UPDATE: At first I was concerned about this poll and the language involved. Now from comments I’m seeing a number of people whom aren’t worried and see an opportunity to voice their opinion. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide if they wish to participate. – Anthony
Wow, just wow. Who would think we’d see this sort of language and lack of sound judgment from a science museum? In the Now playing at a museum near you, the “Day After Tomorrow Map” thread, something interesting was discovered.
Once you click the “count me out” button, you enter a netherworld of governmental lists. The London Science Museum might want to think about redoing this web feature. The images are below, here’s the link.
Okay…now look what happens when you click “COUNT ME OUT”. Yellow highlighter mine.
Not only is this insulting and threatening to the reader, it virtually ensures that all responses logged by the London Science Museum are “COUNT ME IN” if you originally chose to vote otherwise.
Future presentation of results to the government: “The results show overwhelmingly that people agree with us. Hardly anyone chose COUNT ME OUT.
Even with the caveat the list*, how many people would trust it? I wouldn’t. I doubt many people even get to the caveat. The main statement is just too worrisome.
Perhaps the “COUNT ME OUT” respondents get a visit from these chaps? 😉
To be fair, respondents get a similar message if they choose to be counted in.
However, one wonders how many people will respond at all once they see that language.
The Science Museum really ought to pull this feature or redo language in it in my opinion.
h/t to alert WUWT reader coddbotherer
UPDATE: 10/24 @11:30PM
It appears some robovoting hit this poll. Robert Phelan’s letter pretty well sums up my thinking on this issue.
Sirs:
By now you must be aware that your on-line Prove It poll was seriously compromised. I voted “count-me-out” once under my own name, but after the individual who corrupted your poll revealed himself, I tested your polling system with two consecutive “count-me-in” votes, which were both apparently accepted.
Leaving aside my distaste for your support of politicized, Lysenko-style “science”, as both a social scientist and computer systems consultant I respect data and am appalled by the shoddy manner in which your organization collected it. A few suggestions:
1. State clearly the purpose of your poll and exactly which data will be used for that purpose.
2. You stated that you would pass the results to the government:
a. if the results had fairly resulted in a “count-me-out” majority, would those results have been passed on?
b. it would be helpful top explain what you would do with the comments you requested from the “count-me-outs”;
c. since the results were to be passed, presumably, to the UK government, foreigners such as myself should have been excluded from the voting. Checking the IP location of voters should be easy.
3. No one, either inside the UK or outside received the follow up e-mail. The explanation provided about ensuring one vote per person, frankly, makes no sense.
4. Maintaining a confidential list of voter names, e-mail addresses and IP’s to verify non-duplication would be easy. Making the voting a two-step process, where the voter had to respond to a follow-on e-mail would be even more secure.
5. Maintaining a list of non-acceptable names for screening: Joseph Stalin, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Mickey Mouse all claimed to have voted no, as did Keith Briffa, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt and James Hansen.
7. Create a display page where interested persons can view the names who have voted. Given the politicized nature of the topic, a unified alphabetical list would be appropriate.
8. Test the security of your poll before putting it on-line. Find a good hacker and pay him only if he succeeds in breaking into your system.
If you people can’t even run an on-line poll, why should anyone consider your opinions on climate? If this poll was so important that you needed two ministers of HMG to introduce it, why didn’t you get it done right?
I intend my suggestions to be helpful; if you find them so then I would be glad to be of further assistance. I am bitterly opposed to the position you have taken on “AGW” but I would not allow that to interfere with my professionalism.
Oh, one last suggestion. Don’t even try to salvage the results of this poll. Wipe them, make the changes I’ve suggested and start again.
Robert E. Phelan
Adjunct Instructor of Sociology
Business Systems and Automation Consultant
A commenter on our site, “lihard” has seemingly confessed to adding a thousand votes via a script. There was a period of about 15 minutes where the count jumped about 1000 votes. It appears “lihard” was at fault as he pre-announced it here in comments. Of course there was little anyone could do about it. I speak for myself and the moderation staff in saying we strongly object and are offended by his ballot stuffing and want to make clear that it is not condoned in any way. Whether or not the poll was put together with apparently no security in place does not justify any kind of dishonest activity.
However, since that burst (if indeed he, lihard, did one) the vote count has steadily risen, I believe those to be valid. If the Science Museum has any logs, they should be able to filter those ~1000 in question out. I hope they do.
I don’t condone ballot stuffing in any form. Unfortunately it can happen when polls like this one don’t appear to have the most basic simplistic security. The interesting thing here is that if anybody wanting to stuff the poll, no matter what side of the argument they are on, could easily have done so. No special skills are needed to boost the counter…just keep clicking the submit button. Any kid can do it.
Perhaps the Science Museum didn’t think of security for cyberspace like they do for their exhibits. The internet is a harsh place and prone to such things. The lack of due diligence for security is as troubling as the language they used which originally caught my attention.
The polls we do here at WUWT don’t suffer from these problems, as they have anti-ballot stuffing security built in courtesy of WordPress. I hope that the Science Museum will upgrade their poll security if they choose to continue with it. Also for the record, you’ll find me logged once in poll, shortly after posting this story on 11/23 approximately 9:30-10AM PST, with my full name and email address given. If anyone from the Science Museum (or the UK government) wishes to contact me, they can use that email address. – Anthony
I suspected somebody wouldn’t like my stuffing of the ballot box. But I highly suspect that there are others too who have made multiple votes intentionally, though I have had the biggest say on things atleast for now.
There’s also the fact that if you push the “count me in/out” button multiple times before it loads the next screen it registers that same amount of votes. So there are possibly many who have made two votes without knowing it. That’s how badly the polling system has been made.
It could’ve well have been made by the “expertise” of David Milibands brother who seems to have something to do with the poll.
-Lihard
454 counted in so far 3009 counted out so far
I too told them that the empirical data shows a very weak warming effect from CO2 and we don’t have a good enough theoretical understanding to make any worthwhile predictions.
Perhaps they will get the message, but I doubt it. In the Warming camp, belief is far more important an honest appraisal of the science.
No you haven’t had the biggest say. All you’ve done is to ensure that you have no say at all. And that none of us have any say. I think the “outs” could have outvoted the “ins” fair and square. But that’s no longer possible.
It’s all wasted. And the skeptics get a black eye. I am ashamed.
evanmjones (16:29:37) :
It’s all wasted. And the skeptics get a black eye. I am ashamed.
——
….. and now we’re even more obviously funded by big oil too.
Lihard:
We were all pretty sure it was a badly done poll, but if they kept any records other than those two counters, you just gave them evidence that skeptics are just vandals. I just posted two “count me in” votes in a row which seem to have been accepted, but you didn’t bother to check to see if the scripts on that side of the poll were any more sophisticated, did you? They may well be tossing duplicate warmer votes but not duplicate skeptic votes. Next week’s Monbiot article may prove interesting indeed.
evanmjones
We’ll get our say in January for Best Science Blog 2009.
I have, of course, contacted sciencemuseum and informed them of this. Perhaps they can separate out the invalid votes. (Or not.)
This has upset me very much.
I do understand what you are saying but I think you’re taking it too seriously. The vote counts have been so low that I think it wouldn’t have made any impact in either direction.
And if you are worried about this thing there’s a high change that the results won’t be nulled, because they propably don’t even store the names and email addresses anywhere. It seems that way keeping in mind the quality of the scripts.
-Lihard
evanmjones (16:43:51) :
I agree with you. You did the right thing. Keep in mind, though, that Lihard confirmed what a lot of us were beginning to suspect even without his contribution: that the poll was just too shoddy. For a survey that was supposed to convey the wishes of UK residents to Her Majesty’s Government, allowing non-UK residents to vote and allowing multiple votes and failing to send the confirmatory e-mail is just too slack. This whole thing stinks. Just like the Lorax flap at Steve M’s not so long ago….
If that exhibit and poll, which involved two UK governmental ministers, was so damned important, why didn’t they do a better job with it?
I’ll have a supply of tin-foil hats ready for sale and distribution shortly.
Expect this to heat up Monday as AGW bloggers jump on the bandwagon.
Since Anthony made this post, outs are “out” voting ins by 22 to 1, but I think that is primarily a consequence of the visibility on this site and a reasonable number of votes as compared to the number of regulars here.
Oh, it’ll heat up, alright. And we’ll likely be in the hot-seat.
I don’t give two hoots if the poll was too shoddy. It’s not going to win over a judge if you plead that the bank was so poorly guarded that it really wasn’t such a bad thing to rob it.
REPLY: “And we’ll likely be in the hot-seat.”
Since when haven’t we been here? WUWT gets trashed daily, yet keeps growing. Looks like another record month in October, and this is before “adjustments”. Heh, ya know it might be funny to take my site data and run it through NCDC’s algrothms, then post that as the “real” measure of WUWT… just to see what pops out. – A
Evan, your conduct here has been above reproach. You have constantly advocated honesty, fair play and even magnanimity. You have nothing to be ashamed of. All I was attempting to point out was that it is possible that the whole poll may have been nothing more than an elaborate honey-trap, which underscores the point you made several times in this thread: honesty is not only moral, it keeps you from getting tripped up later…. especially when clever people of mischievious intent are trying to trip you up.
I giess it shopws that the AGWr’s do not have a monopoly on Jihadists.
Oh Dear.
It’s pretty much as I suspected from a cursory reading of the reports of the count from this very site. The site launch was on Oct 22nd. A day later Mr Watts wrote …
Future presentation of results to the government: “The results show overwhelmingly that people agree with us. Hardly anyone chose COUNT ME OUT.
But what has occurred? One day after the launch the count stood at 333 ‘Count me in’ to 234 out, a ratio of 1:0.7 Right now, the count stands at 461 ‘Count Me In’, and 3034 ‘out’, about 1:6.5. This is so far outside of the domain of every other similar poll in the UK as to redefine the word ‘outlier’.
Sadly, we do not need to look far for the root cause …
I tried to count myself out. Gave them a false name “Whatta Lyingsackofsh**e” and a valid throwaway email.
Mickey Mouse just counted himself out three times…
I have a dozen quite legitimate e-mail addresses (personal and business) and I’ve just used each one to be “counted out.”
As what goes for the poll on that uk site, anyone wanna bet the out votes are up by 1000 after a few minutes?
Shortly after that last WUWT post, in the space of 12 minutes, the ‘count me outs’ jump from 485 to 1496 in the space of just 12 minutes. Heck, might be a glitch in the site sofware, but surely more likely the scripted addition of 1,000 ‘votes’ by the poster who boasted in advance of what he was about to do.
Hint to all riggers of polls:
(1) Do not push your rigged results beyond the realm of plausibility .
(2) Do not boast about having voted a dozen times. This has the double whammy effect of exposing your personal ethical system as worthless, and invalidating the poll.
(3) If you are about to stuff 1,000 votes into the ballot box, it is probably unwise to advertise this fact in a public place. See (2).
Now I voted in this poll. Being just one person, I used a single identity, expecting that my opinion would count for the same as eveyone elses’s. It appears I am mistaken. If I may quote… Wow, just wow. Who would think we’d see this sort of language and lack of sound judgment …?
Oh Dear.
And Evan, Jimmy Stewart in “Bandolero” made the comment “…if I’d known that banks were THAT easy to rob, I would have have done it a long time ago…”
‘course, only Stewart, George Kennedy and Raquel Welch were left alive at the end, so I guess you’re still right….
Since when haven’t we been here? WUWT gets trashed daily, yet keeps growing. Looks like another record month in October, and this is before “adjustments”. Heh, ya know it might be funny to take my site data and run it through NCDC’s algrothms, then post that as the “real” measure of WUWT… just to see what pops out. – A
All they have to do is homogenize . . .
(Nonetheless, I am confident we can agree that poll rigging is clearly not to be tolerated.)
it is possible that the whole poll may have been nothing more than an elaborate honey-trap
Hmm. Not likely, I think. But not implausible.
Roger Carr (20:51:54) :
Paul Coppin (19:20:13) : “… but on the other hand, to pretend that one’s enemies will in the final analysis be impressed or swayed by one’s decency in addressing their views, as opposed to aggregate and confirmed force, is a fatal conceit.“
(Me) ” I hear an echo in my mind: “Good guys finish last. A shame; but a reality.”
Some back-tracking. My throwaway line (and it should have been “nice” and not “good”) was just that; a throwaway line, because in fact I fully endorse Evan’s take on this. At the same time I also endorse the quote (above), which Paul noted, as worthy of contemplation.
I voted, once, under my own name… now wish I had not bothered.
p.s. The full quote is, “All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.” –Baseball manager Leo Durocher, and is not even relevant. (Call me a clown… reformed…)
Sad time for both sides.
A poll so shoddy it was easily stuffed & some people willing to stuff the ballot.
My vote is now worthless, thanks nameless
DaveE.
For what it’s worth, sent this e-mail to sciencemuseum on their contact us page:
Sirs:
By now you must be aware that your on-line Prove It poll was seriously compromised. I voted “count-me-out” once under my own name, but after the individual who corrupted your poll revealed himself, I tested your polling system with two consecutive “count-me-in” votes, which were both apparently accepted.
Leaving aside my distaste for your support of politicized, Lysenko-style “science”, as both a social scientist and computer systems consultant I respect data and am appalled by the shoddy manner in which your organization collected it. A few suggestions:
1. State clearly the purpose of your poll and exactly which data will be used for that purpose.
2. You stated that you would pass the results to the government:
a. if the results had fairly resulted in a “count-me-out” majority, would those results have been passed on?
b. it would be helpful top explain what you would do with the comments you requested from the “count-me-outs”;
c. since the results were to be passed, presumably, to the UK government, foreigners such as myself should have been excluded from the voting. Checking the IP location of voters should be easy.
3. No one, either inside the UK or iutside received the follow up e-mail. The explanation provided about ensuring one vote per person, frankly, makes no sense.
4. Maintaining a confidential list of voter names, e-mail addresses and IP’s to verify non-duplication would be easy. Making the voting a two-step process, where the voter had to respond to a follow-on e-mail would be even more secure.
5. Maintaining a list of non-acceptable names for screening: Joseph Stalin, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung and Mickey Mouse all claimed to have voted no, as did Keith Briffa, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt and James Hansen.
7. Create a display page where interested persons can view the names who have voted. Given the politicized nature of the topic, a unified alphabetical list would be appropriate.
8. Test the security of your poll before putting it on-line. Find a good hacker and pay him only if he succeeds in breaking into your system.
If you people can’t even run an on-line poll, why should anyone consider your opinions on climate? If this poll was so important that you needed two ministers of HMG to introduce it, why didn’t you get it done right?
I intend my suggestions to be helpful; if you find them so then I would be glad to be of further assistance. I am bitterly opposed to the position you have taken on “AGW” but I would not allow that to interfere with my professionalism.
Oh, one last suggestion. Don’t even try to salvage the results of this poll. Wipe them, make the changes I’ve suggested and start again.
Robert E. Phelan
Adjunct Instructor of Sociology
Business Systems and Automation Consultant
The snark doesn’t show through, does it?
I “counted myself out” (only once!). I also made an extended comment for them to read, including my “credentials” (BSc, MMath, Phd) — none of which I expect them to read, put any stock in, or in any case reply to or broadcast to the world. I guess I love wasting my time.
I would discourage anyone from “ballot box stuffing” (’cause it’s dishonest) or from placing any weight on the outcome of this “ballot”, but one must note up front that the whole purpose of the museum’s “Prove It!” online feature was precisely that: For AGW proponents and “activists” to “rally the troops” for a grand show of force during the lead-up to Copenhagen. They say as much all over these pages: Tell your friends! Get them to Count themselves in! In other words, stuff our ballot box.
They even make it easy with a “build my email message” feature so that people can easily mass-mail their friends with all their AGW alarmist talking points and urge them to “take action now” by visiting the site.
I also wasted my time by reading through their “evidence”. For a “science” museum I must remark that there is an inordinate amount of pure politicking, pseudoeconomics and pseudo-social-science. There is no clear threshold where one begins and the other ends. I visited this museum some 25 years ago, when they really were an exhibitor of science and science history. When did they become a propaganda mill? It is very sad.
Filtering out the politics and nonsense to get to the core of their “scientific” argument leads to further disappointment. They aren’t even very good apologists/propagandists, and the number of nonsequitors and goofs in their directories of “Evidence” boggles the imagination!
Anyone wanting a good laugh — take the time to click through the “evidence” they’ve compiled.
Greenhouse gases work like a blanket — no, even AGW advocates don’t claim this; GHG’s act radiatively, not convectively, like blankets. It’s a classical goof.
“After three centuries of Stability, sea levels are now rising”
“Ice in the Arctic is melting further back year on year.”
“Extreme weather, such as droughts and hurricanes, is becoming more common or more intense.”
“[The IPCC] are considered the most trustworthy group of experts on climate change in the world.”
What a lark. There’s plenty more where that came from.
It gets better! Click on their prominent link “About PROVE IT!”, then on “Our climate credentials” and see with what authority they speak.
Dozens of PhD’s in climate-related science on staff, or consulting with them? Awards for innovated study of the climate? Peer-reviewed publications, or any kind of verifiably scientific work at all?
(To give them some credit, they do list some “experts for advice on content” one page up from this — some of whom appear to have valid academic credentials)
No. Their climate science credentials, by their own words, must be read to be believed. “Our credentials”, according to their account, consist of designing the PROVE IT! web page and science exhibit to “minimise its carbon footprint, without compromising on the experience”. They even list about 3 paragraphs of environmentally friendly ways they have done this. Using recycled materials, using a wood floor because “when trees are felled for timber, the area is replanted. This means there are still plenty of trees around to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere…”
By the way, the current count on their site is:
Count me in: 463
Count me out: 3078
The latter group leads by about a 6.6:1 ratio. For about every 2 “count me in”s there are 13 “count me out”s.
I have watched both numbers grow for about 12 hours and it appears that the ratio has remained almost exactly the same the whole time. The robustness of this figure suggests to me that not a lot of ballot stuffing is going on (unless it is done to deliberately maintain a certain ratio — that’s possible I suppose).
The museum promises to “Pass the results along to the government to let them know where you stand”. Is there a hope in Hell that they actually might?
Further to my last long comment — It has struck me as highly likely that the strong “count me out” vote is partly attributable to the “build my email” feature. I know my first reaction is negative when I get this sort of thing from my acquaintances. There’s probably a good number of neutrals or tentative AGW believers who clicked “count me out” in response to prodding from an overzealous AGW-crazed “friend’s” mail.
This site gets about nine thousand regular visitors a day. It is not unreasonable that a couple of thousand legitimate (perhaps not UK based) came from this site over two days.
No doubt.
Mmm, yes. But in this case, the guilty party admitted adding c. 1000 votes.
Robert E. Phelan: Good letter. (Mine was shorter and more direct.)
yeah, that’s why I said a couple thousand and not 3 thousand.
Well, we have the integrity to leave our vote stuffer outed.
It is hard to believe something that poorly constructed would be placed online at the science museum in 2009. It is reminiscent of pre 2k mistakes.
Robert Phelan’s letter pretty well sums up my thinking on this issue. I could not have written a better letter myself. I’m going to elevate it to main post level as an addendum.
[self snip – I’ve moved this commentary up to the main body along with Robert Phelan’s letter]
evanmjones (22:26:58) :
Mmm, yes. But in this case, the guilty party admitted adding c. 1000 votes.
And Tom in Texas as well as at least one other commenter provided a time-line. R. Craigen (22:16:02) : has a good point about the blow-back from that build an e-mail feature…. even without the 1000 vote-stuff the “count-me-out” crowd is still way ahead… whether that is because there were more vote-stuffers, blow-backers or Watts referrals it’s damn near impossible to say. That whole site looks like a high-school kid’s computer project.
The poll would have no value as a sample, but if they would just add a question about “how did you find us?” it would tell a lot about the topography of the battlefield, so to speak…. and would test R. Craigen’s hypothesis about the effectiveness of the build-an-email feature.
Another question I have is why didn’t the warmists take up the challenge? They’ve never been slow to do so before. It may very well be that the AGW trolls look numerous because they turn up everywhere to argue…. but they are always the same trolls. While I’ve come to recognize a number of handles here, it seems to me that there are always lots of anti-AGW enthusiasts I don’t recognize. Maybe our enthusiasts really do outnumber their’s…..
Evan made an interesting statement of principle earlier: “…. ballot stuffing is intolerable…” I think it was…. yet we seem to be tolerating it. The miscreant(s) has/have not been banned or shunned or sanctioned…. just a thought.
REPLY: FYI I did look into “lihard” based on what little info given me by WordPress. Unfortunately his handle, email address, and possibly even his IP address (which WP autologs with each comment) are total fabrications. So banning him won’t do much good. All I can tell you is that according to the logged IP, the comments came from Finland. The real issue here is how poorly designed the poll code is. A 9 year old kid could skew it in an afternoon after school.
BTW I’ve elevated you letter to an an addendum, as it speaks pretty well for me also. Thank you sincerely. – Anthony
Anthony:
I didn’t see your last comment until after I’d posted mine. I suspect you might be able to say it better, but thank you. Quite frankly, I’ve learned a lot from you and your moderators here… you manage to balance quite a bit that would send me over the edge.