Research Data: Share Early, Share Often 138
Shipud writes "Holland was recently in the news when a psychology professor in Tilburg University was found to have committed large-scale fraud over several years. Now, another Dutch psychologist is suggesting a way to avert these sort of problems, namely by 'sharing early and sharing often,' since fraud may start with small indiscretions due to career-related pressure to publish. In Wilchert's study, he requested raw data from the authors of some 49 papers. He found that the authors' reluctance to share data was associated with 'more errors in the reporting of statistical results and with relatively weaker evidence (against the null hypothesis). The documented errors are arguably the tip of the iceberg of potential errors and biases in statistical analyses and the reporting of statistical results. It is rather disconcerting that roughly 50% of published papers in psychology contain reporting errors and that the unwillingness to share data was most pronounced when the errors concerned statistical significance.'"
More Errors in the Reporting of Statistical result (Score:1)
"It is rather disconcerting that roughly 50% of published papers in psychology contain reporting errors"
How many errors are present in this statement? Just saying.
You Mean... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You Mean... (Score:5, Funny)
Did you know that you can just BUY labcoats?
Re:You Mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Trust me I'm a scientist" isn't good enough anymore?
Actually, in a very real sense, it never was. The story here is that those that were unwilling to let outsiders (i.e., independent researchers) study their data had a significant error rate. But this has generally been understood by scientists; it's why normal scientific procedure encourages getting second opinions from others outside the group.
If you doesn't want us seeing your data, that will normally be taken as a sign that you know or suspect that there are problems with your data. Attempts to block independent researchers from replicating the experiments or data collection (which is one of the main uses of patent law) is generally taken as an open admission that there's something wrong with your data.
"Trust me I'm a scientist" may sometimes work with the general public, but it really hasn't ever worked with scientists. A real scientist reacts to interesting scientific news with "Further research is needed", and applies for funding to carry out the research.
Re:You Mean... (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of these errors have been found in neuroscience journals, too, which fancies itself a harder science...
Re:You Mean... (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of these errors have been found in neuroscience journals, too, which fancies itself a harder science...
Actually, this is mostly a special case of a problem that's recognized in most scientific fields: Much scientific work (experimental or observational) has a statistical component, and scientists generally don't have as good an understanding of statistics as their work requires.
Statistics shares a common problem with other basic subject such as quantum theory, relativity, and chaos theory: They don't fit well with human "intuitive" concepts of how the world works. With quantum theory and relativity, this is fairly blatant, and people usually don't try to pretend to understand them until they've done some serious study. But with statistics (and chaos ;-), people tend to think they have at least a basic understanding of probability, and they also tend to think that that's all they need. They end up publishing data on the basis of output from packaged software that they don't understand well.
A while back, there was a discussion in a linguistic forum that I follow, about the Pirahã language which lacks words for numbers. As a way of explaining how people could survive without numbers, one contributor came up with an informative parallel: In the modern Western world, there are many important things (economics and climate are hot-topic examples) that can't be understood without an understanding of the important concepts of statistics. But one can easily argue that the dominant "modern" languages lack words for statistical concepts.
Nearly everyone will object that, for instance, English has well-known terms like "chance", "probability", "mean", "standard deviation", "correlation", etc. But, the author pointed out, these are "cargo-cult" terms, borrowed from an alien (i.e., scientific) language, with little or no actual understanding of their meanings by most of the native speakers of English. This is clear if you look for statistical terms in the English media, and figure out how they're being used. They are just magical terms used to sound convincing, but it's usually clear that the speaker/write doesn't actually understand their technical meaning. Similarly, "quantum" is a common English word, but it's common meaning is very nearly an antonym of the technical meaning in physics. Most English speakers have little or no understanding of the technical meanings of these terms
In the case of statistical terms, scientists do tend to have taken a course or two in college. But understanding is low, barely above the common understanding used in the media and politics. So it's not surprising that a good number of papers in many scientific fields claim results that don't strictly follow from the data. If there is any sampling done to get the data (and there usually is), it's likely that the conclusions came partly from an interpretation of some software's output that is based on a misunderstanding of the statistical terminology.
Of course, when you get to the pseudo-sciences and the political arena, this process isn't accidental. Statistical buzz-words are often used as part of the psychological weaponry, to convince readers/listeners of whatever the writer/speaker is trying to convince them of. This is often done with malice aforethought, knowing that the public has almost no understanding of statistics.
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rgb
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The work on cognitive dissonance, for example, is pretty amazing and reproducible and explains so very much...
That contradicts what I already think, so I don't believe your statement.
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Hey, there's a scientologist in our midst!
So if psychology isn't a science, then classical conditioning doesn't exist, despite the huge volume of evidence that says it does? There's no value in trying to understand how human reasoning and memory works? We can't learn anything at all about how brain damage causes changes in day-to-day behavior?
Fact: Anything researched and studied according to the scientific method is science. That there are some researchers w
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Your "fact" is utterly incorrect. Psychology isn't a science like math, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science are sciences.
A science has laws with verifiable, reproducible outcomes that can be proven (psychology has theories of behavior, not laws). Look at Jung vs. Freud for a great example of why there are no laws of psychology, neither of them is wrong but neither of them is right doesn't make a science.
Descartes used research and studied according to a scientific method to prove there was such
Re:You Mean... (Score:4)
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Not sure where the tautology of the first sentence was supposed to go...I simply pointed out that when your field is filled with theories and does not contain any laws (which allow you to make verifiable claims) then your field is not a science.
It's a pseudoscience.
Similar to a pseudo-question, which is a question without an answer or for which any answer serves (e.g. "Where are your thoughts?" Descartes
It looks like a question because it's imperative in form, but it is not a proper question. Just like psy
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So, are you claiming that evolutionary biology is a pseudoscience? Really, I'm hard pressed to think of any laws that exist in biology at all, although I won't claim that there are none. However, I'm quite certain that you could have a biology class that is completely absent of those laws if they exist.
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The difference between a theory and a law isn't how verifiable a law is, but that theories attempt to explain why and laws do not. There is no explanation of why certain things happen in math and physics, so we have lots of laws in it. However, biology is far more abstract from fundamental truths of the universe, so it tends to have theories, since what is tested has explanations. Psychology is even more abstract, and thus would be even further down that line.
Abstraction in sciences is generally understood as a way of simplifying things--physics and chemistry are more abstract than biology and psychology because they employ simpler concept like particles, forces, atoms compared to cells or emotions. You conflate explanation, theory and law, with result being a sort of typical soft vs hard science confusion (also when you say "further down that line" What line?)
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After all the bullshit about "EVOLUTION IS JUST A THEORY LALALALALA", are you seriously dismissing a branch of science because it only has *theories* about how the world works? The process of science is the process of constructing and verifying theories. The defining feature of actually doing science is often being neither wrong nor right; in the science of physics, Newton's laws are a prime example of just that.
And are you seriously pointing to Jung and Freud as "a great example" of anything at all? No deg
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No science has laws, except in the sense of very well-confirmed theories. Many sciences do not have reproducible outcomes (astronomers, for example, have to take what observations they can get, and can't crash more galaxies together to replicate the Bullet Cluster experiment.) The core of any science is forming theories and figuring out how to get observations to disprove them, and psychology does that.
Neither Freud nor Jung were scientists; what they did is much closer to philosophy of mind, and they
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So who is going to pay for the costs? (Score:1)
It'll need money to store and make available and staff to manage.
So who is going to accept an increase in taxes to allow this to happen?
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What is expensive and wastes taxes is bozos who do crap research, publish the crap results, hide the cr
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My dissertation research data set is pushing half a terabyte, plus another half or so of transformed data in intermediate form. Mind you I'm in neuro, and we're a pretty data-driven lab. If you're curious, it's mostly confocal stacks, neuron recordings (each experiment is usually several hours, multiple channels, and sampled at 20kHz or more), integrator output, parameter-space vector data from optimizations, etc. Some of this *can* be regenerated from smaller seed data sets ... if you have access to a d
Science is like any other job/craft in that... (Score:5, Insightful)
An Anecdote to Back This Up (Score:4)
...most people who do it are downright bad at it. That they might take more time and care to be good at it without the perpetual axe of publish-publish-publish and grants funding hanging over their heads is another issue all together.
I agree and I can think of something to illustrate your point.
I was listening to a This American Life episode a few weeks [thisamericanlife.org] back and there was a story done on two people -- one a music professor and the other a respected oncologist -- who were investigating a long defunct theory that certain electromagnetic wavelengths can kill cancer cells and only cancer cells leaving healthy cells completely fine. When left to run the test, the music professor failed to maintain the control correctly and many other things. But after being corrected by the respected researcher they started getting positive sets of preliminary results. The respected researcher requested that the music professor not share this with anyone and not to attach his name to it just yet.
Well, the music professor did not follow this advice because he was so excited about the preliminary results and had, I guess, sort of felt like the respected researcher had short changed him and suppressed him. What the music professor wanted to do was blow the lid off this thing with possibly flawed data and sent it to other oncologists with the original researcher's name attached to it -- possibly misrepresenting it as flawed data. Now I can see why a researcher might fly off the handle when data is released extremely early. They were having problems recreating their own findings (with sham-control) which caused the original researcher to want to keep this very much out of the public's eye. You might claim he was just trying to save himself embarrassment but there's nothing embarrassing about finding out your hypothesis is wrong in science, I just think the best researchers avoid these "failures" and the subsequent investment of resources into them.
I think that scientists figure out how to create the most data and separate the wheat from the shaft in a very lengthy (think decades) long process whereas the first sign of a breakthrough might cause more inexperienced researchers to show the world. And the reason, as you mentioned, is probably the immediate funding they can get with it. But I think it badly neuters scientific news, the reward system and even the direction that research takes. But to release and share early on and often might just make everyone look bad when the whole background of the data is unknown to someone who receives it.
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That was a good episode, I felt sorry for the scientist.
Lie or Die (Score:2, Interesting)
It is very difficult to make a man understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. If psychology research were made to adhere to any kind of stringent scientific standard, there would be no psychology research.
Re:Lie or Die (Score:5, Funny)
It is very difficult to make a man understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. If psychology research were made to adhere to any kind of stringent scientific standard, there would be no psychology research.
Sounds like you have some issues with authority. Would you like to discuss it?
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Afterwards he can be ordered to perform a really nasty task, such is cleaning up the urinals in a public restroom with a toothbrush...
It's not actually really nasty until he has to brush his teeth with said toothbrush afterwards.
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Re:Lie or Die (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but you're an intellectual bigot who resorts to citing well-known celebrities rather than actually researching what the content of a field actually is and making a principled argument. Unfortunately, your bigotry is only ameliorated by its ubiquity in communities such as Slashdot.
A number of points need to be made:
First, most people have a stereotyped idea of what psychology is, because they don't actually know what it is. It's the scientific study of human behavior and experience. If you think it's couches and Freud, you're uninformed. My guess is that Feynman took psychology courses and had his primary exposure to the field during the mid-20th century, when psychoanalysis was dominant in *one branch of psychology*, and isn't even dominant in that area anymore. Psychologists study molecular neurobiology, multivariate statistics, neurophysiology, immunology, and any other number of topics. Be prepared to argue that those fields aren't science (or math) if you're prepared to argue that psychology isn't a science.
Second, it's worth noting that this fraud case (and the way the story is framed) focuses on psychology, but similar problems happen in other fields. E.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_the_discovery_of_Haumea
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/chronic-fatigue-researcher-jailed-controversy/story?id=15076224
Finally, what would you propose to do instead? Study human behavior and experience nonscientifically? That's what you seem to be suggesting.
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Intellectual bigot or not, the GP has a point. That Freud was ever considered a valid contributor to the field is a big fat black mark against psychology and the fact that introductory courses still mention his name with any purpose other than to ridicule his stupid, foolhardy, unscientific perspective is another.
Psychology is permeated by poor statistics (I read the journals), a poor understanding of experimental design and generally poor methodologies. Sure they make use of molecular neurobiology, multiva
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Head back to Wikipedia for a bit... Feynman was not talking about all of psychology, but mostly parapsychology. Reading minds, bending keys, that kind of thing. He was also speaking in a time where non-religious (or loosely religious) mysticism was fairly common and even mainstream compared to today. Psychology is a much different field nowadays than it was almost 40 years ago.
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It is very difficult to make a man understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Could you post the psychological research backing up this claim?
A better way (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't believe anything that hasn't been verified by an independent group of researchers.
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Just don't believe anything.
very expensive in medicine (Score:2)
Sometimes its not an unwillingness... (Score:3, Interesting)
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I do research in textual web mining and from time to time I have other researchers ask me for my collections which I spider myself from copyrighted web sources. While my work is purely academic, I am covered by fair use. But since US intellectual property laws are obtuse and overbearing (imho), I cannot take the risk of sharing my collections with others for fear of running afoul of copyright law (since I can't control what is done with the collection once it is out of my hands and how do I know they would use it in a manner consistent with fair use). So it may be more than an unwillingness out of statistical fudging and more an unwillingness to become a target of copyright lawyers.
Why would that be an issue? The onus would be on the people you share the data with it do keep it in the fair use domain. An analogy would be a professor quoting some copyrighted text in a syllabus and then saying she couldn't give a copy of the syllabus to another professor (or student) because she can't control what they do with it.
Regrettably, consult an attorney (Score:2)
I do research in textual web mining and from time to time I have other researchers ask me for my collections which I spider myself from copyrighted web sources. While my work is purely academic, I am covered by fair use. But since US intellectual property laws are obtuse and overbearing (imho), I cannot take the risk of sharing my collections with others for fear of running afoul of copyright law (since I can't control what is done with the collection once it is out of my hands and how do I know they would use it in a manner consistent with fair use). So it may be more than an unwillingness out of statistical fudging and more an unwillingness to become a target of copyright lawyers.
Why would that be an issue? The onus would be on the people you share the data with it do keep it in the fair use domain. An analogy would be a professor quoting some copyrighted text in a syllabus and then saying she couldn't give a copy of the syllabus to another professor (or student) because she can't control what they do with it.
There is a difference between copying a brief excerpt in a fair use context and copying the complete copyrighted work. The key point is that the fellow researchers want the complete data set, complete copies of copyrighted works. The original researcher is correct to fear legal consequences and regrettably should consult an attorney before sharing such a data set. Alternatively the original researcher should have logged the URLs where the original data was found and provided these URLs to fellow researchers
How do you prevent scooping? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you publish the data with the paper then that isn't a problem. If you want to publish the paper before you've finished analysing the data, that looks like a bigger cause for concern than someone else stealing the data.
Re:How do you prevent scooping? (Score:4, Insightful)
And I believe that they should not have the "right" to publish without others trying as well. Yes, having a topic and milking it for the rest of your life sounds a wet dream, but it is not in the interest of the society, so why would that approach be encouraged/protected?
So publish your paper and disclose the data. Others after you will reference your work, in fact even those who *just* use the data and otherwise have not much common with your ideas will still have to cite your paper. Sounds great to me. Also remove the quantity thinking in publishing. One paper in 5 years that will be referenced for 50 years coming is way better that 10 papers in 5 years that are reshuffling of the same and instantly forgotten.
I would replace the publish or perish with: be cited or perish.
In fact, too many publications can be taken as warning signs that:
1. There is little new material, but a lot of reuse of text.
2. The paper is not carefully written and so it is not understood by the field and so the same gets republished over and over.
3. Corners were cut regarding the experiments or methods, or reviewing related work etc. to save time.
Of course there are exceptions and just because someone publishes a lot they do not necessarily guilty of the above.
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Other scientists typically inquire for data after publication of the findings. (How else would someone know what to ask for?) This suggestion only stresses that error-checking be encouraged after the current process of publication.
Note that this error checking (after attempts to reproduce findings failed) is what led to Gordon Gallup identifying Marc Hauser's recently-acknowledged academic fraud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser#Previous_controversy_over_an_experiment [wikipedia.org]
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Unless their competitors are good at time travel, that seems as though it might be enough...
rgb
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Science wants to set its own pace as much as information wants to be free.
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I understand what you are saying. But consider: where does the publish or perish demand come from?
It seems it is perpetuated by academia itself to a great extent. A lot of them got pretty got at the game and it is easier than writing really good papers. People in academia should promote and use "be cited or perish" instead (if a rigid measure is needed).
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Please no, we don't need any more overview papers from scientists who are not good enough to come with something new every once in a while.
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I am fortunate that in my field I did not have to add "extra" citations. But, I have heard about the practice and it is a serious problem along with the fact that many papers simply use references from other papers without checking them first. I still think that citations are better (if rigid measure is needed). And obviously any attempt of a measure that does not account for differences between the fields will have to be flawed.
I also understand the pressure from funding agencies. However, tenure and pr
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The problem there isn't with the science, or sharing data; both are good. The problem is with the inane and counterproductive prestige game that science has become. Counting publications is a moronic method of measuring ability. Generating and making available a good data set is often times MORE important than publishing a particular paper.
What is this "share early, share often"? (Score:2, Insightful)
The IPCC doesn't know about this. Or does this only apply to the "soft sciences"?
Re:What is this "share early, share often"? (Score:4, Informative)
What? The IPCC was just collecting already published data, there was no 'new' studies done.
Careful - your bias is shining through.
Careful, YOUR bias is shining through (Score:2)
Regardless of where the data was from and what agreements covered its release, the stated purpose of the people in the emails was to keep the data out of the hands of their opponents regardless of open freedom of information requests, and Phil Jones himself said he would be "hiding behind" the agreements in order to keep the data from being released. There was quite literally a conspiracy not only to avoid normal scientific sharing of information, but legal freedom of information requests.
As scientists, the
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Doesn't matter to the IPCC or anybody else that uses that data.
Look up the history of e.g. Steve Mcintyre's efforts to get actual data and methods out of any o
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That's a very weak dodge. Metaresearch doesnt get some magical exemption from scientific procedure. Whether you are going out and collecting raw data to start with, or importing the results of a dozen earlier studies and going from there, all information necessary to replicate your results must be made openly available for replication or else you simply are not doing science.
mixed policy in space sciences (Score:4, Informative)
Very Meta (Score:2)
Psychologist's statistical study suggesting that psychologists have possible psychological issues with sharing their psychological studies... perhaps this warrants a further psychological study of said psychologists?
Incentives and disincentives (Score:5, Insightful)
Einstein was unable to find a teaching post, and was working in a patent office when he published his annus mirabilis papers. Things have changed over the years though. John Dewey discovered a century ago how children best learned - let the child direct his own learning, and have an adult to facilitate this. This, of course, is not how children are taught. Things nowadays are very test-heavy, and becoming even more so, not as a means to help students in seeing what their deficiencies are, but as a punishment system - and the teachers, and the administrators are under the same punishment system. The carrot of reward is very vague and ill-defined and far-off. It is a system designed to try to squelch the curiosity of those handful of students who had been curious and wanted to learn. Businesses want to get into the education gravy train, and all this charter school stuff is being embraced by both parties, which isn't surprising if you look at the funding behind it.
At the university, the financial incentives are all aligned so that publishing is a necessity. If one does not publish, they do not get tenure, and then all those years of work were for naught as the academic career is over. And what gets published? An average series of experiments done by the scientific method would usually lead to either inconclusive data and results, or just wind up in a dead end. And what journal wants to publish those results after months of work? One of the most popular Phd comics is this one [phdcomics.com]. It seems fairly obvious to me - the more financial incentives are tied to getting published, the more that bogus studies are going to be published. As far as the idea of honesty, integrity or whatever, these things will gradually subside for most people when they come into conflict with keeping a roof over one's head and food on the table.
Implementation is the problem (Score:3)
Ultimately, everyone agrees that open sharing of research data funded by the taxpayers would be A Good Thing(TM). The problem is: how do you persuade people to actually do it. Much how things like advanced safety features on cars, free college tuition, and taxes on big banks sound like great ideas, until you look at what it will actually cost to implement. Not just "cost" in terms of money for infrastructure development, data storage, and support, but in terms of persuading an entire culture to change their workflow.
In our lab, we already spend an extraordinary amount of time on administrative tasks only indirectly related to our research. Adding in a mandatory data sharing task and fielding questions from random people who wanted to use it would be a serious additional chore. Then there's the embarrassment aspect... we actually had a project a couple months ago where there was another group doing an experiment that we wanted to do, and they had software already written. So we thought, "great, we'll just ask them for the code". So we fired off an email... and after a couple weeks we finally got a reply to the effect of "this is actually my first program, and I don't feel comfortable sharing it." So we had to spend 2-3 months writing our own version to do exactly the same thing.
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In the latter case, I think sometimes this is actually for the best. Even though it results in redundant coding, that's one form of replication. If everyone reused the same code written by one grad student long ago and never rewrote it (and the grad student's first program, no less!), there would be a lot of reliance that that program does what it says it does, and does it correctly in all cases. Sure, you could run test cases, read through the code carefully, even try to formally verify it, but in my exper
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So you say that different rules would apply to research in areas that politicians have gotten interested in, because the public needs more. In that case, the public should be prepared to pay more, since there's a need. After all, the government could take my house because they need to build a bypass there, but they'd have to pay me for it. Public need; public cost.
Therefore, what you want to propose is that, in selected areas of research, money be automatically allocated for a data librarian's service
NSF requires sharing already (Score:4, Informative)
This is a fairly major project at the university I work for, both from the in-process data management perspective (keeping field researchers from storing their only copies on thumbdrives and laptops) and from the long-term repository perspective for holding the data when the grant is completed (that's what I'm involved with).
Storage is cheap. Convincing university administrators to pay for keeping it accessible is another problem, but the NSF position is helping.
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rgb
What's the Incentive? (Score:2)
Surely people aren't just going to turn over the means to get themselves charged with fraud out of the goodness of their hearts. Somehow this has to be made mandatory by the institutions or the publications that they hope to present their work (as suggested in the second linked article; and as I understand some of the top medical journals do nowadays).
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Well, maybe the scientists that aren't committing fraud will be happy to share their data... then, that small percentage of scientists that refuse to will be shamed and/or ignored.
Hiding correlates positively with... (Score:2)
incentives (Score:2)
It's psychology. (Score:1)
In other words made up bullshit, with no cohesive theory tying it all together. So made up data is the least of their concerns...
Is that mean or median? (Score:2)
If it's the mean, it could just be that the ones who do commit fraud are skewing the sample. And that if you subtract them, the error rate of the people who don't share is no different than the error rate of those who do share.
Not saying it's one or the other. Just pointing out that in this particular case, it's a very important distinction.
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Thats how climategate started !!
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Re:Psychology (Score:5, Insightful)
And continues. Phil Jones, for example, has stonewalled requests for the raw data used to e.g. create HadCRUT3 etc, although recently it seems that one reason he hasn't shared it is that he lost it and literally can't share it.
That is complete and utter bullshit.
First, he has never stonewalled requests for the raw data. It's been out there for ANYONE to obtain. The problem is that, for some of it, you have to PAY to get it, and UEA was forbidden by contract to give away said data for free because then people wouldn't PAY for it anymore. So, if you want to piss and moan about access to the raw data, then apply your angst and woe to the most responsible parties, the Met offices which want to profit from their weather data-gathering businesses.
Second, the "lost data" canard is a crock. Since the raw data is not owned or generated by UEA, but instead obtained from outside sources, they have NO mandate to keep the original raw data once they have processed it. They (and you and anyone else) can go and get it from the same sources at any time. Whip out your checkbook and get to it.
So we have a rather important temperature series, openly available on the web and used by many, many climate researchers and nobody can reconstruct it, including the original author. The problem continues -- it is like pulling teeth, getting members of the hockey team to share data and/or methods so anyone can check them.
You (and they) most certainly can get the original raw data and reconstruct it. There are literally mountains of data that have been released to the public on a large part of climate science. You just need to learn who and how to ask properly and, in some cases, how much it costs.
Here's [realclimate.org] a huge FREE repository of all kinds of climate-related data, from the climate scientists themselves.
Since the few times somebody has bulled through until they've succeeded, e.g. Steve Mcintyre vs Michael Mann, what has been discovered is that the published result (the infamous MBH "hockey stick") is nothing but amplified, distorted white noise that has absolutely no correlation with the data used to produce it, let alone skill at reconstructing actual past temperatures, it doesn't bode well for the discipline.
Mann's work has been vindicated and replicated time and time again, McIntyre's (and others') quixotic attempts to discredit it notwithstanding.
I've recently written a guest article on WUWT..
That explains the ignorance of your previous comments a bit.
..calling for data/methods transparency in climate research. By transparent, I mean that you should not be allowed to publish a paper that could potentially influence lawmakers and public policy to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars unless you simultaneously publish all contributory raw data (including any data you for any reason left out) and the actual computer code used to process it into figures and conclusions. Something this important needs full open source open data transparency even more than medical research (another discipline where reproducibility of results is abysmal, where there are vested interests galore, and where we spend/waste a phenomenal amount of both money and human morbidity and mortality on crap results.
In large part, this is precisely what happens, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions usually revolve around whether any kinda of contracts with private entities to obtain said data, or to develop software/hardware, are in effect that would preclude giving them away. That said, the research should (and usually does) document the specifications for said hardware/software, and include where the original data came from for anyone to pay to obtain it themselves.
As a software developer who actually writes software for scienti
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sstamps wrote:
>First, he has never stonewalled requests for the raw data. It's been out there for ANYONE to obtain. The problem is that, for some of it, you have to PAY to get it, and UEA was forbidden by contract to give away said data for free...
No. Those who requested the data requested that if all the data couldn't be provided, then the freely available data should be provided. They were refused. When asked for a list of what data was used, but not the data itself, they refused. Even if the data is a
Re:Psychology (Score:5, Informative)
No. Those who requested the data requested that if all the data couldn't be provided, then the freely available data should be provided. They were refused.
Bzzt. Wrong. Try again. [realclimate.org]
30.First, in answer to the question of whether the raw data are accessible and verifiable, Professor Jones told us that:
The simple answer is yes, most of the same basic data are available in the United States in something called the Global Historical Climatology Network. They have been downloadable there for a number of years so people have been able to take the data, do whatever method of assessment of the quality of the data and derive their own gridded product and compare that with other workers.
31.In addition, of course, there are the sources of the data, the weather stations, to which any individual is free to go and collect the data in the same way that CRU did. This is feasible because the list of stations that CRU used was published in 2008.
41. Professor Jones contested these claims. According to him, “The methods are published in the scientific papers; they are relatively simple and there is nothing that is rocket science in them”. He also noted: “We have made all the adjustments we have made to the data available in these reports; they are 25 years old now”. He added that the programme that produced the global temperature average had been available from the Met Office since December 2009.
51. Even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.
When asked for a list of what data was used, but not the data itself, they refused. Even if the data is available for free on the net, how can the results be replicated if they will not say which data was used?
Jones PERSONALLY refused. The information about what data was used has been available since the original papers and research were performed! IT'S IN THE RESEARCH, DURRRR. Have you ever read any of it?
It has only been replicated by his buddies.
Bzzt! [globalwarmingart.com] Wrong. [skepticalscience.com] Try again. [berkeleyearth.org]
BEST was funded by the Koch brothers, owners of a giant oil/petrochemical company. Most DEFINITELY NOT "buddies" with Mann. Even still, being "buddies" in science doesn't mean diddly-squat; it's not about WHO you know, but WHAT you know, and HOW WELL you know it. So far, Mann's work has been REPEATEDLY vindicated.
There can be no vindication for trying to "hide the decline".
Ya know, for a minute there, I thought you might be trying to be genuinely serious and skeptical. Then you trot THAT out. /facepalm
It is a well established rule of science that you don't leave out data that casts doubt on your conclusion.
You are correct, it is, and the vast majority of climate scientists and their research faithfully follow that rule, no matter how many intellectually dishonest, ignorant, and gullible idiots falling for charlatans and snake oil salesmen lke Watts, Michaels, Singer, et cetera ad nauseum, try to spin otherwise.
You've fallen for their story.
No, I've fallen for the FACTS of the matter. I've done my homework; I've looked beyond anyone's story; what's YOUR excuse?
Many of us used to think the alarmists were good willed, and we assumed they were honest. I still think they are good
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sstamps wrote:
sstamps wrote:
First, he has NEVER stonewalled requests for the raw data. [emphasis added]
the list of stations that CRU used was published in 2008
the programme that produced the global temperature average had been available from the Met Office since December 2009.
So you admit that they stonewalled on the station list till 2008? And you admit that they didn't release their software until after they had been exposed by the climate gate email release? I may not have been clear, but I didn't mean to imply that they still haven't released stuff, but only that they were stonewalling at one time.
Jones PERSONALLY refused. The information about what data was used has been available since the original papers and research were performed! IT'S IN THE RESEARCH
Strange. Why didn't he just give the URL for the files instead of refusing. But of course you've quoted a source admitting he didn't release the station list till 200
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So you admit that they stonewalled on the station list till 2008? And you admit that they didn't release their software until after they had been exposed by the climate gate email release? I may not have been clear, but I didn't mean to imply that they still haven't released stuff, but only that they were stonewalling at one time.
Do you know what a "station list" is? It's a list of weather stations all over the world. It's not exactly a secret, ya know. He didn't stonewall on releasing anything that wasn't already accessible by the public. You get a list of all the Meteorological offices across the world, and you ask them for their list of stations. Some may require you to PAY for that information. What's so super seekrit squirrel about that?
They didn't release their software until they had PERMISSION to do so. I bet you also didn't
gross misrepresentation (Score:2)
That is a gross misrepresentation. Until fairly recently, even the claim that it has gotten warmer was based on extremely sloppy by climatologists who lacked expertise in statistics (the ASA itself criticized that work). The fact that the statistical work has been cleaned up now doesn't change the fact that the original work was sloppy and criticism of it was valid. And what has been shown is just that it has b
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That is a gross misrepresentation.
You obviously missed the following line:
"Now, see how that works? Demonization works both ways, ya know."
Until fairly recently, even the claim that it has gotten warmer was based on extremely sloppy by climatologists who lacked expertise in statistics (the ASA itself criticized that work).
Gross misrepresentation much? I think you need to check your makeup.
The fact that the statistical work has been cleaned up now doesn't change the fact that the original work was sloppy and criticism of it was valid.
The "cleaning up" resulted in statistically insignificant changes in the results. It doesn't sound like "sloppy" and "valid criticism" are very robust descriptive terms in this context.
And what has been shown is just that it has been getting a little warmer on average, over some large regions, nothing else.
Yeah, it's just a little warmer in the Arctic now, on the order of 8-15F some months. Please, now...
The second gross misrepresentation implying that the observation of man-made human warming has automatic policy implications, like the proposed reductions in CO2 emissions. In fact, the "consensus of scientists" is absolutely clear: there is no plausible scenario in which human CO2 emissions make our planet uninhabitable.
Well, actually, there IS a scenario where it becomes u
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Well, you should know. CO2 concentrations have been ten times (!) their current levels and at higher temperatures without runaway greenhouse effects. Throughout most of the ages since the dinosaurs, there have been no polar ice caps or glaciers. The normal climate on this planet is significantly warmer than it is now. Positing t
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Well, you should know. CO2 concentrations have been ten times (!) their current levels and at higher temperatures without runaway greenhouse effects.
CO2 concentrations have been 10 times higher in times when solar output was lower. Quite a number of factors may have been involved which prevented a runaway greenhouse effect. I don't have any information or evidence that it can or can't happen, hence "I don't know". Somehow, I severely doubt you do either.
Throughout most of the ages since the dinosaurs, there have been no polar ice caps or glaciers. The normal climate on this planet is significantly warmer than it is now.
There have been "cool" periods since that time, but the reason that large scale ice sheets did not form (during the Jurassic-Cretaceous period) was due primarily to continental plate configuration; there
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There is no such thing as a "steady-state climate"; global temperatures have been oscillating wildly for the past several million years. Over the past 20000 years alone, sea levels have changed by more than 80m, glaciers covered much of Europe and the US, and temperatures have risen many times than w
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Yes, but fortunately we aren't talking about 10x increases in CO2 concentrations due to human activity, leaving a large safety margin (increase in solar output has been much smaller in comparison). And you can go back to more recent figures where solar output was closer to what it is and CO2 concentrations were still several times what they are today without any runaway effects.
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There is no such thing as a "steady-state climate";
You'll note I said "fairly steady-state climate">. Omitting important qualifiers when quoting opponents is pretty intellectually dishonest, but that's OK, I've come to expect it; at least you blatantly show your bias, making it easy for all to see.
global temperatures have been oscillating wildly for the past several million years.
"Wildly", within 4C peak-to-peak over the last 5M years, and here we are, potentially seeing upwards of that much on the POSITIVE SIDE in a couple hundred years. Your definition of "wildly" is a bit skewed.
Over the past 20000 years alone, sea levels have changed by more than 80m, glaciers covered much of Europe and the US,
..and our current civilization and its infrastructure i
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Yes, but fortunately we aren't talking about 10x increases in CO2 concentrations due to human activity,
Nor are we talking about such increases when humans, let alone our civilizations, were around at all.
leaving a large safety margin (increase in solar output has been much smaller in comparison).
Yes, of course! There are only two factors at play, and they are both directly proportional in their effects when they are changed. Someone call Climate Research and inform them of your astounding simplification of the climate system.
And you can go back to more recent figures where solar output was closer to what it is and CO2 concentrations were still several times what they are today without any runaway effects.
Like when? When were CO2 concentrations "several times what they are today" last? Oh, that's right, over 100 million years ago. Again, your ridiculously oversimplified take on c
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It is ironic that you, whose responses are full of statements like "I believe in the tooth fairy, too" accuse others of refusing to have rational discussions. As I was saying, trying to shoot down my points does nothing to strengthen yours, so you might as well stop that. You need to make a compelling case that climate change is dangerous because you want political and economic change. The
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I don't have anything to prove because I don't want anything to change. You have to make a convincing case if you want people to change and give up part of their money. All you have done so far is attack my arguments and credibility, list some unlikely horror scenarios (milliions dead, runaway greenhouse effect, etc.), and refused to quantify many of the supposed consequences of climate change. And in doing so, you have actually represented the people
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Umm.... it is now well established that Mann and Jones have been hiding data.
No, they haven't. You cannot produce a shred of REAL evidence to back up that claim.
The places you cite are all climate shills pumping out propaganda.
No, they are outlets for the research and data, some of which are run by the scientists themselves in an attempt to disarm the constant noise and bullshit from REAL "shills pumping out propaganda", like icecap, climateaudit, WUWT, etc.
For the avoidance of error, let us be clear what the original issue was. Some tree-ring data was used in an attempt to show that the world's temperature had remained pretty static until recently, when it had shot up. This is known as the 'hockey-stick' assertion, and is a major plank of the argument that mankind has caused global warming by increasing CO2 emissions recently.
It is important to know which items of data, from where, were used in constructing this graph. Not EVERY tree-ring series was used. The choice is obviously important, because it has to be done in an unbiased way.
That "some tree-ring data" was only a very small portion of the overall data used to build paleoclimate reconstructions. Others included ocean/lake sediments, ice cores, coral growth, cave deps
Re:Psychology (Score:4, Interesting)
From message 4241.txt, a communication from Rob Wilson to Ed Cook (and others):
I first generated 1000 random time-series in Excel – I did not try and approximate the persistence structure in tree-ring data. The autocorrelation therefore of the time-series was close to zero, although it did vary between each time-series. Playing around therefore with the AR persistent structure of these time-series would make a difference. However, as these series are generally random white noise processes, I thought this would be a conservative test of any potential bias.
I then screened the time-series against NH mean annual temperatures and retained those series that correlated at the 90% C.L.
48 series passed this screening process.
Using three different methods, I developed a NH temperature reconstruction from these data:
1. simple mean of all 48 series after they had been normalised to their common period
2. Stepwise multiple regression
3. Principle component regression using a stepwise selection process.
The results are attached.
Interestingly, the averaging method produced the best results, although for each method there is a linear trend in the model residuals – perhaps an end-effect problem of over-fitting.
The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.
Surely this vindicates Mann -- by proving that it does indeed turn white noise into hockey sticks! Not only is Mann wrong, but the hockey team knows it perfectly well! There are letters where people openly lament being involved with the hockey stick type reconstructions (and other places, e.g. where they "hid the decline" in tree ring data) because they are terrible science and because they are openly worried that sooner or later people will catch on. As indeed they have, although they have won the PR war (another great Mann quote) to such an extent that even though they themselves know that the hockey stick is bogus and that white noise fit according to Mann's cherrypicking methodology will produce nothing but hockey sticks, it just won't die, will it? Thanks to people like you!
We could review the specific Climategate 2 letters where Jones talks about deliberately trying not to give away data to the people who requested it (something I would call "stonewalling", except that the circumstance in question is a FOIA request that was only a missed deadline away from being "a crime" upon the release of the CG emails), or about the points where it turns out that he does a lousy job of keeping records (problems with Excel spreadsheets) and no longer can reproduce his own results because he doesn't know what data he used, if you like.
Or we could look at the many, many other places where internal communications show that the hockey team is well aware of many problems with their own results and consistently choose not to let the general public know about them lest we be led to doubt their conclusion. Then we could read Feynman's lovely article on "Cargo Cult Science": http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm [lhup.edu]. See how close you think the hockey team comes to Feynman's fairly modest standard for good, honest science, while reading Mann going on about the importance of winning the PR war, getting journal editors fired, and generally doing his very best to eliminate all challenge to his papers, or, if he can't manage that, eliminating the challengers themselves.
But really, read them yourself. Don't accept what people tell you about them, read them! Then tell me that this is honest science, well done.
rgb
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Hmmm, you really do need to read the climategate 2 letters, don't you.
While I would have liked to have skipped the 2-year-old leftover turkey, alas, it just wasn't to be, so I've allllready been there, thanks.
From message 4241.txt, a communication from Rob Wilson to Ed Cook (and others):
I think it is telling where you decided to cut it off. Let's continue with the REST of the message from the point you chopped it:
It is certainly worrying, but I do not think that it is a problem so long as one screens
against LOCAL temperature data and not large scale temperature where trend dominates the correlation.
I guess this over-fitting issue will be relevant to stu
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There is likely no risk; it is a digital data product, so it is licensed, and they probably pay a subscription fee so they can get any of the data (including more current data) at any time.
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