Dipping Into The Sour Mash, Part 2

Mann’s trolls are really, really getting desperate…

I don’t get it Tom. I even tried placing my tongue firmly in my cheek and still was unable to find any plagiarism in the text you provide.
Perhaps Mashey & Bradley are mixing up their politics and science (again?).
And since when is libertarian a bad word? In the 1970’s it was synonymous with liberal – flaky perhaps, but not bad like conservative.

The Wegman Report is not an academic paper prepared for publication in a peer-reviewed (if that actually means anything anymore) journal. It is an “independent review” (note the quotation marks, lest you think me a plagiarist) for “the Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce as well as the Chairman of
the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.” It wasn’t meant to review Wegman. It was meant to review “Mann et al. (1998, 1999) [MBH98, MBH99]
by McIntyre and McKitrick (2003, 2005a, 2005b) [MM03, MM05a, MM05b] as well as
the related implications in the assessment.” I doubt that it is germaine nor does Congress care about Mashey’s machinations which make no difference in the damning (and rightly so) nature of the report.

Soon enough all those warmints, warmits, warmist, warmists, yes that’s it…the warmists, they will soon disappear, out of sight, never to be seen again.

@Nick
short-centred principal components analysis is biased and can produce hockey sticks from red noise

Tom,
You are priceless. I am laughing, LOL. Whatever.

Let’s have a look at the George Mason University Honor System and Code (Wegman’s university) http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/plagiarism.htm#plagiarism :
“Plagiarism means using the exact words, opinions, or factual information from another person without giving that person credit. Writers give credit through accepted documentation styles, such as parenthetical citation, footnotes, or endnotes; a simple listing of books and articles is not sufficient.“
I find it truly bizarre Wegman didn’t follow those rules, as they apply in every university in the world.
REPLY: It has yet to be determined if the issue is with Wegman himself of an assistant – Anthony

The CAGW hyenas have fooled themselves into thinking that problems with Wegman’s assessment report will lead to the resurrection of the Hockey Stick.
This is entirely consistent with the CAGW-faithful’s endemic pattern of cherry-picking data to support their position. But Wegman’s report is far, far from being the cornerstone of CAGW scepticism.
ClimaxPregnant and “Conspiracy John’s” attack on Wegman’s analysis and criticism of Mann’s short-centred PCA is notable by its absence.

People believe what they were going to believe.
The Wegman report had been a thorn in the side of the “consensusiestas” for years. Since ClimateGate they’ve discovered an old truth, dissimilulate and hammer.
It’s been taken to heart and polished to perfection. Find a weakness. If you can’t find one, invent one. Ignore all logic that points out any weakness, take a deep collective breath and , as one, claim a Triumph.
Follow up with exultations of “robustly debunked”, “anti-science delusionalism discredited, once again” and multiple re-links to RC and you’ve regained the initiative once again.
Be careful what you wish for my MSM friends, dear AGW supporters and Western Governments. Your wealth will pass down to your children but only, for as long, as it pleases their new masters.
Our children matter to us. Never forget that.

Descriptions of material that is widely accepted often do not need to be
explicitly cited
The most famous equation in physics
F = ma = E = mc^2
are used routinely without any citation to any source.

Shades of Thomas à Becket…
Likely that Mashey heard Bradley say that Wegman was plaguing him and thought that he said plagiarizing him….. ipso facto….
The gang that couldn’t do anything at all straight.

Leaving aside the fact that this is insubstantial WRT the reasoning and conclusions of the report, how serious is not correctly citing the group efforts at Wikipedia and how is it remedied?
Or put another way, what should Wegman (or one of Wegman’s, ahem, proxies) have done in the first place to avoid this desperate coal-raking some years down the line?
Wikipedias guidance on the subject is that for short excerpts (3 – 4 sentences is the example), no attribution is required; for longer excerpts, the source should be attributed under the license specified:
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Readers#What_is_the_license_agreement_on_the_contents_of_Wikipedia.3F[/url]
So many of the excerpts may require no attribution of ant kind.
This is the situation now; what the prevailing conditions were at the time the report was compiled, I don’t know, but I’d be very surprised if it had been *more* rigorous; the norms and mores surrounding use of Wikipedia would certainly have evolved in he intervening years.
No story to tell from Wikipedia’s angle.
From the pespective of any readers, they are misled to the extent that they would not have known the text came from Wikipedia. No-one is saying that text is incorrect or inappropriate either.
In short then, the conclusion we should draw is that SHORT-CENTRED PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS ANALYSIS IS BIASED AND CAN PRODUCE HOCKEY STICKS FROM RED NOISE.
I forget where I found that quote. Sorry.

Tom,
Thanks for the article, but you might like to review it – it’s a bit garbled and repetetive in places. Maybe some kind of formatting glitch?

Mike:
The Bradley material WAS attributed. The failing there was not plagarism but rather copyright violation. And the failure to use quotation where it would be required.
But be careful those words of bradley have appeared elsewhere without attribution.

Mashey’s allegations are primarily intended to discredit Wegman right before he testifies before Congress in January in the ClimateGate hearings. The vast majority of American citizens won’t understand the details, they will just read the headline about Wegman being investigated for plagiarism. That is the way the left plays politics in the USA.
Of course Wegman quoted much text from Mashey, Wegman was analyzing Mashey’s work. Wegman’s team should have not been so sloppy about attribution but a lot of pro bono work is done not quite as rigorously as it should be. Let’s be clear, Wegman was not publishing original research in his area of research, he was merely auditing substandard work and pointing out the flaws in the audited work. Anyway, Wegman will be cleared of the charges and much more motivated to do a good job come January.
From a skeptic’s perspective, anything that draws attention to the work of Mann is good.

Anthony wrote:
“REPLY: It has yet to be determined if the issue is with Wegman himself of an assistant – Anthony”
Wegman led the team and signed off on the report. The issue is with him.
REPLY: Well, that’s not something you get to determine. George Mason University does. – Anthony

‘a relatively new discipline called Social Network Analysis.’
SNA is a collection of very old practices that “recently” was collected into a unified collection of “refined” approaches and given a nerdy-information-age-name. It’s like the label social engineering which just means how to fool information out of someone.
What’s really funny with the statement is the concept of “relatively new” in a information-age context, since in the information-age context SNA is frakking old news. The weird thing is that the intelligence community who loves their labels can’t move on to the new stuff even though they’re mostly made up of jit-geeks-n-nerds. Of cours it’s only weird in the sense that society today give the bureaucrats the leeway it does even though everyone who remembers their history of ancient greek and roman society know full well that a shit load of the problems with advanced societies is too much information ordered in too old rules. Standard bureaucracy is always to blame as long as it’s designed by the old standards of being firm, fixed and stiff, but continuously applied to new standards, new information (and lest not forget that what once was deemed important has a tendency to end up on the nearest old and abused scrap heap rather quickly), new ideas, ideologies, morals, rules and regulations, hah even new formats for both the old and new information makes bureaucracy outdated faster ‘an light.
Personally I think bureaucracy killed SNA as a viable option. Bureaucracy works when stuff don’t change too often because then bureaucracy has time to change with the time it lives in. The standardized definition of the bureaucracy version of SNA is how people behaved in their communication back in the day when interaction was more static like up to 1995. Today people interact amongst each other in like a fluid dynamic way in a chaos complexity environment. People interact, communicate, more and more whit each other, with whom ever even, based on how they feel at a specific point in time rather then by standardized (physical world) social formula.
SNA I believe was dead even before it became live so to speak what with bureaucracy only is an effective filter for limiting information that can be standardized (was very effective during the height of the industrial mass production age) or put another way one-size fit all.
SNA works when you keep it 19th century simple because then you only use standardized information and are only concerned with that information. Now days though people initiate a communication with each other because one reduced or uped the likeability level of someone else on some site and had to tell it to that someone who got uped or reduced or the person who got uped or reduced just has to know way he was uped or reduced, nine days later they’re bestest of frakking friends and have made it known to all their virtual friends and hopefully everyone else as well and preferably then some, and three days later they have no more contact. Maybe if every analyst also was a full blown behavior psychologist/scientist and into graphology, criminology, statistics, and what not, it could work but otherwise everything is just white noise because nobody really took the time to quantify red noise, instead the red noise the intelligence gatherer want is what’s predefined by what bureaucracy decided was important (i.e. what bureaucracy could standardize so to speak.)
Why do you see so many red flags when it has been determined that you can only account for red flags in an environment of white noise consisting only of supposedly white flags?

Nick Stokes says:
October 10, 2010 at 3:19 pm

It’s not summarising climate papers – it’s a new topic and argument that the Wegman report is introducing.

I agree it is a new topic but it is still part of a report on how the MBH paper and climate science in general has developed, so it is a still on the topic. He uses Social Network Analysis as a tool in much the same way I’d use the Unified Modeling Language when designing a database. He gives an explanation of the the terms, he is not in an way presenting Social Network Analysis as a concept he invented.
I don’t think we can be considering this as plagiarism as defined in the Oxford:

the wrongful appropriation or purloining and publication as one’s own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas… of another

Though I would agree he should have included where he obtained his knowledge of the tool in the bibliography but I don’t think such an oversight meets the above defintion either.

Wiki;

“Definition of plagiarism
Plagiarism isn’t identical to copyright infringement. Material from the public domain still needs to be attributed properly.
Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines the act of plagiarizing a source as follows:[2]
transitive verb:
1) to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
2) use (another’s production) without crediting the source.”

The accusation of Wegman committing plagiarism is one of those “So What?” issues.
Just because Wegman may have copied some Wikipedia or other source does not mean it was plagiarism. It was not presented as his own original academic work.
At most it was improperly referenced material. This does not rise to the level of the dishonesty of the IPCC in making up non-existent sources, or including shallow, non-pier reviewed sources.
Wegman’s work is honest, and makes a vital point. Mann’s work is BS, and Wegman showed too much respect for Mann’s work by not calling it fraudulent.
The level of panic in such shallow assertions as Mashey’s doesn’t fool anyone. AGW advocates don’t worry about facts. They just attack the messenger. What kind of mentality is that?

I am using words in this sentence that come from the English language; each word has a rich history and often various meanings exploited in many works before I emitted these copies of the words here. Each sentence of every book I’ve ever read or that you’ve ever read also contains words of similar pedigree. Yet we don’t bother to provide citations for each work we’ve read where we learned of these words since we started learning words now do we? There are many situations where we don’t cite things at all and many cases where we do. More often than not it’s the meanings of the words that matter, not the source. While I cite where I quote from many people don’t as a practical matter and as a matter of style.
As for reports meant for Congress would not the meaning be more important than exactly how it was cited? Or does the report all of a sudden become null and void?
Is it claimed that the allegedly cited material which lacks citation is fabricated science or incorrect science somehow?
Would not a revised version with an erratum be permissible to be published? Book authors and publishers of many technical books in my twenty plus bookshelf library provide errata and revised versions with corrections. Heck authors such as Donald Knuth offered a $2.56 reward for each error found. Assuming that the lack of an expected citation by some would be deserving of a reward the person who, ahem found such, would need to ask the authors if they are giving said rewards out.
Certainly if failing to provide a reference for quoted material is of grave concern what about the meaning of the report itself? Surely it’s meaning is still valid regardless of the source of the materials? Or because it lacks a citation the flaws it points out in Mann’s bad science suddenly become alright and acceptable? I think not.
So it’s nothing more than a forgotten reference. Move along, nothing to see except the relevant contents that slam Mann to the mat for his fabricated science.
With nothing better to do the real deep climate deniers should really learn to focus on the actual science rather than diverting attention with a few valid yet not properly cited references which can be corrected with the issuance of a new version of the report fully annotated. Mann’s science on the other hand is seriously flawed due to it’s methodology and little Mann can do will ever fix it up to be valid science since it’s been falsified left, right and center by Nature herself too boot (see Girma Orrsenago’s papers).
No works were copied in here. Any words or sequences of words that appear here that also appear elsewhere are the result of multiple groups of 100 monkey’s typing their tiny fingers off. Every word used was learned by me from some source of material long forgotten thus I can’t cite where I learned it from. Some words like the word word were likely learned in grade school but I don’t remember which one. So shoot me. Also I’ve not provided the definitions of any of the words used in this comment so you’ll have to figure out which meanings for each word I meant. Oh, and while I mentioned the works of a couple of scientists I’ve not listed any references to their materials, for that you’ll have to look up their works. This is the internet after and you have a bing googler you can yahoo! Besides alarmists rarely define their terms and haven’t provided as far as I’ve seen in years of looking even a basic definition in writing of their alleged alarmist CAGW hypotheses; there seems to be more than one and they keep changing which can’t be a good sign as Feynman pointed out. It’s more like the alarmists are in a climate of changing hypotheses as each one is debunked. Damn another science reference not referred to with a citation. So shoot me.

I have been a victim of plagiarism.
I described my work to a professor at a major university. He seemed to show little interest and so I put the meeting out of my mind. About a year later, I attended a local conference at which the professor gave a talk describing his new work. I was very surprised to hear my ideas bing described with no modification. He had a year to work on the ideas but had not made any progress. A short time after the talk, the professor and I crossed paths in the exhibition area outside of one of the lecture halls. We made eye contact and it was clear that we both knew what was going on. I had made progress on the ideas in the year but he was still spouting the same ideas that I had told him a year before under a signed non-disclosure.
I was even more surprised a year later when I opened a Scientific American in a bookstore near my home. There was a major article describing the professor’s work. My ideas were still there and in much the same state as they had been when I told him about them years before.
I also know of some one who went to a C level engineering manager to obtain advice on how to make an idea known within a research organization. He was surprised when he then saw a report from the manager describing these ideas and attributing them to himself. He complained to the divisional VP who took care of the matter.
I was a victim of plagiarism and I know the effect of the idea theft. I did the hard work and a lazy professor stole the result of that work. I know what plagiarism is. I do not see any plagiarism in the descriptions of Wegman’s report. he did not try to obtain credit for the work of others. he did not attempt to steal any ideas.

AntoonDV said:
“Plagiarism means using the exact words, opinions, or factual information from another person without giving that person credit.”
Fair enough. Let’s also keep in mind that there is a concept of generally-understood information in a field. A physicist who writes a book and has an introductory chapter on basic physics concepts would likely in that chapter include much information, even descriptions, that are very similar to what a thousand other people have said before. But if it is generally-understood information in the field, it is not necessary to scour the world to determine if someone else wrote about it first and then cite them.
Where it crosses the line is with the word “exact” in the university’s definition you cite (and “exact” doesn’t have to be quite “exact’ in the logical sense; taking a long passage with only minimal changes would be “exact” enough). In cases where exact language, or specific opinions or factual information that is not generally known in the field come into play, a citation, reference or acknowledgement is appropriate.
It sounds like there are some passages in Wegman’s report that cross that line, just as there is a similar situation with Team members that ZT cites at 3:49 above. If so, Wegman should acknowledge the failure to cite/refer/acknowledge and strive to do better.
Now, then, the question is whether Wegman’s analysis of the hockey stick is affected as a result? Well, we might have slightly less trust in Wegman’s ability to be scrupulously accurate in everything he wrote, so in that sense it is relevant. But only just barely. On the substance of the statistical critique of the hockey stick, the analysis remains and the main thrust of the Wegman report stands.
I have to agree with some commenters that the Team can’t be happy with all this renewed attention being paid to the Wegman report. It will come back to bite them.

In my experience of observing some pretty vigorous social movements, the ones who cry ‘conspiracy’ the most are the ones engaging in it.
AGW promoters, from Hansen to Gore to Mann, to Pachurai, to Obama to Holdren all depend on conspiracy to keep their faithful in line.
AGW is a fascinating social dysfunction.

I thought Sen. Inhofe’s Minority Report on CRU Emails was an excellent example of how to cite references to Congress. If you’ve never downloaded & read this one, it is well worth your time!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/23/climategate-minority-report/
I agree with Eric@ 6:19 pm that “…plagiarism is not an actionable offense under the law. Rather, it is an academic standard.” However, plagiarism is increasingly being used in the political arena to discredit opponents. It implies, but does not prove, dishonest intent.
Please see http://blog.ithenticate.com/2010/09/plagiarism-could-impact-midterm-elections/

Let me see if I can get this right…

“never in the field of academic endeavour has so much citation been owed to so little actual content”

-Anonymous (AKA Doug) via the Fanged Furry Death Site.
…close?

For those like Nick Stokes that likes to keep pointing to a an old revision of the Wikipedia article on Social Networks (but not the one where was added to Wikipedia), you might want to go over to the Air Vent and look in the comments:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/as-copygate-turns/
Myself and others have found the so called wiki paragraph in other publications, books and journals prior to Wikipedia having it, Wikipedia just changed the words a little. Here is an example from a Masters Thesis done in March of 2005 and put on the Web in April 2005 (page 26):

Figure 2-2. Social Networks
The shape of the social network has been found to be a key factor in a network’s
usefulness to the individuals it includes. Smaller tighter networks, for example, can
actually be less useful to their members than networks with lots of loose connections
(weak ties) to other individuals outside the main network. More “open” networks,
with many weak ties and social connections, are more likely to introduce new ideas
and opportunities to their members than closed networks with many redundant ties.

http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/publications/paperlink/papag.pdf
Another example from Sept 2 of 2005 (4 days prior to Wikipedia adding it on the 6th):

The shape of the social network helps determine its usefulness to its members. Smaller, tighter networks can be less useful than networks with lots of loose connections to individuals outside the main network. More “open” networks, with many weak ties and social connections, are more likely to introduce new ideas and opportunities than closed networks with many redundant ties.

http://www.knowledgestreet.com/Knowledge_Street_Report_-_BLL_ikonnect.pdf
What is interesting is that both papers basically say the same thing but they have no references in common in their bibliography and they do not have a cite on those paragraphs either to the place they got them from.

Well, I think this is a very good idea. When all the AGW proponents begin to flee the CO2 paradigm, and need a new home, they will have to reference me and the Kriegesmarine Hypothesis every time they refer to ocean surface pollution changing albedo, aerosol production, cloud physics and wind/surface engagement.
Off topic a little: I wish Lindzen would not embrace the ‘denier’ word. ‘Dissident’, Professor, you are a climate dissident. The first word has unpleasant connotations, the second is all positive, romantic, and has the advantage of being really irritating to those who would rather you toed the party line.
JF

You know, this comes to mind…

DaveE.

Robert E. Phelan says:
October 10, 2010 at 7:53 pm
boballab says:
October 10, 2010 at 7:16 pm
Let’s put this in perspective. Social Networking Analysis is NOT new. Ferdinand Toennies wrote about networks in the 1880s. Wegman’s text could easily date from the 1960′s or even earlier, making it “common knowledge”

When trying to find exactly how far back in time that particular paragraph reached (found one example from Nov 2004) I kept seeing references to works dating back to the 1930’s. The ancient roots of SNA plus finding examples of that particular paragraph all over the place, with no citations, led me to believe it is basically something that comes from a text book from back in the past.

“Overall the network includes 112 proxies, and each series has been formatted into annual mean anomalies relative to the reference period used for this data, 1902-1980.”
When compared to MBH98, page 779, it does indeed look similar:
“The long instrumental records have been formed into annual mean anomalies relative to the 1902–80 reference period, …”
Doh. I honestly had no idea that was plagiarism. I thought it had to be verbatim to be plagiarism. Man, I used the plagiarize the hell out of my history reports in school.

The fact remains that the text on SNA was copied wholesale from the Wikipedia article as it existed in January of 2006 w/o attribution. This is clearly plagiarism of the first order and is an attempt to cover up a lack of expertise in this area, just as the lifting of text from Bradley was an attempt to cover up a lack of expertise in the area of paleoclimate reconstruction.
Wegman might have been a fine participant on the NRC panel, but heading up a report on an area of science about which he knew nothing was not an appropriate assignment. He just compounded the problems by venturing into another area, SNA, about which he knew nothing. These facts bring into question all of his conclusions except the criticism of Mann’s use of improperly centered PCA, and even that is questionable since he ignored a comment from one of his “reviewers” which suggested that he redo the Mann analysis using properly centered PCA (something which Wahl and Ammann did do and showed that it had no effect on the conclusions of the papers in question). All of this is covered in the Mashey report.
The litigation mentioned in the USA Today article appears to be connected with Elsevier as mentioned in Donald Rapp’s somewhat intemperate comment in the threat attached to that article. So yes, copyright violations appear to be involved with regards to the wholesale copying from Bradley’s text.

DL says:
I have been a victim of plagiarism.
Jimmy Haigh says:
Me too.
I say:
Me too.
It was back around ’55, in my eighth grade math class. C. Skinner would regularly plagiarize my test answers, that is, until the day I experimented with a little double booking–one test paper conspicuously displayed with close-but-no-cigar answers, and a second surreptitious page with the right answers, destined to be turned in. Sometime plagiarism carries its own reward. : >)
But tell me, how much of MBH 98 would any competent statistician want to plagiarize?

Poor Nick Stokes. He feels cheated because Wegman may possibly have copied a definition of something.
Tell me Nick, did you feel cheated when you found out that the bristle cone pines were discredited? How about when the statistical analysis turned out to be so poorly done that incompetance barely explained it? Did you feel cheated upon learning about a reconstruction that turned out to be based on just 7 trees, with 50% of the weighting from just one? Did you feel cheated when you learned that 60 years of tree ring data had been quietly replaced with thermometer readings because the tree rings “diverged” but we’re still supposed to accept the previous 940 years as accurate?
Really Nick? A definition in common use was possibly copied from somewhere which changes the conclusions not one bit and you feel cheated? Because of a skipped foot note? If Mann’s work had stood up, Copenhagen would have resulted in 20% or so of your pay cheque being transferred to people like Robert Mugabe. Would that make you feel better?

I thought students weren’t allowed to quote wiki, because unattributed. It can be made up by anyone.
But if what is being disputed here is simply bog standard knowledge of the background then how is this any reflection on the skills Wegman brought to this?

Lets take translations. Can there be an accusation of plagiarism in translations?
Particularly poem translations.
I will give you an example. There exist translations of poetry from greek to english on the net. I found that my favorite greek poet was translated woodenly. All it needed was a shift in syntax and a change in a few words to make it closer to the original spirit of the poem. I did it and put it up on the web ( as a physicist I do not publish on poems 🙂 ), never thinking of attributing the first translation, since google translate would do about the same job of finding words from the dictionary.
Where does plagiarism accusation stop?
The introductory paragraphs that are used for the accusation, as far as I can see could be entries from an encyclopedia. If so it should have been in the bibliography. If it is from standard textbooks they should have been in the bibliography. I doubt it that any students used the Wiki: even if they went there for first information they would go to the source for confirmation. Who trusts wiki? Now if they found the paragraph in one of the bibliographies of wiki they should have quoted the text book.
btw I would be happy if somebody plagiarized 🙂 my translations of the poems. It is the need to have the spirit correct and not the attribution that is important, and as far as I can see the spirit is correct in the report.

It does seem bizarre to draw attention to the social networking section of the Wegman report with a claim of plagiarism against the background preface. Especially after the Climategate leak showed that the situation was worse than Wegman indicated. Perhaps the Weman report was deficient. Possibly it did not go far enough. Could it be that Mann’s email 31/10/03 which included the line –
– Let’s let our supporters in higher places use our scientific response to push the broader case against M&M. –
requires further investigation? Just who were these supporters in higher places?

Nick Stokes says;
It isn’t a good idea, and the many reconstructions since that have shown a hockey-stick shape did not use it. Several of these were published prior to Wegman’s report. So Wegman’s structures against it are just empty.
————————————————————–
Nick, Nick, Nick. It was only yesterday that I called you out on this. These studies that you keep claiming vindicate the hockey stick, have been shown to use the same false data (bristlecone pine trees) that the NAS has accepted should not be used as temperature proxies. Without them, and that tree in Yamal (YAD06) that is also an awful and improperly used temperature proxy, you don’t get a hockey stick! Yet on an almost daily basis you are posting to blogs trying to convince someone that these studies have supported Mann’s work, when you know that they are fatally flawed and worthless. These studies deliberately used the bristlecone pine data, and the YAD06 data knowing that it is incorrect to do so. Of course they knew that they had to include them to arrive at the desired conclusion. 😉
Oh, and their statistical techniques were wrong too, as McShane and Wyner showed in their paper (they also included bristlecone pine data, and did NOT get a hockey stick!).
And these studies were not meant to refute Wegman’s report, but McIntyre and McKitrick’s report in 2003. Wegman’s report wasn’t until at least 2006. So your statement to that effect was pretty meaningless.
—————————————————————————-
You also said;
But to complete that, Wahl and Ammann in 2006 showed that even if you analysed the Mann’s original data with centred normalisation, and with more PC’s (MBH lack of which was also criticised) it made very little difference.
—————————————————————————-
Oh please. As shown many times on many blogs, etc., McShane and Wyner showed that it mattered greatly. A dozen corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent studies can’t change that. In the future, more and more people will come to believe McShane & Wyner, because their science (i.e. the mathematics) is correct, and will withstand the test of time. Their work was
Like you accuse others of, almost everything you say is just empty. But worse than that, it is just plain dishonest.

Wahl and Amman have been brought up.
This is a helpful link about their paper:
The Jesus paper
(because it resurrects from the dead)
Bishop Hill – Andrew Montfort http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
McIntyre had to ask them several times to have them include R2 in their paper; which they didn’t want to do because it was close to zero.

So Anthony, how does this proclamation compare to the use of your data etc from surfacestations by the US gov agencies without an form of ackowledgement. These people are pathetic. Oh and I note Stokes has had to poke at it. Unbelieveable.

Steven Mosher says:
October 11, 2010 at 1:01 am
You didn’t cite the source showing Bradley said that. And at the end of the section of Cuff and Goudie’s book on the next page after the quote, page 132 shows this:
“Bradley, R.S. Quaternary Paleoclimatology: Methods of Paleoclimatic Reconstruction. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985.”

Steven Mosher,

“In full possession of the definitions you give I would still not consider it to be plagiarism.”

… so, using a highly non standard definition of ‘plagiarism’, you would not consider it to be ‘plagiarism’… is what you’re saying… ok

In the early 1990s I had a demonstration from Network Analytics who had a remarkable piece of analytical software called NetMap which ran on a Sun station for analysing the relationships in “social networks” (their words) – they were demonstrating commmunication linkages in a business organisational context and how the relationships could be inferred from the answers to seemingly non-intrusive questions [I understood that their major source of income came from organisations seeking to understand the shape of criminal networks]. That software still exists and I understand is still in used by Police and other analysts.
My point of course is that descriptions of Social networks were extant outside academic circles well before MBH98 never mind any paper which referred to it in a citation.

Hmmm – another example of climatological copying…
Bradley, 1999 – as quoted by Mashey “Many natural systems are dependent on climate; where evidence of such systems in the past still exists, it may be possible to derive paleoclimatic information from them.”
The Chen, Xing, 2008 “Many natural systems are dependent on climate; where evidence of such systems in the past still exists, it may be possible to derive paleoclimatic information from them.”
(i.e. a direct copy)
http://books.google.com/books?id=SEO_RyNDJ0gC&lpg=PR1&pg=PA50#v=onepage&q&f=false
Seems to me that copying is common in climatology.

It would be interesting to use social network analysis, which btw, is concerned with understanding the linkages among social entities and the implications of these linkages. The social entities are referred to as…. ah you guys know what I mean. It would be interesting to see if among Bradley’s incestuous connections he himself copied someone else’s definition of dendrochronology. Anyone up to checking out Bradley’s work for plagiarism? Now that would be rich!

[Snip. Calling others here “deniers” gets your post snipped. ~dbs, mod.]

Elise, tell me more. Who do you think has actually used “short-centred principal components? And when?
Actually, the wide circulation of Montford’s eccentric phrase “short-centred” is a giveaway. A lot of “let’s talk about the science” is just parroting.
But OK – Mann used decentred normalisation in 1998, probably by mistake.
Ugh. Sorry this is off topic (delete if it is too far off topic) but Nick Stokes’ comment above is just plain ignorant and wrong headed. It isn’t just Montford’s phrase and it isn’t eccentric – it is exacting and accurate, unlike Nick’s vague and inaccurate comment.
Nick tries to imply there are just two types of processing – centred and decentred PCA. The reality is that there are a multitude of conventions which have different behaviours and characteristics. If you want any hope of understanding the issues, you need to understand the properties of all the different methods.
For example, for PCA on data matrices (as MBH98 used), you can have column-centred PCA, row-centred PCA and double-centred PCA (meaning both row- and column-centred). All of these have different properties.
Furthermore, you can use the sample mean to centre (simply zeroing the sum of the column or row) or the population mean. The sample mean is most common because doing PCA is usually a statistical exercise (i.e., you don’t know the underlying characteristics and you are estimating them from the data) but in principle, the population mean would be more accurate, leading to (slightly) more accurate estimates of variance explained by the analysis.
There are different types of decentred PCA as well, such as unit-centred PCA – for example, the results you get from using a specific unit. This may be beneficial as the measurements themselves may yield a more accurate reference than the sample mean from the data.
Note that one of the possible reasons for decentring is that you may have a separate reference which is more accurate than the sample mean estimate – such as an external reference (when using units), or if you have more data that you are not including in the PCA. What Mann did was use a subsample of the data to centre. This method is unheard of in PCA literature. This is a *less accurate* estimate of the mean than using the full sample set, or a known reference. Why would anyone want a less accurate estimate? The inaccurate estimate directly injects an error into the “variance explained” calculations. Steve McIntyre, I believe, was the first to coin the term “short-segment” centred PCA, which is an entirely appropriate description of the flawed technique.
As we see, just lumping all forms of PCA into “centred” and “decentred” leads to misunderstanding. Different forms of decentred PCA have different properties, and it is highly relevant to specifically identify the type of decentred PCA being used. “Short segment” centred PCA is a form of centring which injects additional error terms into the analysis.
As for Wahl and Ammann showing that you can still “get” a hockey stick with conventional centring, the Wegman report clearly explains why this is flawed. They do so by tuning the results – changing the retained PCs, something which is carried out subjectively by the authors. Since tweaking minor aspects of the methodology can yield a wide variety of results (as explained in the paper “are multi-proxy reconstructions robust”, Burger and Cubasch 2005) which means that by tweaking these parameters you can get any answer you want – all Wahl and Ammann have to do is change things until they get the answer they want, then come up with a plausible justification for that decision.
As the Wegman report correctly observes, using this type of analysis is simply bad science. You can provide evidence for anything on this basis. Nick Stokes seems to be happy with this. Yuck.

Rattus Norvegicus says:
October 11, 2010 at 5:43 am
“According to an update of the USA Today article, GMU has begun a formal investigation. Pass the popcorn.
For all of you who say this is not serious, well GMU seems to think it is.”
GMU will probably want to be careful with that. All formal inquiries, be it the courts or the legislature usually have mechanisms in place to ensure that evidence is submitted freely to them without external pressures being applied. This includes freedom from all forms of sanction for that testimony.
Otherwise, the Mafia could have hefty fines for breach of contract in place for all “employees” who break the code of silence and testify against the Don.
If GMU wish to punish Wegman for something he said to Congress, then they should beware of Congress turning around and ripping them a new one.

Shoot-the-messenger-gate
Trip-wire-gate
What is auditing all about?
(1) Clarify the material, make sure you understand it. YOU ARE NOT EXPECTED TO BE AN EXPERT, you’re simply auditing the books. So of course you’ll need to explain the concepts, using standard texts but if need arises, modifying the language to make sure other auditors can understand – the key concept of the checking being replicability.
(2) Only when you’ve grasped the concepts can you do the auditing. Checking replicability, checking the fair use of data, checking the attainment of statistically significant results, is your area of expertise.
How can there be plagiarism in anything but an academic-nonsense sense, in rewriting standard text purely for the purpose of clarifying the issues? REAL PLAGIARISM IS ABOUT TAKING CREDIT FOR ANOTHER’S IDEAS.

Steven Mosher,
I posted the previous comment before reading your latest… I’ve no problem with what you’re saying.

ZT,
So now you are claiming that an author can plagiarize his own work?

Steven Mosher says:
October 11, 2010 at 9:18 am
“In the SNA case they fail to cite or indicate the KIND OF USAGE. Thats worse.
The reason the DONT CITE the source is cause they are probably embarassed they used wikipedia and didnt read primary material. ( sounds like a grad student )
Bad.
Anyway, if people want to go after the best argument they will focus on the SNA stuff and the real reason why they didnt cite the source”
That isn’t Bradley’s call, and the University might be shy about exposing themselves to some of the blame. But I’m still trying to track down the original source, and it isn’t clear to me that it was a Wiki author. I’ve tried to track down the last sentence from the identical Wegman Report / 2006 unattributed Wiki article:
“Similarly, individuals can exercise influence or act as brokers within their social networks by bridging two networks that are not directly linked (called filling social holes).”
In 2008 Wiki changed to:
“Similarly, individuals can exercise influence or act as brokers within their social networks by bridging two networks that are not directly linked (called filling structural holes).[5]” “Scott, John. 1991. Social Network Analysis. London: Sage.”
Wegman also using “social holes” doesn’t demonstrate that they took it from Wiki.
Wiki’s new language and cite doesn’t demonstrate that it is correct in language or cite.
I’m unable to find text for Scott 1991. However, he wrote a revised edition of “Social Network Analysis” in 2000 which can be viewed in GoogleBooks, quote:
“(Burt 1992) has described this in terms of ‘structural holes’.”
That may be an indication that Scott 1991 did not include “called filling structural holes”.
I did find the sentence in another article that points to a different source, but with no “structural holes” or “social holes” :
“Similarly, individuals can exercise influence or act as brokers within their social networks by bridging two networks that are not directly linked [4]” D.J. Watts, S.H. Strogatz, Nature 393 (1998) 440.”
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ss824/papers/scn.pdf

ZT,
You make some broad and unsubstantiated claims.
1) People studying climate change get their grant money just like any other scientists: by proposing interesting and original research.
2) I see no evidence of this. The team which produced the Wegman Report are currently being held accountable (you should like that word) to the standards of the institution which employs them (in the case of Wegman himself) or which granted their doctorate (in the case of Said). GMU has previously sanctioned a law professor for misconduct related to a WSJ op/ed. I don’t see why a prominent report to congress should be held to a lower standard.
3) While the data in the original report was scant and the analysis flawed, the flaw in the analysis made no difference to the conclusion of the paper. In the ensuing 10 years more data has been developed and new and better analysis techniques have been employed, and the original results stand. Seems like pretty solid stuff to me.

“Rattus Norvegicus says:
October 11, 2010 at 8:02 pm
ZT,
You make some broad and unsubstantiated claims.”
Hmmm…I guess anyone can read through the comments to see that:
I stated my conclusions and described them as such.
You do not address the fact of Bradley’s evident text copy and pasting.
You portray my conclusions as ‘claims’.
Just what is it that you have against facts?
But feel free to make your own comments, claims, or excuses – whatever they are.

The more I look at this, the more I think that Mashey is worrying about some very minor details of academic etiquette. Which might make fine points for witty discourse in the Senior Common Room over the port, but are pretty much irrelevant to the main points.
Similar,though the origins of the Wegman piece may be of some interest to future historians of the Climate Wars, they aren’t hugely relevant to the truth or not of its content.
Mashey has studied a tiny piece of the canvas in obsessive detail but has completely failed to see the big picture. Simply weird.

ZT,
And since I didn’t find a copyright notice in the CONAM/World Bank report, the copyright devolves to the author or the institution (depending on institutional policies, in the commercial world with which I am familiar your rights are assigned to the institution if the work is funded by or used the resources of the institution in it’s preparation. Agreements may, and probably are, different in the academic world.). You can’t violate your own copyright.

Rattus Norvegicus says:
October 11, 2010 at 9:18 pm
“Given the lag time in scientific publishing it is entirely likely that the text in the paper was written before the CONAM/World Bank report. Still, it is sort of hard to plagiarise yourself.”
The 2008 paper was received in May 2007, the CONAM report is dated January 2007, not that it matters which was copied from which. Self plagiarism in the form of “text recycling” or “text reuse” is a real problem, and considered fraud. At the least in the scientific literature, it needs to be nipped in the bud.

@Latimer
I agree with you (as I have written above) that if climatologists want to spend their time cutting and pasting dire warnings and introductions about vanishing glaciers from one publication to another, this is their choice. It may lead to the large grant incomes, for example.
If you look at the Bradley/Vuille example above (October 11, 2010 at 11:20 am) you’ll see that the copied chunk of text is not a vivid and memorable description, but a recycling of an introduction. The kind of thing which a journalist or a student would not get away with (if caught).
Normally scientific papers are thought to offer some new insights – which tends to imply that the text has not been copied and pasted from some prior publication.
But – climatology is a rather special “science” – I hypothesize that the thought from climatologists is “the more repetition the merrier” or “the more this is repeated the more true it becomes”.

@Latimer
Right! As the climategate messages revealed, peer review in climatology is simply a filter to prevent the publication of contrary evidence.

Steve McIntyre has just thouroughly emasculated Bradley and the warmists on the Wegman “plagiargism” over at Climate Audit. He documents the multiple citations of Bradley in the very sections where Bradley claims Wegman stole his work without citations. Plus, McIntyre points out worse examples of Bradley’s fellow “climate scientists” lifting his work without attribution – will Bradley and the warmists be filing lawsuits against their ‘friends’?
Here’s a real citation: “And if Bradley is sincerely committed to the extirpation and punishment of plagiarism, then he should also file a complaint against Wahl and Ammann, who plagiarized the reply of Mann, Bradley and Hughes to our 2004 Nature submission (the reply was also summarized in various realclimate posts). I’ve previously alluded to this plagiarism incident in passing, but will discuss it in more detail on another occasion. Standing to file such a complaint is not limited to the direct victims of the plagiarism (Mann, Bradley and Hughes), but can be filed by anyone.
Perhaps the best way to honor Bradley’s newfound anti-plagiarism zeal would be for someone to file a plagiarism complaint against Wahl and Ammann, taking care to recognize Bradley’s anti-plagiarism commitment in the covering letter.
“, http://climateaudit.org/2010/10/12/copygate/
Looks like the warmists may being staring into the abyss of reaping what they have sown…

Rattus Norvegicus says:
Forgive me I had forgotten Smokey’s wise advice ” Never feed a Troll”.
Kindest Regards

@glenn
Thanks for you reply to my question about self-plagiarism. You suggest that an author reproducing their own work would be unethical and possibly criminal.
Care to explain why? Because that seems pretty counter-intuitive to me.
I’d also remark that to the ‘outside world’, that supposed adults are wasting so much timearguing about such trivial points seems incredible. On the one hand there is a debate about the Future of the Earth and on the other one about whether Fred should have said something nice about Jemima or mentioned Albert in passing in his Christmas message.
In UK we have an expression ‘Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’ meaning to worry about trivia in the face of overwhelming disaster. This discussion doesn’t even get beyond considering what colour the fabric should be on the deckchairs.
FFS – why does anybody care?

Haven’t y’all learned to be careful what you ask for?
Asking for investigations of academic misconduct poses a much higher risk for the alleged experts cited by the handful “climate change isn’t happening, or if it is it isn’t caused by human activity” alleged experts than it does for the 97% of climate scientists who have concluded that global warming is real, and most likely caused by human activity.
This could turn into an epiphany for y’all.