ASHRAE Journal - October 2024 - 72

REFRIGERATION APPLICATIONS
COLUMN
Andy Pearson
Confessions of a
Curmudgeon
BY ANDY PEARSON, PH.D., C.ENG., FELLOW ASHRAE
We have reached the end of a busy conference season. I have been at events in Japan,
Indiana, Maryland and South Africa and it has been really encouraging and refreshing
to see the wealth of young talent that is working on cutting-edge technology in our
industry. This gives great hope for the future, and I congratulate all of the young
researchers who were brave enough to present their work to the world this summer.
However, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old
man, there have been a few recurring themes across the
presentations that raise my blood pressure a bit. It's not
my intention to offend anyone or to disrespect
their work, but here are my pet peeves this year.
I hope that it will encourage authors next year
to improve their offerings. In particular, I hope
that their supervisors, who really ought
to know better and be guiding them better,
will take note.
First in the bombsight is the practice of citing
dozens of references that bear very little relation
to the topic of the paper. If I am refereeing a
paper, I will try to look up all the references
and when I find that they only bear a passing
acquaintance with the topic, they get the thumbs
down. It is particularly bad to cite a reference because
someone else used it without even bothering to look
it up yourself. If you only have eight or so pages for an
account of your work, don't waste more than half a page
on listings of other people's output.
Another great waste of space is photographs of
Equations are perhaps a more controversial pick.
Stephen Hawking was told by his publisher that every
equation he put into " A Brief History of Time " would
halve the sales numbers so he only used one,
E = mc2. It may be hard to explain what you
have done without equations, but unless you
are presenting something novel, they generally
do not help the reader understand your work.
Matrix notation is even worse. It takes up a lot
of space that could have been used to describe
your work and doesn't help the reader at all.
Exergy has been high in the rankings of my
Try my neural network
for size.
pet peeves for a long time now. I think of it as
a very Scottish concept: " It doesn't matter how
well you did, it could have been so much better. "
laboratory test rigs. There is some merit to their
inclusion because they indicate that this was not just
a desktop study or literature review, but to be honest,
if you tell me you built a rig, I will believe you and the
pictures will convey so much more in your PowerPoint
at the delivery of the paper. In any event, all test rigs
look the same when the image is shrunk down to fit on a
page, so you are not conveying anything useful.
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ASHRAE JOURNAL ashrae.org O CTO B ER 2024
Usually when I see the word in a paper, I come to the
conclusion that the author is trying to make something
that is fundamentally simple sound more complex than
it actually is. Just don't.
Finally, this year's top pick of the irritants: Neural
networks. When someone says " I created an artificial
neural network " and shows a diagram of circles
connected by lines, my inner monologue is saying, " you
used a clever piece of software and you don't really know
what it's doing. " I'd rather hear details of the clever
things that you did yourself.
As I said at the top, I am not trying to offend, but if the
cap fits, wear it.
Andy Pearson, Ph.D., C.Eng., is group managing director at Star Refrigeration in
Glasgow, UK.
http://www.ashrae.org
ASHRAE Journal - October 2024

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