I am pretty sure that most Europeans know at least two languages, and quite often three.

As a European who lived for significant amounts of time (several years) in Italy, Germany and Norway, this depends a lot on the size of the country. Germans, Frenchmen and Italians do not need a foreign language since their entire lives can go on just fine with their mother language only: dubbed TV series, translated manuals for electronic gizmos, this stuff. Same goes for Japanese and Chinese. And Americans. They all have their language classes in school, but you really do not know a language unless you use it once in a while, so they learn just enough to pass the classes and then forget it.

In smaller countries with small languages (Scandinavia, Netherlands, Finland...) people speak at least workable English because they need it for their daily lives. Plus some languages are similar to the point of being ridiculous (e.g. Danish/Swedish/Norwegian), so it is really easy for some to raise the count. Yes, there is also something to be said about the school systems, but country size is very important in defining actual need.

It's also important to define what we mean by knowing a language: being able to order a beer, to entertain casual conversation, or defend a doctoral thesis? I read once a nice definition by some random linguistics expert on Usenet: "If you can have a bitter, verbal-intensive, emotional fight in a foreign language, then you know it".

I think there is a fundamental bias when measuring the age of best work with the proposed metric, i.e. measuring when the work for which a Nobel was awarded was originally published.

Nobel prizes are awarded only to living physicists (and that's why Einstein never got one for relativity, he died too soon). So, only the work done early in life can lead to a Nobel prize, since it needs to be revolutionary to be worth of the prize, it needs to be settled so it will not be controversial, and revolutionary ideas take a long time to settle (see, again, relativity). Consider also all those physicists working on radioactivity and X-rays in the early days: many died very young simply because nobody knew of the dangers of what they were researching.

So, I think the increase in "genius age" is only due to the fact that scientists, as everybody else, are living longer.

It wasn't done by those specialists reviewing his papers either. They simply accepted his data sight unseen .

That's what you always do with data, you trust the submitter. What would the alternative be? Replicating the experiments is costly and there is no guarantee that reviewers (who work anonymously and for no money) have the resources for that. Still reviewers are the most likely people to spot errors or inconsistencies as they are experts in the field.

Reviewers filter bad logic and bad math. Bad data is filtered down the road, when someone else tries to reproduce the results. It can take a few years, but if you are caught making up data like this guy Stapel you mention (there was a similar crook in my university for that sake), you usually get your doctorate retired and your reputation tarnished. Good luck with your career after that.

Have you ever reviewed a paper?

Why yes I did.

When you find a paper which is not fit for publication (let's say some results are obviously faked), what happens?

Not obviously faked, but I was given a paper to review that had one obviously wrong parameter value. It was off 6 orders of magnitude from typical real values. Substituting a realistic value invalidated the whole paper, as they were solving a problem due to the value of that parameter. The paper was well written and logically consistent, but they solved a non-existing problem.

What I did was to send back with "major revision" being requested, making it clear to the editor that they had to come with pretty convincing evidence for their parameters, or they should be rejected. Rejection followed.

If you can convince an editor to drop such a paper, it will only be picked up by another journal.

That's what happened with that paper. It ended up somewhere else, even though this time it carried a notice about the unrealistic value of the parameter.

The critical review you get by publishing in mass media is more complete and honest than what you get in a peer reviewed scientific publication. Why publish in a scientific journal just to say you did it? The peer review and publishing process has ceased to be intellectually valuable and completely fails to separate lies from truth.

Uh, I don't think so. Have you gone through peer review in a scientific journal? The process is long and can last 6 months or even a year. It is very thorough as there is always something that can be improved in a paper. In my experience papers usually come out better than the entered the process. You do encounter the occasional dick reviewer, but that is not enough to break the system.

Critical review by mass media is not done by specialists who have several months to write their comments. It is done by journalists on a field they are incompetent in within an afternoon. It is done by pundits with an agenda (in this case against videogames and Internet), who will put their own spin on the issue. It is then fed to the unwashed masses who know nothing of the subject and can easily be swayed.

The proper process is: first peer review, then, when the findings have been verified, you go to the public.

[I]s there some journal somewhere which would publish this, even if it was wrong or falsified?

You betcha. The results are interesting either way.

You do not really address the issue, [...]

Of course I do not, for there is no issue to begin with. They are withholding construction details and refusing others to inspect the apparatus. They ask us to believe their word for it, which means that their credibility, not the actual science (which they do not make available, supposing there is some), becomes the issue. An their credibility is zero.

"Republish"? I wrote that a few weeks ago. I have not changed opinion on the matter. I see no reason to change the text.

Also, these guys are not explaining how their magical device is producing energy, nor they allow anyone to inspect it. Had they done so, I would shut up and let nuclear engineers do the bashing. As they basically ask us to trust them, an analysis of their credibility is very much warranted. Ad hominem? Sure, credibility always is.

And by the way, I have myself two patents being processed these days, so I am no complete foreigner to the procedure. Neither is a world-changing revelation, though one can have some economical worth. You don't see me going around press conferences, in fact my company's patent lawyers were very adamant that publication must be avoided before the patent is filed, otherwise the patent will not be accepted. If Rossi and Focardi really had something, they would have filed the patent (filed, not waited to be awarded, it takes a few weeks) and then started looking for investors, showing off all their tech. Tech they do not show because it obviously does not exist.

Seriously? The heading is "Andrea Rossi's Petroldragon Story—by Andrea Rossi".

It could be just as well be titled "Trust me, I am a convicted felon."

Actually Focardi has published papers on cold fusion [...] I'll leave the literature search for you as an exercise, since you are a professional.

So, word of Elsevier's portal on one side, random Slashdot anonymous coward on the other side. Now, since I am obviously ignorant, would you point out which papers Focardi ever published, in which journal, which issue, which pages? Because if he had actually proved cold fusion he would have made a lot of noise in the scientific community before.

Note: newspaper articles do not count. Press releases do not count. Conference presentations do not count. And even disreputable journals count very little. I see your cards, sir.

About a month ago I got an email from my dad in which he asked my opinion on this issue, since I have a PhD in engineering and work as a researcher. The case had been presented to the public in a Italian TV magazine. I drafted a debunking on various grounds, which for your benefit I report here.

Short version: this Rossi guy is a convicted felon, his buddy Focardi an old, crooked professor with no relevant publications since the 60s, and they are after the money of naive investors.

Detailed version:

• Mr. Rossi is a convicted felon, known for the Petroldragon affair: in the 70s, he claimed he could make oil out of garbage. He was eventually sentenced five times, including bankruptcy fraud of said Petroldragon society. He managed to dodge some more convictions thanks to Italy's statutory limitations law.
• Prof. Focardi has an academic career spanning over 50 years, yet he has amazingly few publications. On ScienceDirect only about 10 publications show up, of which only 2 as first author and dating to the 60s, the other ones are publication orgies with a dozen of authors or so dating to the early 70s. The greatest is the latest publication, dating back to 1986, with TWENTY-ONE other authors, that over 25 years gathered only 4 citations. In any case, Focardi never published anything on fusion, cold or warm.
• The patent filed by Rossi is titled "process and apparatus to obtain exothermal reactions, in particular from nickel and hydrogen". There is no mention whatsoever that the reaction is nuclear.
• The mysterious device is explained vaguely (also in Italian sources) referring to likewise mysterious unknown nuclear forces. So, there is no theory, no experiment that can be reproduced, only claims.

Mr. Rossi is therefore only looking for rich, greedy fools that will pump money in his next bankruptcy fraud. As a consequence of a certain prime minister and his modifications to the legal system, crimes like bankruptcy fraud are now very difficult to prosecute in Italy, so Rossi could just get away with it this time.