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
Well done, Lihard!
I think Anthony should be up for some kind of award for his amazing prophecy here 🙂 namely that this poll “might go horribly wrong”.
I wonder if even he had any idea exactly how horribly wrong it might actually go. This is a wonderful online farce. I do hope after they clean up whatever garbage they can, the Museum actually retains and more importantly reads the messages left for them by the “out crowd”. In fact, I think as a public service they should publicly archive them online so people — especially the politicians they promise to report the results to — can see for themselves the level of understanding of both sides of this issue.
Keep logging, Lihard — I really doubt the funny business is over yet.
In the meantime I’m going back and planning to leave a suggestion in their “regular” feedback system that a representative make a visit here and explain what’s going on.
Have the figures settled down now? I make it over 6:1 against, so presumably the warmists will be calling all their friends to persuade them to vote. Assuming they’ve got any left, that is… 🙂
I just went back to the SM site and refreshed the page, having been away about 45 minutes. The ‘in’ count went from 771 to 772 and the ‘out’ count went from 5249 to 5270. Oh dear.
Lihard:
Yeah, I’d call this a public service. Good work. It’s a long time ’till Copenhagen; how long can you keep monitoring that site? I think your evidence will have quite a bit of importance when they get to the end of this fiasco, so if you can keep doing, great.
UK residents should be contacting their MP’s and demanding answers. All of us should take some time to visit other blogs or sites that have commented on this and let them know what is going on, refering them back here if blog or site rules allow.
Do not forget the roles the Miliband brothers played in launching that thing.
Science Museum Press-release on the ProveIt poll;
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/press_and_media/press_releases/2009/10/Prove%20It%20Results.aspx
Yes to Robert Phelan’s idea of writing to MPs, pointing out that Museum directors have no business mounting exhibitions at the request of the government. A museum is not a Government Policy Showroom. Yes to Adam Gallon’s idea of writing to the Chairman of the board of trustees. (He probably doesn’t get much fanmail) The complete list of trustees is at
http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/nmsipages/boardoftrustees.asp
and some of them might not be raving warmists. One of the trustees, Ms Street Porter, is a well known journalist, and might like to publicise the story.
I have emailed the Science Museum on the ‘contact us’ tab (not the PROVEIT!) contact, asking them what exactly is the problem and do they realise that these highly erratic counts ruin the credibility of the museum.
I have left contact details so they can take every opportunity to revert back. If I get an answer I will submit it to WUWT (after seeking permission from the museum – we play fair).
Whichever way you look at it, this is not a good day for this museum or science.
Maybe this is what happens when science gets into bed with politics…
Based on the patterns of the votes, I think what happened:
People who frequent the museum and its web site noticed the new page, and the few voters tended toward “counted in” because pro-warmers were more interested in the web page than others are.
The web site became more widely known, and many more chose to be “counted out”.
The newspaper reported the “counted out” dominance as a surprising aberration, attracting more people.
The “counted in” tally suddenly increased by several thousand. Someone probably used automation to stuff the ballot box.
The web site staff decided they couldn’t ignore the ballot box stuffing, so they added pro-human procedures to the voting process.
The counters were reset to zero and voting restarted with the new procedures.
The previous votes, or vote totals, were added back on to give some semblance of continuity.
The previous votes were filtered in several ways which removed unacceptable ballot box stuffing. Vote tallies varied wildly as several filters were tested, because this was done on live data.
They have released a press statement as of 28/10/09 or should that be 10/28/09 -for the colonies….
It reads:
Between Friday 23 and Wednesday 28 October the poll associated with Prove It! was manipulated through repeat voting. This was undertaken by those who wanted to be “counted in” and those who wanted to be “counted out” from the statement: “I’ve seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.” As a result the majority of duplicate votes cast during this period have been removed. Internet polls face this risk and the Science Museum has implemented additional security measures to reduce this risk.
5984 were cast: 764 to counted in and 5220 to counted out. (Correct as at 16.20 Wednesday 28 October)
So:
Manipulation occured
On BOTH sides of the debate
It has been dealt with
And now perhaps ‘may the best team win’.
Lets assume that the Science Museum are playing fair and have realised how bad this would be – even if they dont get a preferred result.
Bravo to the Science Museum for coughing up to this.
Dorme bien
They’ve added an “About the count” page which echoes the press release’s statement about removing duplicate votes.
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit/about_the_count.aspx
“Maybe this is what happens when science gets into bed with politics…”
Or you hitch up to a Milibandwagon. It may do some good if the brothers (who, whatever you think of their politics, are not stupid) are made aware that they have backed the wrong horse here.
I received my confirmation e-mail.
It also appears that 5000 plus “Don’t Count Me in” people did as well.
And about 700 for “Count me in”.
You have paranormal powers, Anthony, to see that this was a poll that could go horribly wrong.
Robert, the only drawback is that my electric bill will go up a bit, so if anybody wants to throw a couple of euros I wouldn’t mind =)
But leaving the kidding aside all I have to do is to keep my laptop open all the time, so it’s not a problem to keep at it. I could even switch to my fpga board that uses even less power so my carbon footprint wouldn’t go up at all.
-Lihard
From the Science Museum website press release:
“Between Friday 23 and Wednesday 28 October the poll associated with Prove It! was manipulated through repeat voting. This was undertaken by those who wanted to be “counted in” and those who wanted to be “counted out” from the statement: “I’ve seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.” As a result the majority of duplicate votes cast during this period have been removed. Internet polls face this risk and the Science Museum has implemented additional security measures to reduce this risk.”
It seems to me that the Science Museum is being disingenuous at the very least.
Since the poll began, if you voted to be counted ‘in’, a website page came up giving the message: “To be counted in just tell us who you are*. We’ll pass the results on to the government to let them know where you stand.” Similarly, if you voted to be counted ‘out’, a website page came up giving the message: “To be counted out, just tell us who you are*. We’ll pass the results on to the government to let them know where you stand.”
Both pages contained the information: * We won’t pass on your name or e-mail address. We’ll just use it to send you a confirmation email, and make sure that we only count people once.
In fact nobody, so far as I am aware, received the “confirmation email” as described above until the count was temporarily reset to zero at approximately 17.15 GMT on 27 October. It seems that the Science Museum failed to implement the security measures it claimed to have put in place until 17.15 GMT on 27 October. This is prima facie evidence of complete incompetence on the part of the Science Museum. Would you trust this institution to provide you with objective evidence on whether or not climate change is anthropogenic?
Regards
S
Lihard:
will a hundred Euros cover your costs for the next 45 days?
Moderator: please send my e-mail address to Lihard.
Oh, I can’t stand it any longer. I just hacked up a dumb Python program to monitor the ins and outs being recorded, check out http://wermenh.com/proveit.html
It will settle down (I think) to record things once an hour, currently it’s checking every 5 minutes while I tweak it.
I’ll post this on Tips & Notes once I scale it back to every hour.
Ric Werme (18:52:48) :
I like it. Now we’ve got two records of what is happening on that site, yours and Lihard’s. I’m certain that there is more than one someone out there who;s thinking “Security? A challenge!”. Documenting any further tampering may be important come December. Documenting the lack of tampering may be important. The spin placed on this utterly unscientific poll, especially if the ridiculous “count-me-out” lead is maintained, will be interesting…. kind of along the lines of “… the baleful influence of the deniers is worse than we thought and this shows we need to step up our efforts to educate the public…”
I got an Email from the museum to click on the link to confirm.
@Ric
It’s dead, Jim
http://wermenh.com/proveit.html
Site Temporarily Disabled
” the baleful influence of the deniers is worse than we thought and this shows we need to step up our efforts to educate the public…”
As I see it the results will go one of three ways:
1. The poll is quietly withdrawn. In which case we get a good laugh at the science museum for it amateurish attempt the politics of climate alarmism.
2. The poll returns a “count me in” majority. In which case we get a good laugh at the science museum for putting up a slanted poll and having the neck to report the result as though it means anything.
3. The poll returns a “count me out” majority. In which case we get a good laugh at the science museum for putting up a slanted poll and still not getting the result it so obviously wanted.
So it’s a case of heads we win, tails we win, and no-toss we win.
And when we are done with scoffing at the museum, we can always pause to chastise the management and trustees for damaging its reputation in this hapless foray into the politics of climate alarmism.
I can’t wait for December.
D’OH!
http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/10/greens-caught-fiddling-science-museum-count-me-in-vote/
David (05:12:26) :
Yeah, probably An Inconvenient Timing.
For the indefinite future, the Museum data is also (only?) available at
http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/proveit.html
I’m currently updating things every half hour.
Current counts: In: 806 Out: 5580
Robert, thanks for the offer but I really don’t need it. It won’t cost me much.
I’ll also put up a system to update my data to a web server, but that will be when I have the time.
-Lihard
It is still not right.
I legitiimately voted ‘Count Me In’ just once prior to the ‘reset’, but then seeing that 5000-odd ‘In’ votes had been removed I voted again to see what would happen. My vote was accepted, so it seems that at least some legitimate ‘in’ votes were incorrectly trashed.
I fear the result, however it turns out, has decidedly minor credibility.
Phil:
I suspect that they did not retain the “metadata” – just incremented the vote counter. It’s possible the purges involved votes that came in the four or five series that incremented like clockwork…. thus anyone who voted before the changes may be allowed to vote afterwards because they don’t have the data to say one way or the other. I have chosen not to vote again because it looks like my original vote is being counted, even if unattributed with “metadata”. I still think that the better course would have been to simply reset and invite everyone to vote again. As it is, the seven to one voting rate of “count-me-out”s to “count-me-in”s, while personally gratifying, is also disturbing and unnatural. I don’t believe that the gap is that wide… something else is in play here… but the lack of transparency in this process makes it anyone’s guess.