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 would suggest that someone has done a projection on if/when the ins will overtake the outs and if that will happen before the close of the vote. A small adjustment has been made to ensure the politic of vote suits the required outcome.
I just posted on the Tips & Notes page:
The Science Museum just chopped off 1500 “count me out” votes.
From http://wermenh.com/proveitraw.html
What’s up with that? I wonder if they’ve identified Lihard’s “contribution” and chopped it out.
I noticed the same unexplained adjustment in the count and I sent them an email asking for an explanation. Does anyone have a day by day count? I have 6558 Outs and 2309 Ins as of Nov 7 at 21:06.
Ric:
Thanks. What is really startling is that there is no apparent adjustment to the Ins.
Oh good grief, look at the 1600 UTC counts!:
Nov 12 11:00 UTC: 2968 6703
Nov 12 11:30 UTC: 2972 5217
…
Nov 12 15:30 UTC: 2989 5224
Nov 12 16:00 UTC: 4439 7233
First the “count-me-out”s drop at 12:00 by 1445 votes, according to Ric’s figures. Four hours later They are back up by 2012 votes and the “count-me-ins” are up by 1556. Ric, I do believe Lihard’s “contribution” was deducted when they originally reset the numbers On October 28. It was not long after that Lihard set up a monitoring scheme like yours to watch the poll, but his page has not updated for two days now.
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=62965c1675d258c800d27174b47c66570574a07afa1e342b61390143435ec59c
The museum has an “about the count” tab on a tool bar at the bottom of the page, but unlike the last time, there is still no announcement of what the radical manipulation was about. So much for their improved security. It looks like someone (or more than one someone) could not resist tampering. Again.
It is time to start drawing attention to this. Again. E-mail the museum. E-mail the papers. Post on blogs. Humiliate them.
Good work Ric.
Lihard, are you still maintaining your monitoring? I told you it might prove important.
I’m still monitoring, though I missed the recent “corrections” to the counts. My network connection drops out occasionally and I have to reboot my computer. And as this happened when I was away I missed hours of voting. I should test if I could get my fpga board to monitor the site, that should be more stable.
-Lihard
Lihard (10:39:43) :
Damn. I was hoping your second by second count would be able to tell us if the changes were all one-entry replacements, which would indicate they were changes from within the museum’s system, or a rapid run-up similar to your original hack, which woould indicate that people external to the museum are meddling with poll and that the museum’s security still sucks.
Well, still almost a month to go. Wish this thing would get more publicity from “our” side.
Just to keep people in the loop:
Figures at 20:04 GMT were “4446 counted in so far 7235 counted out so far”.
I wonder where the sudden doubling of the ‘in’ vote has come from….
This ‘poll’ has passed through all the stages of embarrassment, and become pure farce. Whatever the result, I would love to see how the Science Museum are going to present it.
I assume they initially thought that they would have a modest few thousand exhibition viewers voting in, with an overwhelming ‘yes’, and would use the figures to show how ‘successful’ their exhibition was. Now, whatever they do, they have an unexpected problem on their hands.
If I were the exhibition curator, I would have withdrawn the vote entirely when the multiple voting started, claimed that my ‘scientific investigation’ had been ruined by deniers, and presented myself as a brave martyr for science. As it is, he just looks stupid and incompetent…
Occam’s razor and Murphy’s Law both suggest that incompetence is the underlying reason for this totally and irredeemably embarrassing piece of attempted astroturfing.
E-mail I sent to them today:
Gentlemen:
Your “Prove It! Poll” has once again been compromised. At 12:00 UTC today, November 12, 2009, the “count-me-in” votes declined by almost 1500 votes. At 16:00 UTC, four hours later, they were UP by 2000 votes. Also at 16:00 hours the “count-me-in” votes had increased by more than 1500 votes in less than two hours. There is no statement on your “about the count” page explaining these manipulations.
Several weeks ago when the tampering first occurred I sent you an e-mail with recommendations on how to make your poll something more than a crude propaganda exercise. You chose to neither respond to me nor implement my well-intentioned suggestions.
Gentlemen, this whole ill-advised and poorly executed project with its shoddy science, lack of both transparency and security, and blatant political posturing is a humiliation. If you don’t feel the humiliation at this point you have my pity.
Robert E. Phelan
Mea culpa dept. There’s an overnight gap in my Proveit stats. To test out changes to my web page generator I commented out the call to get and process the Museum page. It doesn’t look like I’ve lost anything interesting, only a dozen votes are in the gap.
Nothing to see here, move right along please.
Nice. Really nice. 10:54 P.M. EDT…. checking the poll I’m getting a SERVER BUSY error. Hope Lihard and Ric are both up and running.
Interesting, I hadn’t been paying attention. I’m missing the samples from 0200 to 0430. The 0500 one worked, the 0530 is less than a minute away … Yep, that’s okay.
My system has several hung programs waiting for their data, that implies the system has been up but the web server is either unresponsive or it couldn’t start the application that fetches current data, pretty much what Robert saw.
Staff might have shut things down, for some maintenance, though starting that at 0130 is odd timing. Oh well, I guess it’s back, not much worse for the experience.
http://wermenh.com/proveitraw.html
The Science Museum is back in the news with this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/nov/16/science-museum-climate-change
The commenters clearly have no idea about the story of this exhibition and its ridiculous poll. I do recommend people to inform them. I’ve posted a comment, but since I’m under premoderation (the Guardian’s Kafka treatment) there’s no guarantee my comment will appear.
Hmmmph. With all the brouhaha about the leaked e-mails the science museum poll has been neglected. Wonder if we’ll start to see an uptick in voting as the e-mail leak gets wider publicity?
It’s clear now that the email leak won’t be presented in the MSM any further. It got little mention and will be dropped.
The only methods to get wider publicity for it are the ones which Bonnie mentioned in the CRU hack thread or getting the only significant free media to cover it. And by free media I mean YouTube.
There could be a real change to get the founders or decision makers at YouTube/Google to promote a video concerning this leak. But that would require coordinated effort. What if a couple of hundred or even thousand scientist contacted them and tried to arrange a front page place for the video. For the content of that video you should get the expert opinion from professionals in the media. I think Bonnie could be one of those.
There really needs to be action on this matter.
Lihard:
Funny, this is on You Tube and I thought of you.
Take a look.
Reply: It’s a shame most people will not get the joke. But it is hilarious. ~ ctm
Perhaps I should make some noise on the threads related to the hack.
The only thing the MSM is going to report about this is the occasional reference made my a republican on the subject in the U.S. congress if even that.
To me YouTube isn’t really a place for anything serious. But what else do we have?! Even if the main audience is pretty young on youtube there are videos with more serious content there.
By the way Robert do you know what does the “All your emails are belong to us” or should I say “All your base are belong to us” refers to?
Not until you asked. I think it’s even funnier now. It’s a young audience we need. Take a look at Tom Fuller’s little on-line poll here:
http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2009m11d17-Examinercoms-first-global-warming-surveymore-analysis
He knows that his poll is not scientific or representative, but it does track with other, more scientifically based representative polls. AGW believers tend to be young. They need to be pried away.
Let me make a kind of digression here… here in the U.S. it wasn’t until about 1960 that more than 50% of the American population had high school diplomas. Only 9% had college degrees. Most of those degrees were in Liberal Arts where students had to master history, philosophy, art, language, literature… they had a wide perspective on the world, and they ran the country. Our LEADING universities, from where we draw most of our leadership, are still liberal arts colleges.
Today, more than 25% of our population have college degrees, but most of those are essentially career preparation degrees. Many of my students, perhaps most, do not read well, can’t write, have no knowledge of philosophy, literature or history, little awareness of cultural history, and little in the way of critical thinking skills. They are simply being groomed as a better-trained proletariat, and they don’t even realize it. Not all college degrees are equal, even if my students believe they are. In a sense, it is a 21st century version of Marx’s “false consciousness”. When the young people of Europe and America find out just how badly they’ve been betrayed, the results will be horrific.
Let’s see what can be done, then.
For UK citizens who follow this excellent website, I have managed (amazingly) to get a PETITION published on the No 10 site which (supposedly) should receive the Prime Minister’s attention if signed by “a certain” number of British nationals.
It requests a Public Enquiry into the SCIENCE of climate change.
The aim is to gain such a large number of signatures BEFORE HE GOES OFF TO COPENHAGEN that he will never be able to claim that he “didn’t know”.
I know this is an old thread, and maybe nobody is looking at it any more, but I leave
this message here first because its subject matter is “petitions”.
I’ll now see if I can find a better place to publicize this petition, but please, everybody, get the message out in whatever way you feel appropriate. Anthony, maybe you could pitch in to help us beleaguered Brits?
And, of course, vote! (see below)
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/warmfeeling/ (Sorry if you have to cut and paste. I’m not clever enough to insert a link.)
Steve
Ooooo! It seems to have done it all by itself!
Wonders of modern science! I’ll never say “computers are rubbish” again.
S