Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cycle theory: Difference between revisions

Cycle theory

New set of articles about non-notable pet theory. Original set of articles posted in June/July 2005.

I am also nominating the following additional articles:

• The Foundation for the Study of Cycles
• Cycles Research Institute
• Unified Theory of Cycles

Material regarding Cycles Theory was originally inserted into Wikipedia in the summer of 2005. This was backed out where it was added into articles like Cycle, and deleted outright when it was presented in articles like Harmonics Theory, as it represents the pet theory of one individual (see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Harmonics Theory and Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Harmonics Theory (2nd nomination) for sample context). Material has recently been reinserted into Wikipedia in the articles noted above.--Christopher Thomas 06:11, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Update - The Foundation for the Study of Cycles looks like it dates from the first time this topic came up. I'm striking it from the list of related articles, to be considered separately if anyone wants to put it up for AfD. --Christopher Thomas 06:19, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Too funny. This is a 501c3 U.S. recognized organization. That is doing research in cycle theory. Your personal opinions on whether it is bias, rubbish or pseudoscience is redundant. This is a verifiable entity conduction research in cycle theory. Thus a sub on the theory should be expanded. Therefore, cycle theory should be on wikipedia as the foundation and it research arm. Personally, I hold little interest in the topic. But what does interest me is giving credit were it should be given and it should be. H0riz0n 06:46, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

First - State a vote of "keep" or "delete", at the beginning of your voting comment, either as a blanket for all articles listed, or on an article-by-article basis.

Second - getting registered as a non-profit organization doesn't make you noteworthy. It means you went to the appropriate office, filled in the form, and paid the fee. I've been part of one which consisted of half a dozen people who met once a year to satisfy the AGM requirements so I'm quite familiar with the process.

The most likely deletion criterion considered here is notability (though that's not a cast in stone policy, it tends to be what gets considered). What makes a _scientific_ _theory_ notable or non-notable is how much mention it gets by scientists. What makes an entity in general notable or non-notable is how much mention it gets by the public at large. Google is the usual yardstick for this for AfD disputes. Go and check for yourself to see whether this is notable or not.

Third - while status as science or pseudoscience isn't relevant for an AfD vote, it _is_ relevant for how the articles themselves are presented (see WP:NPOV). I have a strong background in science and engineering. If I call something pseudoscience, it's because I have the expertise to know it certainly is. If I'm not sure, I _say_ that I'm not sure, and ask scientists. Accusing me of "bias" and "personal opinion" when assigning labels like that verges on being a personal attack. Please consider the possibility that I _do_ know what I'm talking about. --Christopher Thomas 07:07, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete as non-notable research, no evidence of being pursued outside of this institute, smells of pseudoscience. Sandstein 06:46, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

(Comment by User:H0riz0n, originally interleaved with the original AfD notice text:)

(Cycle theory isnt a pet theory to hedge funds who apply very secret matenamtical equations to hedge their investments over large investment markets.)

(grouping the article together is like grouping all religions, philosophies, sciences under individual topic. Cycle theory is a long studied topic that deserves individual coverage.)

Cycles Research Institute -- this an [independent 501c3 reseach entity] doing work in cycle theory and working to establish a Unified Theory of Cycles this work has been ongoing since Edward R Dewey was appointed In 1931 as chief economics analyst for the U.S. Department of Commerce with the special task of finding out what had caused the market crash two years before.

Unified Theory of Cycles -- (this should be an independent sub since there is published research by the Cycles Research Institute

(Comment by User:H0riz0n)

research outsite institute on cycle theory

1. Germany 1 2 3
2. United kingdom 1
3. Australis 123
4. Business & Other Cycle Theory 1 excellent overview of the verious types of cycle Theorys

(Comment apparently by User:H0riz0n)

The term cycle is used a technical term in many areas, including symbolic dynamics, the area of my own Ph.D. thesis (on a kind of almost periodic dynamical system, and I think I am reasonably qualified to discuss the periodic kind too, heh). But it should be clear that such usages do not in any way "endorse" the vapid claims discussed in these articles! Let's see: you linked to a web page discussing some work of John Maynard Keynes, the K-theory preprint archive (ROFL !!!!!), some kind of blog on business cycles--- c'mon, who do you think you are kidding? But thanks for mentioning K-theory since I think others here will enjoy that as much as I did! :-) CH 20:54, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

• Weak Keep Cycles Research Institute since it's not immediately obvious that it doesn't exist , merge (slowly and painfully) the others with it. Studying rhythms is one thing, but they don't have a cycle theory yet, and Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. (Didn't Fourier or someone work out the real cyclical math a few hundred years ago?) Peter Grey 07:12, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

You're thinking of Fourier series. This is a useful way of representing an arbitrary signal as the sum of a series of sine waves (via versions of the Fourier transform). I could wax poetic for several paragraphs about when it's (very!) useful and when it's not useful, but suffice to say that it's not related to what Cycle theory claims to do. --Christopher Thomas 05:28, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

What's your definition of "exists"? According to its website it does not yet have an office of any sort. It seems to exist on the web and the author seems to have filed for 401(c) status. I don't think that's very notable; it sounds like this is run out of this guy's kitchen. --Fastfission 05:11, 6 April 2006 (UTC) (addressing Peter Grey, not Christopher Thomas)

• Delete as non-notable, if that wasn't evident from the fact that I initiated the AfD. A google search turns up all of 309 hits for "Cycles Research Institute", once Wikipedia-sourced pages and a similar-sounding unrelated organization (Economic Cycles Research Institute) are removed. Many of these hits are archives of a post CRI made to sci.astro.research and other newsgroups. --Christopher Thomas 08:17, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

These results are inflated by a variety of things. I get 353 results from your search. After removing results from cyclesresearchinstitute.org and tomes.biz, these results are brought down to around 260. Additionally, from playing around with the search parameters, it appears that of these 260, about 100 are the result of spamming of newsgroups with announcements. Even here, with only 160 results, some are references to other organisations, and many appear to just be random links. My final search was this rather long expression.--Philosophus 05:56, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete -- Though there are many studies of cyclic processes in different forms of science, I see no independent evidence for the existence of a coherent discipline known as "cycle theory" as defined on the article page, one which tried to be a "unified theory of cycles". The key question here is not whether one can find times when various economic models are described a cyclical, but whether or not there exists a "cycle theory" as a disciplinary field. It seems, from a superficial look at the links offered here, that the author is trying to carve out some sort of new interdisciplinary approach. That's good and well, but unless there is independent reference to this from a mainstream source of some sort I don't think it passes WP:NOR, and does not belong on Wikipedia. If/when it becomes a notable disciplinary approach, we'll be happy to have an article on it. --Fastfission 05:08, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete - More than half of the 350 results on google are either self-references or newsgroup spamming. The articles focus quite a bit on cycles outside of business, but have no links to peer-reviewed and respected publications outside of the business-related links. It appears that "Cycle Theory" might be an obscure business theory, but depending considerably on psychology of people involved in business, which bears little relation to what these articles are about. To cite a precedent, this is much less notable than Aetherometry, which was deleted for non-notability. Foundation for the Study of Cycles seems a bit questionable too - many of the links to it appear to be astrology related - but I will look into this later. --Philosophus 05:56, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete all. Ray Tomes has been posting similar stuff in UseNet newsgroups for years, and recently has tried several times to create WP articles which misleadingly portray this Cycles Institute and so forth as some kind of major scientific enterprise. In fact, as far as I can tell, all three or four articles here are really only talking about Ray Tomes and his website. Tomes has appropriated (with credit) the writings of an earlier crank, and continues to popularize these ideas, but as far as I know, he is the only living person who seriously believes in this stuff. He seems like a nice enough fellow, but in the interests of the readers whom we are here to serve, Tomes should be gently but firmly discouraged from using WP as soapbox in this manner.---CH 20:06, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Good grief, some time back Foundation for the Study of Cycles was only a blank site, but it has become an extensive website with sections on such crank-infested waters as Nikola Tesla, Rife, Wave Structure of Matter, and naturally, poor old Einstein. Tomes does claim that the organization has a dozen researchers, but I question the mental picture of a large building with these fellows hard at work in their offices which I think the website and articles try to create.---CH 20:19, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Anticipating that some users who are not mathematicians or scientists may wish to vote intelligently in this AfD, or might be curious to learn more about why cycles are commonplace (but certainly not present in every phenomenon which one might study), I'd like to give two very readable references

• Hilborn, Robert C. (1994). Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-195-08816-6. The best undergraduate level survey of this vast topic I've seen. Clear and well organized.
• Jackson, E. Atlee (1991). Perspectives on Nonlinear Dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-42632-4 and 0-521-42633-2. (two volumes) A wonderful nontechnical survey, with beautiful illustrations.

Both of these books extensively discuss various applications, and discuss both periodic and almost periodic dynamical systems.

I urge anyone interested to obtain one or both of these books and also to read the articles up for AfD in order to verify the following assertions:

1. Modern dynamical systems theory offers much insight into why cycles are common (but certainly not ubiqitous) in dynamical systems, including systems which are often used to model phenomena in economics, biology, and physics.
2. "Cycle theory" as described at the FSC website and in Cycles Research Institute and the other articles up for AfD amounts to little more than the observation that cycles are common (but certainly not ubiquitious) in phenomena which nowadays are often modeled as some kind of dynamical system (continuous or discrete).
3. There is no such subject as "cycle theory" in mathematics or dynamical systems theory.
4. The mathematical theory of dynamical systems is a theory. The "cycle theory" promoted in these articles is vapid nonsense.

Since the real theory (dynamical systems) is both beautiful and powerful, I encourage anyone interested to learn a bit about it. The book by Jackson should make wonderful reading regardless of background.---CH 22:56, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

I should probably point out for the benefit of mathematically literate users that the notion of a cycle finds its proper place in symbolic dynamics. See the first half of

• Lind, Douglas; and Marcus, Brian (1995). Introduction to Symbolic Dynamics and Coding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55900-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

There are in fact beautiful connections between cycles, closed geodesics, zeta functions, primes, and all that. Strictly speaking, graphs such as occur in symbolic dynamics do harbor homological cycles which are seen to be closely related to cyclic permutations in this context. And operator K-theory does play a role in symbolic dynamics (part of why I was ROFL up above), although not, of course, in a naive way :-/ But of course this does not at all contradict anything I said above. Quite the contrary, it supports my contention that the mainstream theory (the only real theory discussed on this page) is intricate, beautiful, far-reaching and powerful.---CH 23:25, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Yet another article written by the FSC crowd is Edward R. Dewey, which promoted his mysterical numerology as mainstream until I fixed it just now. ---CH 02:24, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete all per the arguments given above. Anville 11:25, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete. CH is right; to anyone who knows anything, this is akin to shouting Eureka! 2+2=4 ! Well, of course it is! linas 13:25, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

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Lost in Logs, Re-do from Start

• Call me a process stickler if you will, but for some reason, this has fallen off the April 5 AFD log. I am not sure when it happened, but since a discussion can be radically altered by it not being on the main AFD list, I thought it best to ensure that it gets sufficient attention by having it on for the full 5 days. I have added this to the April 25 AFD log. Sjakkalle (Check!) 14:18, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete per CH. –Joke 14:38, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete Notability concerns as well as the arguments presented above.--Cini 15:45, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per Fastfission, Philosophus and the previous AfD discussions. Last time(s) around, User:RayTomes was adding a category to lots of unrelated articles in an attempt to create a discipline ab nihilo, citing Edward R. Dewey as the primary progenitor; when you looked at it in detail, everything traced back to Tomes' own site or was unrelated to cycles (the category was applied to Sonoluminescence, for instance). This looks like a similar attempt to borrow credibility for Wikipedia for a basically pseudoscientific enterprise. · rodii · 19:16, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete tosh and even if it wasn't no sources. Kotepho 21:30, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete it is not an established science and this is not a crystal ball. rxnd ( t | € | c ) 22:07, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete All (weak, in the case of CRI, as it may be a real organization). Not science, and non even established pseudo-science. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 22:32, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
• Comment Cycle theory predicts that even if we delete these articles, they will come back. Lambiam^Talk 23:55, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Move — as a compromise. Article is certainly insufficient as currently written, and needs to be held to a higher standard. However, following the links in the See Also or External Links (?), you can also see a respectable webpage and a number of links to other related organizations, as someone documented above. Some of you may not remember or know about Biorythms, which millions swore by (And sometimes 'At'! Well, certainly some daze, I did! <G>) for a few years back when computers first became common in the office. Basically, I'm saying this is a stub and no worse than many I've stubmbled across herein. The given links suggest there is a lot of room for improvement and clean up. WP:NPOV ALSO means rejecting it out of hand as psuedo-science doesn't mean these folks may in fact someday be able to explain say Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or something YOU PERSONALLY view as appropo to science. I PERSONALLY, however recall a mention and discussion of Cycle Theory in an upper level Economics course in 1974. Is this article well written— Hell No. But are the specious objections listed above because one only made a passing stab at looking into a topic they haven't been exposed to a correct and well informed vote— I don't think so. One of the criticisms of this forum is that far too often people don't take enough time to examin the topic and delete promising article topics willy nilly out of hand in misguided youthful exuberence. Doing Something does not equate to to doing the right thing. If you're unqualified in this forum in particular, don't vote on something. Experience is a wonderful thing and it tells me that stranger things than this research have occured. Most topics in particle physics for starters— perhaps we should toss out String theory and Quarks— I'm sure they are equally familar to most of the voters back in April.

Some particulars:

1. Has anyone noticed that one of the Board Members on the below link is the CEO of FedEX? Think he's wasting his time?
2. Google Results 1 - 10 of about 355,000 for "Cycle Research", Hmmmm Looks notable.
3. Been around a LONG, LONG While— re:Dr. Theodore Landscheidt 1927-2004 Theodore Landscheidt of the Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity passed away on Wednesday, May 19, 2004. He was a long time member of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, author and publisher of many books and papers on cycles and universal phenomena.
4. From the same site: While cycles have an ancient history, the science of studying modern financial cycles began over a hundred and fifty years ago in the early 19th century. However, serious study of financial cycles did not begin until after the American stock market crash of 1929. In 1931 the Department of Commerce assigned Edward Dewey the task of discovering the cause and underlying dynamics of the Great Depression. As Chief Economic Analyst for the Department Dewey had unprecedented access to resources and information. Dewey's work on understanding the Great Depression led him to his lifelong calling in cycles. He combined his enormous research in business cycles with research from leading biologists on cycles in nature and in wildlife. Dewey was astonished to discover that:
   1. ) Cycles of identical length were found in both disciplines
   2. ) Similar cycles from different areas reached their peaks and troughs at the same time.

and

On January 10th, 1941, Edward R. Dewey incorporated the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, Inc. in the State of Connecticut, to conduct further research into these important discoveries. The Foundation has now become the recognized world center for multidisciplinary cycle research.

Lastly, Crystal Ball doesn't apply in any way, in economics and biology in particular cycle theories have some strong adherents. Rather than deleting it, I suggest it be moved into the creator's user page as a sandbox and he be asked firmly to vastly improve it before resubmiting it to article space. Or better yet, some of the delete voters above could do some penance and clean it up properly with a little research. FrankB 05:28, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, there is a real topic here; and we have an article on Nikolai Kondratiev. Septentrionalis 05:43, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

"Has anyone noticed that one of the Board Members on the below link is the CEO of FedEX?"

So? John Harvey Kellogg was pretty weird, too -- even in what we have in our article. There's even more wierdness which I may be able to find verifiable sources for. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 06:01, 27 April 2006 (UTC)