Ken wrote,
 
> One thing that I remarked to Rudy back channel was one time my doing a peer review of an APT Bulletin article on lime mortars. I freaked out when the author got into recommendation of lime mortars on steel and glass curtain walls in NYC. This is NO joke, and one of the reasons that I have problems when asked to review APT articles is that I almost always seem to end up with whacko papers. I feel dismal over the powers of stupidity and guilty over my rarely having encouraging responses and of late I have been ignoring the requests to review articles as a result, which brings up other discussion as to how that process of peer review itself is restrictively asymmetrical.
>

Ken, it is not only you that get whacko APT papers. I have also been a peer reviewer for the Bulletin, an effort I undertook because I got tired of reading some of the incredibly bad papers they have published from time to time. Most of the papers I have reviewed were so bad they ended being withdrawn by their authors. Others went through major rewrites. A couple were really good and needed only minor questions addressed.

I have seen papers on chemistry that demonstrated the author's total ignorance. (NO - gypsum is NOT a non-hydraulic material). I trashed another one that was a completely nontechnical love letter to lime with no systematic series of observations or any objective substantiation for any of the flowery conclusions reached.

Don't feel guilty. You really are doing them a favor. Some day they may become wise enough to be embarassed that the thing was published in the first place. And if they don't - the hell with em!

Mike E