More on the now infamous “moon landing denier“” statistical paper.
Question – how did this title for a scientific paper:
Understanding Statistical Trends
Turn into this?
NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science
Easy. You get ethics approval from your university for the first and use it to push the second. According to UWA rules, Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky was required to obtain approval for his survey from the UWA Ethics Committee. He got that, the process took a week.
At Australian Climate Madness, Simon Turnill obtained information on this process through an FOI, request, which he details here. The FOI released email exchanges are available here.
Steve McIntyre writes about it:
The information showed that Lewandowsky used bait-and-switch. Lewandowsky had obtained approval for a project entitled “Understanding Statistical Trends”. The original proposal had nothing to do with his bizarre online conspiracy theory. Lewandowsky switched the proposal in August 2010.
In addition to Simon’s points, note that Lewandowsky stated the following in his ethics proposal:
Because I am interested in soliciting opinions also from those folks, I would like to withhold my name from the survey as I fear it might contaminate responding”
Nonetheless, Lewandowsky’s name was prominently displayed at some of the anti-skeptic blogs. Lewandowsky’s fears that the survey would be contaminated seem to have been justified.
What is even more interesting, is that when Lewandowsky asked the Ethics Committee for a change to the procedure, switching from a written passed around survey at UWA to one done on the Internet, that approval took only about 18 hours.
Lewandowsky was so surprised at the speed he wrote:
My question now is whether those last minute changes violated some required review procedures. The question is whether or not the changes were at the sole discretion of ethics committee chair Kate Kirk or if they required a wider review. If the latter, I’d FOI the results of that review.
Based on the timeline for the change approval, my suspicion is that Ms. Kirk just waived it through without really looking at it or consulting anyone else. That may or may not be procedurally kosher according to UWA ethics rules.
She seemed flippant in this exchange:
As advertised publicly in this other UWA online survey project:
For any ethical concerns regarding this research project please contact:
Kate Kirk (Kate.Kirk@uwa.edu.au, Ph:08 6488 3703).
I strongly advise any readers against sending hate mail, but instead ask how she allowed herself to be victimized by this apparent bait and switch by professor Lewandowsky and if that 18 hours from request to approval was mostly waiting for Ms. Kirk to read the email in her inbox, or if she actually sent it out to others for review.
Simon Turnhill deserves props for following this through. I advise visiting ACM and reading his full essay, leaving some thanks in the tip jar.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Just send Kate these two videos. I can’t imagine ANY University willingly retaining anyone this kooky on its staff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8wVfxoPqPA
Minor typo:
Australian Climate Madeness -> Australian Climate Madness
IanM
For me the *real* question here is how a paper as idiotic as ‘Understanding Statistical Trends’ ever got approved in the first place.
Mike.
An other minor typo:
Ms. Kirk just waived it through -> Ms. Kirk just waved it through
IanM
REPLY: no typo, that was my intent, like a waiver – A
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/waived
I hope Dr. Lewandowsky didn’t fund the aforementioned research effort with grant money. If he did the organization who funded this effort might be a tad upset about having the research methodology and focus changed at the last minute.
If this happened with an R&D effort I was managing I think I would of been fired. Our accounting and legal departments would be going over the contract with a fine tooth comb if for no other reason then to make sure bait and switch activities don’t happen in the future.
Chris B says:
October 12, 2012 at 7:53 am
Just send Kate these two videos. I can’t imagine ANY University willingly retaining anyone this kooky on its staff.
More shifty arrogance…James Hansen Junior.
There’s an interesting sentence in Stephan Lewandowski’s last email: “Because I am interested in soliciting opinions also from those folks…” (meaning us frothing-at-the-mouth types).
Yet the subsequent processing of the results seems to demonstrate that he sought *primarily* to “solicit opinions” from “those folks”, rather than *also*. I wonder whether this too was a somewhat less-than-truthful way of phrasing the request?
Update at ACM indicates that Lewandowsky seems to have done a paper on the original survey (possibly as approved, don’t know yet), but then piggy-backed this “amendment” request onto the original approval in order to do a 2nd, quite different survey and “study” (sic). What Lewandowsky actually did differs dramatically from the original approved study, and the amendment letter is inaccurate in describing the changes.
Lew seems quite deceptive in the amendment request, using the phrase “modified slightly” (according to Lewandowsky’s amendment letter) is not accurate in describing a survey that would no longer be about “understanding statistical trends”.
It is difficult to believe that the university’s ethics process should accommodate the 2nd survey/study without a new approval process, but they may well bend over backwards to protect an errant professor’s behavior. Such dramatic shift in the purpose and details of the study probably should have required a new ethics approval.
THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
Achieving International Excellence
WUWT
Is it my imagination or are the warmists adopting ever more ruthless deception to keep the AGW hoax going? The deletion of Professor Leroux’s Wikipedia entry is positively Orwellian. This story of bait-and-switch is more of the same.
Here’s an argument that should be considered and developed: research on human subjects is much more sensitive when/if there is any potential harm to participants. Particularly if there is undisclosed harm without benefits (e.g., medical). Lewandowsky & co. will say they can’t “harm” anonymous survey participants. BUT, if the purpose and procedure of the study is shown to be unscientific propaganda, designed to smear “skeptic” participants (and of course skeptics far and wide, but research ethics tends to focus on the study participants), then in fact the study serves to harm (some of) the participants.
The steps of the argument (this is just an initial sketch, not a detailed and logical argument) are as follows:
* Survey/study is badly designed for tendentious purposes
* Even aside from issues about faked responses, presumably some real “skeptics” participate.
* Real (undisclosed) purpose of the survey is to tell the world that said skeptics are nutters who believe the moon landings were a hoax and other conspiracy theories.
Can anonymous survey participants be “harmed”? Certainly their interests can be harmed, if a deceptive study is used to smear them. Even though they are never named, they know they took the survey and the resulting study seeks to marginalize their credibility and participation in public life and decision-making.
Lewandowsky has long since run through his 15 seconds of fame.
(Does anyone here think he rated 15 minutes?)
What’s the time limit on infamy? I’m as tired of hearing about Lewandowsky as I am of Sandusky. Why can’t both just quietly crawl into the holes they’ve deservedly earned so we can begin the ignoring and forgetting about their existence?
It would have been approprieate if the title had been changed to “Misunderstanding Statictical Trends”.
Appropriate, of course!
Darn, bad hair day…Statistical.
I hope the ethicists of UWA are proud of their achievement.
Random unhinged ethicist:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=6047
(about Julian Savulescu; wants us to create super moral master race by GM)
Who would have thought such a bad paper could generate so many interesting blogs? Given Ms. Kirk’s apparent sympathies for the Church of Climatology, it’s ironic her name is an old word for church …
Pointman
He lied, but he lied for a good cause, isn’t that the only thing that matters to his crowd? At best he’ll get a finger wagged at him and a “naughty, naughty.” How often do people like Lewandowsky get fired for lying? It’s rare.
Not even good enough for a A in a high school class.
Understanding statistical trends! Sounds pretty simplistic to me. Getting legitimate statistical trends is another matter entirely.
I finally did it. I’d been mulling over this for a month now, but I finally did it.
I counted how many times Lewandowsky blinked during his now notorious sermons on climate deniers in the videos posted above.
In the first video, which lasts for 2m 58s, Lewandowsky blinks 136 times. That is on average one blink for every 1.3088 second.
In the second video, which is 3m 10s in length, Lewandowsky blinks 144 times. That comes to on average one blink per 1.3194 second.
What does that mean?
It probably means Lewandowsky is suffering from some disability in the eyes
OR
his heart and mind is not on what he is saying
OR
he is consciously or unconsciously signaling the camera man or woman for a romantic encounter
OR
he is lying on average once every 1.3 second.
“The paper says that a staunch belief in free markets was an overwhelmingly strong factor in the rejection of climate science …”
So they are saying that climate scientists are Marxists? Sounds that way to me.
@sHx
“It’s perhaps my imagination, but I swear to God, a lot of them don’t appear to blink much.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/climate-alarmism-and-the-prat-principle/
I’m glad someone else has noticed that lizard-like blink thing.
Pointman
High blink rates can also be associated with Tourette’s Syndrome and neurological problems or injuries, or just dry eyes. Your figures are about twice the norm for an adult. Hmm, tourette’s or dissembling…
From the FOI we get the actual application for the survey, stating aims and procedures (see excerpts below). I do not recall single graph in the online survey. The survey that resulted does not seem to have any similarity whatsoever to the application. Is it possible that a survey as stated in the application was actually done, but the results were not acceptable to the alarmists and was buried? In any case, what happened to the original survey?
7. AIMS OF THE PROJECT:
Please give a concise and simple description of the aims of the project.
This must be in lay terms
The project seeks to explore people’s understanding of statistical trends in time-
series data. If we are monitoring stock price, what do we think will happen to it
in the future?
Participants will be shown simple graphs of time series (samples enclosed) and
will make predictions about future trends.
9 DETAILS OF PROCEDURES:
Subjects will be shown a number of statistical graphs (3 or 4 at most) that contain
time series data. subjects will be asked to extrapolate the visible trend into the
future by indicating their guess of the most likely values (see enclosed sample).
Some of the trends will be upward, some downward, and most will be presented as
fictitious stock prices. The actual data will either be generated randomly or will
be the world’s temperature (climate) data collected by NASA (NASA GISS data set).
For some subjects, the climate data will be identified as such whereas for other
subjects (chosen at random) they will be presented as stock price.
Upon completion of the graphical task, subjects are presented with 3-4 questions
about their impressions of scientific certainty. For example, people will be asked
how certain they think scientists are about the association between emissions
and climate change, HIV and AIDS, and tobacco smoke and lung cancer (using
a scale from 1-100%). For each item, participants will also provide their own
subjective certainty rating (i.e.,”how certain are you that human emissions (HIV)
are largely responsible for climate change (AIDS)”).
13 POTENTIAL BENEFITS AND RISKS
(a) What are the possible benefits of this research?
(ii) Better understanding of how people process statistical information , in particular
temperature records relating to climate change.