@DGM - do you have the numbers of signers of the petition grouped by qualification handy? Has this actually been done?
...
About 3 years ago, I went through the list of signatories, focusing on the category "Professional Engineers (degreed & licensed)". Two reasons for this focus: a) The most relevant engineering qualifications, structural and civil engineering, require licensing by US state for engineers to practice b) The states publish rosters of all Professional (i.e. licensed) Engineers (P.E.s).
Back then, when they had a bit over 300 P.E.s, I found that this represented about 0.02-0.04% of all P.E.s in most states (that usually includes retired or inactive licenses). A handful of the smallest states didn't have even 1 PE sign up for Gage.
On both the rosters and the petition, civil and structural engineers were slightly more than half of the number, so the percentage applies to them as well.
Today, of the 2352 signatories, 433 are P.E.s - an increase of not quite 40% in 3 years. So still, under 0.05% of the civial and structural engineers in the USA have signed the petition - less than 1 in 2000.
They have 338 licensed architects. The AIA has ca. 80,000 regular members, with my understanding that AIA membership is premised on you being a licensed architect in good standing (in addition, they have "Associate AIA" membership). I don't know what percentage of licensed architects are AIA members. Anyway, 338 out of more than 80,000, that's at most about 0.4% of the licensed architects in the USA.
The remaining signers - 882 unlicensed engineers, 123 unlicensed architects, 576 non-US architects and engineers - either have qualifications the relevance of which to assessing building collapses is highly questionable, or (in case of the foreigners) they represent a far far smaller fringe minority in their countries. For example: They have 59 signers from the UK. That's 3% the number of US signers, while the UK population is 20% of US population. It stands to reason that, as a first approximation, less than 0.01% of the UK's civil and structural engineers support Gage. This is after Gage having toured the UK at least two times, most recently in April.
When you take into account and compare with the percentages of the general population that extremist left or right political parties draw (
for example, the neo-nazi NPD in Germany got 1.3% in the last Federal election), or that are believers in weird, non-mainstream religions (
e.g. Scientology claims 0.2% of the UK population, 1.6% of Americans are Mormons; this, by the way, includes truth leader SE Jones who actually has a paper in his vita that purports to present evidence that Jesus visited North America!), or that suffer from serious cognitive deseases (
prevalence of schizophrenia is estimated at around 0.5%), perhaps you can see that a self-selected group of under 0.05% of any adult sub-population really is a tiny fringe that shouldn't be taken serious just because of their numbers. People on the fringes are often
very weird indeed!
) -- IMO that is the main reason that Bazant and the academics went astray on the bits they got wrong. So busy improving their maths that they forgot they were not describing the real event.
