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
Tom in Texas (15:25:58) :
F1yingwellie (11:46:00) :
Is Tom in Texas the only one
The only one what?
The only one to notice the Lihard 1000 vote jump?
Yes Tom,
When I mentioned shunning/banning, Anthony, I didn’t mean you – the last thing we need is to try and turn you into some kind of net-police… I was rather referring to the rest of us. From early on Evan Jones had the integrity to ask that we play fair. The rest of us, the commenters, would do well to emulate that. Too many of us are willing to over-look eye-for-an-eye statements. The anonymity of the web makes it easy to become extreme – but it also makes it easy to simply speak and some commenters need the anonymity. I decided I didn’t and my sometimes salty comments delivered from behind a nearly untraceable handle were not badges of courage… so I use my real name. I find the decency of Evan Jones inspiring.
Whatever the rights or wrongs about the way this poll has been conducted there are a few things to consider.
If the votes for “count me in” ever finished higher than those votes for “count me out”, it would have been reported in the press, and in the Science museum literature, and on the gloating AGW sites.
As it appears at the moment that “count me out” votes will be higher, no mention will be made anywhere. Except from AGW sites crying foul play, ballot stuffing, uninformed skeptics, big oil etc.
Or they will probably only count votes at an arbitrary start point to show AGW support is growing over time…
From the article above “I don’t condone ballot stuffing in any form.”
From http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/05/wuwt-nominated-for-best-science-blog/, “Voting is now open, for anyone who wants to vote for any of the blogs below. A note about voting. Since you can vote once every 24 hours, this is a horse race. So to pick a winner, voting must be repeated until the poll closes next Tuesday at 5PM EST”
Reply: If one is allowed by the rules to vote every day, then voting every day, by definition of the rules, is not ballot stuffing. Nice try. Go away. ~ charles the moderator.
Has been picked up in the Sunday Telegraph. Note that the result of the poll is due to be published in December. It will be interesting to see whether it is published if the current vote ratio continues.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6425738/Science-Museums-climate-change-poll-backfires.html
Let’s face it, the poll was never going to be credible. One or two people here have demonstrated, and others have made recommendations to help improve the situation. This was a service to the science museum and its poll.
I agree with the sentiment about dishonesty and I voted only once, with comments.
But those who showed that poll stuffing was possible also helped to show that nobody was ever going to take the results seriously. Having shown the how slack the poll was, the results were always going to be dogged by questions of vote rigging. Anybody who tries to use the results will be easily ridiculed.
So our votes went from zero value to zero value. And two (or a thousand) votes with zero value still have zero value.
As the poll is designed to favour the “count me in” side, there is another reason not to dignify it with respectability.
The poll has given people the chance to communicate and express an opinion through the comments. It will help the recipients to appreciate there is another body of opinion with substantial concerns about the AGW hypothesis and what is being proposed.
There will be significant value in those letters to the trustees of the science museum. Perhaps even, privately, a measure of sympathy/embarassment.
I disagree with those who suggest the poll should have been restricted to UK residents. As I said above, this is supposed to be an international issue, requiring international cooperation. Why would anybody wish to deny a voice to our prospective partners?
Re anonymity, I agree with Robert E. Phelan that some commentators may need it. But I believe that most probably don’t and therefore, like Robert, should have the courage to use their real name. Strong, controversial and coherent comments that can be traced to their source are IMHO far more convincing that those delivered from behind a cloak of anonymity.
I do not see the 1000 votes excess in “in”
# 494 counted in so far
# 3277 counted out
some filtering must be in place to catch stuffing.
Dr A Burns (12:51:22) :
The science museum link states:
“Scientists can tell the extra carbon dioxide around the Earth comes from fossil fuels by looking at the type of carbon.”
It was my understanding that 1-4% of the CO2 in the atmosphere has a fossil fuel origin, based on C14 studies. Unfortunately I can’t find my reference for this. Is this figure correct ?
As all the AGW claims, this one also is standing on shaky assumtpions: that the ratio of the absorption of of C12 to C13 ( the two stable isotopes) is disturbed by fossil fuels which release more C13 than found in nature.
When one digs in and looks at the data, one finds this is shaky because there are algae in the oceans who preferentially release C13 and could affect the ratio. It is one of those urban myths that Spencer is expanding on in a different post. A bit of truth and a lot of hand of sleight.
Let alone that if fossil fuels are not abiotic ( the dominant theory is that they come from remains of biota) there is no reason to assume that present day biota would have a different carbon cycle.
Despite the obvious security weaknesses of this poll, I disagree with those who consider it worthless. Despite the odd vote from Mickey Mouse etc, the proportion of no to yes votes has held pretty steady at about 6:1., suggesting that the level of cheating is no worse than in an American Presidential Election. You could see the whole exercise as the Revenge of Al Gore … gone rather badly wrong.
There are 1,529 subscribers to whattsupwiththat on google reader alone. I think there are enough readers of this page only to make up for 3000+ votes.
geoffchambers (06:49:49) :
If you look at the screen shot at the top of this page, the voting was 333 in vs 234 out, before this article was published.
I feel so distressed about this…
Lihard:
I’m surprised to see you back. If you’re really distressed and want to make some kind of amends, post a message here with your real e-mail address and Anthony will undoubtedly contact you. You don’t have to reveal yourself to us, but you owe Anthony that much.
I just tried to show how questionable the results of this poll would be. But somehow that was interpreted that I really wanted to change the outcome of the vote…
-Lihard
Well it seems that either :
This site’s readership is highly motivated and followed through – preferably with OMOV – the bedrock of Democracy, or vote stuffing has occurred and would damage our stance way beyond the naive scientists who put this poll together. And perhaps pro-AGW sites have not seen this yet and have not rallied troops to get voting.
All it will take now is a passing AGW believer /journo to look in on the comments, see boasts about multiple voting and bang! Monbiot gets copied in on it and its in the Guardian next week.
As nanny used to say: ‘It’s not clever and it’s not funny’.
This poll is worse than we thought!
:O
LOL!
(apologies to who ever may have beaten me to this line–I haven’t read all the comments)
Lihard:
You are wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to begin…. Please believe that what follows I mean kindly.
First, we A-L-L KNEW the results of the poll would be “questionable”. No one here was naively taking it at face value and we didn’t need a demonstration of any kind to wake us up. This site is lousy with statisticians, engineers, scientists and academics. They know the limitations of self-selected on-line surveys run under the best of conditions. Anthony’s original post addressed that very issue – the set-up militated against a “fair” poll… and self-selected polls are statistically, and usually practically, meaningless.
What was unusual here is that a large number of commenters took up Anthony’s challenge and volunteered their real names and e-mails to announce that they would not be intimidated. This poll was rigged to provide a large number of “count-me-in” votes to make a propaganda point. Any complaining that we did about validity and reliability and robustness and representativeness would have been dismissed as typical denier sour grapes. This time, without your help, it looked like the warmers would have some explaining to do when their very own poll showed the opposite of what they were trying to prove. Now that you’ve demonstrated rather dramatically the pointlessness of this poll (and by the way did you notice Alec J’s comment and link above? You made the London papers.) that little victory is denied to us.
Finally, as Evan Jones pointed out over and over and over, ethics are important. Anthony has discouraged the use of the term “fraud” on his site, but I’m going to use it once: many of us feel that much of the evidence for AGW is fraudulent. If you are inclined to make that charge then your own sheet better be squeaky clean. If you are no better than your opponent then you can and will be dismissed by those whose support and good opinion you seek. “Anything it takes” is the motto of the fanatic. Honesty is not only good policy, it is good for your immortal soul.
Your grandstanding cost all of us here something. We’re still finding out just what. Now, if you have not done so yet, post a comment with your true e-mail address in the e-mail box and let Anthony contact you.
I’ll have no more to say.
snip ~ Evan
In response to, Robert E. Phelan
Dear sir,
“Anything it takes” might well have been a motto used by most of my relatives (and yours too no doubt) while they were risking their necks winning WWII in order that you could sit there blubbering over your keyboard about immortal souls.
Open the shutters, this is the real world. It doesn’t matter if the box is stuffed by either side, just as long as it is because any publicity is good publicity at this stage of the game.
You mentioned the newspaper-article. Did you see the comment from the museum?
“A Science Museum spokesman said: “Three thousand responses in just three days shows how important this subject is in the run up to the Copenhagen summit.”
There speaks the brainwashed. You could kick him up the keister and he’d say it was caused by global warming, but readers of that newspaper might just take a moment to scratch their woolly behinds and think for themselves. And more and more sheep are thinking. Look at the polls, particularly in the US. Every time such a debacle as this happens it draws attention to the fact that there is another side to the so-called consensus.
[snip. We will not tolerate any encouragement to stuff the ballot. Anyone who does not see the damage this sort of thing does to fair debate and to honest skepticism is blind. You hand terrible weapons to opponents of fair and free debate. ~ Evan]
Pops:
You’re starting to sound like Che Guevara. Many of the associates of “the current incumbent of the White House” started off in Che Guevara mode, but when THEIR associates ended up as dead as Che Guevara, they switched to the tactic of forcing the establishment to live up to its own rules and overwhelming it legally. Those associates lived long enough to become the “in crowd” and the associates of the current incumbent of the White House…. still, every movement needs it martyrs…. “Justice for Pops! Justice for Pops!” or “Remember Pops!” – both have a nice ring to them….
Turboblocke Thanks for correcting me. I was quite wrong. Never comment till you”ve read the whole thread.
Here, from a reader of the “Harmless Skies” blog is a link with a revealing interview with the director of the Science Museum.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=209274
Note his apparent support for the idea of Nuremberg-type trials for climate sceptics. Note the phrase “anyone who was not in was out” used in an interview two years ago.
And yet more.
Just take a look at the attitude of a local councillor in the UK, and he’s just one roasted peanut in a whole bagful of heated believers.
http://www.thisisderbyshire.co.uk/news/Tory-s-just-wrong-says-Labour-boss/article-1448800-detail/article.html
Isn’t that just great? More publicity. How many people in Derbyshire (a mostly rural county full of sheep and hills) would ever have heard about “Not Evil Just Wrong” if the good councillor had not opened his outraged mouth? Now, the film is being advertised for free in the county’s best-selling newspaper. Bloody marvellous.
See what I mean?
Poor Evan, can’t abide free speech, or free thinkers.
I guess I’ll just have to head to cooler pastures. I knew this site would take a turn for the worse once Google got its claws into it.
Google = Apple = Gore. Say no more.
Have a nice, warm future.
Reply: I’m going to check on that one. If what I think happened, happened, I agree with you and will admonish Evan accordingly. ~ charles the moderator
Robert, I know that the poll was found to be questionable by this article before I made my demonstration.
My point was that I found it was highly questionable purely in the technical sense also, and I would contribute by showing that.
Now you are acting like that I killed somebody. I certainly feel like it. And I literally feel this will haunt me for a long time…
I’m just waiting for Anthony to contact me.
-Lihard