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
Robert
“We’re looking at a potential PM?”
I think that’s the other one (called David – they’re not easy to tell apart), but he’s just as responsible for the science museum fiasco. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for them, but it must be difficult for politicians, who are mostly clueless about anything technical, to know which advisors to listen to. Perhaps the answer is to have more politicians with science degrees, but of course of the candidates are busy doing something more useful…
That should be ‘most of the candidates’ – sorry!
James P:
I think the Milibands have not yet decided how to divvy up the positions. As for the suggestion that maybe they are just clueless… I don’t believe it. Just as with certain factions here in the States, they’ve decided that AGW is exactly the horse they need to ride to achieve goals that have nothing to do with science and even less with saving the world.
http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/proveit.html reports that for Nov 2nd, there were more “count me in” (95) vs. “count me out” (83).
Someone suggested that there might be a push on school kids returning after a holiday to be counted in, though 95 in votes isn’t much of a groundswell.
Current total: 1062 in, 6147 out.
Currently the AGWers are outvoting the sceptics by 2:1 at the Science Museum Prove It poll. Get voting!
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx
Looks like there is a push going on. The ‘in’ vote has jumped and the score is now : 1201 in to 6202 out.
Or graphically:
http://proveit.gofreeserve.com/
(data from Ric)
There is a hockey-stick on the Ins!
Let’s try a bit of self honesty here with this poll: before WUWT publicised it the results were 333 In 234 Out as you can see from the screen shot above. Presumably this result reflects people who visited the science museum web site on a normal everyday basis.
Once a well known sceptic site has publicised it, it would be obvious that the chances of getting a “meaningful” result were significantly reduced.
David (05:33:42) :
Thank you very much for the graph! I just didn’t have to do it myself. One thing that might change is to fill in the missing data (gasp) for the 2 hour points. If I do that I’ll note it on the end of data lines in proveitraw.html, so be sure your code ignores extra columns. If you want, I’ll add one tonight so you can check it out. I like your page title. I might copy it myself.
My “preferred” web hosting site has reenabled the account, so http://wermenh.com/proveit.html works again and triggers the page reference code.
Also, a couple days ago, I have the file doing an automatic reload every half hour so you can leave the page on a stray browser window and it updates over the day. (Dave, you can add inside if you want to do the same.)
I think the INs are coming from George Monbiot’s blog which posted the link yesterday.
“Presumably this result reflects people who visited the science museum web site on a normal everyday basis.”
Except that the first people to know about it would have been those involved with the launch, and their friends and relations, nearly all of whom will have been in favour. After the unforeseen (!) robovoting, the corrected figures were heavily in favour of the outs, and have remained so. There will doubtless be some cyclical variation as the warmists rally round and the sceptics do likewise, but the end result should be broadly representative, shouldn’t it?
Clearly there are waves of voting that will lead to big swings in the ratio of INs to OUTs. The key problem is to ensure that these votes are not robovotes of some kind. Earlier someone was automatically monitoring the voting pattern – it would be interesting to hear what patterns they have detected. My own distinctly manual monitoring found an unusual jump in IN votes starting early this morning Eastern Time (11/3/2009) with a rate of 25 IN votes per hour compared to 4 IN votes per hour the previous day. The rate for OUT votes, was 4 votes per hour on 11/2/2009 and 8 votes per hour on 11/3/2009. The absolute numbers are still relatively modest: 425 IN votes today and 130 OUT votes. Despite the significant changes in the last 24 hours, 80% of the votes are still OUT.
James P (11:18:09) :
“… but the end result should be broadly representative, shouldn’t it?…”
James, the short answer is “no”. The poll is representative of nothing except how many activists can be mobilized to vote. The “outs” pulled way ahead mainly because Anthony publicized the poll on this thread. Apparently Monbiot finally got a glimmer and publicized it for his trolls.
A representative sample looks like the population it was intended to measure. Those fine people at the Science Museum have not indicated what population they intend to represent. People from all over the world are voting… it would not surprise me to learn that a Koi-San hunter-gatherer with a smartphone has voted. Should ninth-graders be allowed to vote?
This poll is primarily an exercise in one-upmanship. It is not scientific. It is not representative. It is a fraud and the only valid result will be if skeptic votes outnumber “count-me-in” votes. This poll was engineered to maximize the count-me-ins.
Like many people, I have an internet account that provides multiple email addresses (anything@myaccount.com) so I could, if so inclined, vote as many times as my patience would allow. I wonder how many warmists are taking advantage of this..?
James P (06:07:49) :
Their security was non-existent at the start but they claim to have implemented something a little more robust. If it was my poll I would have had the voting scripts recording the IP address and maybe even querying the MAC address of the NIC adapter…. one vote per computer. All they really intended to do was be able to present a large number of “count-me-in” votes to much fanfare and to the satisfaction of their political masters, the Miliband Brothers.
I’d like to see more skeptics get mobilized to drive the count upm but either way, its just propaganda.
Uhh.. Lihard? are you still out there?
Moderator: please forward my e-mail address to Lihard… I’d love to see what he’s got.
FWIW, the In count is over 2000.
“2029 counted in so far, 6475 counted out so far.”
http://wermenh.com/proveit.html shows a fair amount of British daytime activity.
Robert, here’s the latest of my prove it vote count logging. The link has the two raw data files and two plots I made from the data:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=62965c1675d258c800d27174b47c66570574a07afa1e342b61390143435ec59c
-Lihard
Lihard, that is very good. The graphic seems to show a flattening curve for the “ins” after a boost… looks like the curves for both will start to match unless a major blog summons the faithful once more. If those science museum idiots have been collecting any kind of metadata, your files and Ric Werme’s combined with them might form the basis of a very nice paper on internet polling. Keep it up.
I see the ‘in’s are climbing steadily. Presumably they have got a terminal at the exhibition which everyone is invited to type into – producing a slow but guaranteed list of ‘yes’s.
Unsurprisingly, those of us who don’t believe in Global Warming won’t attend the exhibition – perhaps someone should advertise this poll on The Register, or some other blog….
“Presumably they have got a terminal at the exhibition which everyone is invited to type into – producing a slow but guaranteed list of ‘yes’s.” -DG
Good point. It would be easy for our stats collectors to correct for this — do a simple comparison of average rate of IN vote during museum hours versus hours of closure. Can we assume no OUT votes occur during museum hours? Can we also correct for variations in voting at different times of day? (The above correction wouldn’t work, for example, if the museum closes at 9 PM, and most voters (of either variety) come from the same time zone and tend not to do much online after that time.
I’ve been a bit surprised that the voting follows England’s daytime hours. Nighttime plateaus of few votes stand out every night since the in votes started their higher slope about Nov 3. It continued through the weekend (when schools were closed but museum attendance is higher). I’d rather leave further speculation to the Brits here.
The surge is because of an article by George Monbiot in The Guardian on 2nd November. It actually mentioned the “Prove It” poll, probably because he wanted to galvanise a few more warmist votes. It certainly worked!
You can find his article here entitled “Death Denial”
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/02/death-denial/#more-1221
If any of your pals have not yet voted, get them to do so now.
Toodle-oo
George is a bit of a alarmist guru in the UK. He actually provided a link in the blog version of the article to take his fans directly to the “Prove It” website. that’s the ONLY reason why the warmist voting has surged.
Not only is the ‘in’ vote climbing steadily, but the ‘out’ vote is now declining.
Figures at 13:04 GMT were “2981 counted in so far 5220 counted out so far”.
I wonder why the ‘out’ vote has dropped by over 1000….