's weekly to the web and make it a collective effort. Not knowing about wiki software, but learning some PHP tricks from a young friend, I invented and programmed my own wiki software in order to allow my friends and others to collaborate. Currently my efforts on that site are focused on energy policy, about which I'm writing a book and making it available for free on the web as I write it (as I did with my previous book). This time I intend to self publish to I can set a low price and keep it available on zFacts.
Goal of collaboration with Wikipedia I view Wikipedia as a fabulous resource and have made a few minor contributions. As I move into energy policy on zFacts, I would like to contribute much more to Wiki, since this is an area (unlike the Iraq war) where I have both expertise and credibility. The material I am posting on zFacts (all the backup research for the book) is far to voluminous to include in Wikipedia but I am hoping to include the most interesting results in Wikipedia and make the documentation of them available on zFacts.
Benefits of collaboration I believe I can provide Wikipedia with a number of results that readers will find valuable and interesting. My intention is to give away the good stuff, but to use zFacts for the boring but essential details. (Of course zFacts will have both.) Wiki readers who are really interested can check zFacts. The benefit to me is that many more people see my work, and some people with deeper interests will be introduced to zFacts. I see no conflict here. This is win-win. Especially there is no conflict in the sense the term is used in Wiki's definition of conflict of interest (the normal definition). There the concern is that people will provide biased information--for example if I owned an ethanol factory. In fact, it would be extremely damaging to me to provide biased or inaccurate material. My reputation is built on saying exactly what I think and providing excellent analysis. I specialize in clients who want credibility rather than control over what I say.
Why simply merging zFacts documentation info into Wiki doesn't work ZFacts has a particular way of backing up arguments that I believe will be very useful in the Wikipedia context. When there is a partisan controversy over some fact like ethanol's energy balance, X. If zFacts finds X is low, then to prove X is low, it attempts to use data from the partisans who claim X is high. This will allow them to trust the data and therefore learn from our calculation of X. A second technique is to make such documentation extremely easy to access. For example, if I say Berkeley's ERG reports in [link to ERG document] that CO2 savings is 7.4%, only 1 person in 10,000 will verify that and trust my assertion. It took me an hour reading the report to find this information, and you must divide two of their numbers to get this value, so you cannot scan for the value. To solve this problem, I packaged the document's title page and relevant data page along with my own cover page, which explains what to look for. I highlight the relevant numbers in the original document.
The details of how to provide the users with both the kind finding and access to the research and documentation can be worked out as we move forward.
