Paul Chesser at the American Spectator tips me via email to a TV news report from WHTM-TV in Harrisburg, PA. WHTM is the TV station whose DMA covers State College.
Chesser writes:
Following up from yesterday, the ABC news station in Harrisburg did a fair-and-balanced story about the Commonwealth Foundation‘s call for an outside, independent investigation of Penn State’s Climategate scientist, Michael Mann.
Here’s the video news report:
Transcript here:
ABC27: Penn State at Center of Global Warming Debate
MarkM,
“MarkM (12:28:07) : ”
” Societal norms are not based on scientific proof alone . . . ”
” Most societies have their most basic tenants based on beliefs . . .”
” I know my examples are simple ones; however, most free societies start with a belief structure that makes murder a grievous . . . . . Subjective beliefs.”
etc.
This is getting a little of thread, so my last post on this.
What you describe regarding political and social processes that exist as essentially subjective is unfortunately virtually true. But to the extent that citizens are rational/scientifically oriented then a country’s governmet and society can have some scientificlly demostratable basis and likely will have. On the contrary countries wholly lacking such citizens are going to have a totally subjective base for their gov’ts and society.
It is the tendency that will tell.
John
>Tom in Florida (06:20:52) :
> > Newt Love (05:30:33) : ” a $450 hammer or a $600 toilet seat”
OT but I must try to put an end to this misinformation.
1. I worked at Lockheed on the P-3 Orion program when the $600 toilet seat was invented. The long-range subchaser P-3 stayed on-station for days. Rotating crews manned it. Just in case the pilots had to take defensive maneuvers when somebody was on the toilet, they wanted a “seat” that would seal, such that, even in the case of a barrel-roll, the person strapped in on the toilet would not get their cheeks wet. Challenge: design, build and manufacture that for less than $600! Lockheed was the LOW Bidder!
2. The post I made was NOT about the hammer or toilet seat. Look up “cultural iconography” and learn. It doesn’t matter if Mary had a little lamb; people know of the mythology. It doesn’t matter If Luke Skywalker is real; we know how to “use The Force.” It doesn’t matter if the hammer was $450 (or not) or the toilette seat was… It’s broadly used, even as fiction, and so is fair game to illustrate a point.
3. You, by rehashing old news from two decades ago, have diverted the discussion from “Penn State can either bring in outside experts, or they can support DoD contractors having three of their own executives perform ‘independent audit’ of their scandalous behaviors.”
Thanks for picking a nit that changed the subject.
Newt
Newt Love (my real name) newtlove.com
Aerospace Technical Fellow, Modeling, Simulation and Analysis
Regarding “1) the acceptance of an idea without a provable basis in reality (belief)”: That’s only one of the dictionary definitions of it. Pamela was not using the definition you provided, but rather #1 below (boldfaced), found at http://www.dictionary.net/belief :
Second, Pamela’s focus was on condemning “self-righteous” argumentation — I boldfaced those words in her quote to make her intent plain. (Her phrase “such belief” refers to the quality or “suchness” of the belief — i.e., to its self-righteousness.)
John Whitman (15:15:37) wrote:
“What you describe regarding political and social processes that exist as essentially subjective is unfortunately virtually true. But to the extent that citizens are rational/scientifically oriented then a country’s governmet and society can have some scientificlly demostratable basis and likely will have. On the contrary countries wholly lacking such citizens are going to have a totally subjective base for their gov’ts and society.”
I agree with your belief (we are splitting hairs here).
Societies that use hard data and fact to base decisions regarding their governance and economic system are the best societies. Some basic decisions of right and wrong will still be decided by belief. Discrimination is wrong because we are all equal. Murder is wrong because it discrimates against innocent life. Those are beliefs.
The decreasing of anthropeginic CO2 should be decided by scientific data that is peer reviewed and widely dissiminated. An agenda or belief system does not belong in this process.
thanks,
markm
Miachael Larkin (06:38:39)
Thank you for your comments. Perhaps Cold fusion not a good example. I am sure that you might be able to identfy another. My point is that the mainstream media hyped cold fusion prematurely and as a result government funding answered with more money for cold fusion research. I fear that AGW has suffered the same fate.
Sharon (10:42:48) :
“However, I was very curious to know what exactly Prof. Mann had researched for his Ph.D. Below I have copied his dissertaton abstract, available from the ProQuest (formerly University Microfilms) database. What strikes me about the abstract is the total absence of the words “tree rings” or paleo-anything, or even “carbon dioxide”. I am left to wonder how and why Mann made the leap from oceans to dendrochronology so quickly, and with such meteoric success!
Even though I am not a scientist, I am by nature a skeptical person and I have toiled long in the Ph.D. universe. And so, this “divergence” of Mann’s research interests ca. 1998 strikes as somewhat odd. I’m sure others here are better informed about Prof. Mann’s research, past and present. When did he start looking at tree-rings? What in fact are the areas of overlap between studying the oceans and trees? Was it his signal-processing techniques? Inquiring humanists want to know!”
I’ve read a summary of Mann’s PhD dissertation in Wegman’s report. To me it seems that the connection between his dissertation and his later work, starting with MBH98, is – believe it or not – his use of PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and statistical data handling generally. My guess, based on my own experience with PhD dissertations and the papers you often write with others in the same group while working on your dissertation, is that – believe it or not – Mann was the “resident statistical expert” in that particular group. So in his own dissertation he worked a lot with PCA, his co-authors in MBH98 essentially approached him with, “hey Mike, you did a great job finding those signals with PCA in your dissertation. We have tons of proxy data we can’t seem to find any signal in, maybe you can give it a try?” or something like that. That is my guess.
So Mann’s supposed expertise, as seen by his colleagues, seems to be the handling of data – whether from proxies or from ocean circulation data or whatever – in order to squeeze trends and signals out of them. I think it’s obvious that most of the other Team members understand statistics even less than he does, so his own handling of data wasn’t seriously challenged. And then what happens? Steve McIntyre shows up and indirectly implying that Mann is incompetent in that precise supposed expertise. As for the “meteoric success”, I think MBH98 was just the paper that a lot of people were waiting for.
I have no direct confirmation for any of that, this is just my interpretation of what’s going on. If correct, what’s at stake is not only his career, but also his whole standing in the community – and even his self-image, since if he’s incompetent in data handling, what then does he know? I might feel sorry for him if he hadn’t shown himself to be such a petty and vicious individual.
@ur momisugly Peter B (04:12:49) : I’ve read a summary of Mann’s PhD dissertation in Wegman’s report. To me it seems that the connection between his dissertation and his later work, starting with MBH98, is – believe it or not – his use of PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and statistical data handling generally. My guess, based on my own experience with PhD dissertations and the papers you often write with others in the same group while working on your dissertation, is that – believe it or not – Mann was the “resident statistical expert” in that particular group. So in his own dissertation he worked a lot with PCA, his co-authors in MBH98 essentially approached him with, “hey Mike, you did a great job finding those signals with PCA in your dissertation. We have tons of proxy data we can’t seem to find any signal in, maybe you can give it a try?” or something like that. That is my guess.
You’ve got to be kidding. But as a non-scientist, non-PhD, could someone tell me if it’s standard practice for a junior scientist (after all, he’d just gotten his PhD) to end up as a lead author so quickly?
@ur momisuglyI think it’s obvious that most of the other Team members understand statistics even less than he does, so his own handling of data wasn’t seriously challenged. And then what happens? Steve McIntyre shows up and indirectly implying that Mann is incompetent in that precise supposed expertise.
I got the impression that even some of his colleagues questioned his statistical know-how, but since they felt he was more adept than they were, they let it go.
Why, oh why, didn’t they use statisticians to check their work?
@Peter B: Thanks for that information!
*****************************************
Mom2girls (13:19:10) :
How old is Mann. Isn’t he like in his mid 40’s? Did he just get his PhD in ‘98? What took him so long? Mid 30’s is kind of late for PhD in science unless he took a detour early on. Did he fail out? Have to restart or retake classes? Did he have to change dissertation directors frequently?
*****************************************************
Actually, Mann’s graduate school career is (statistically-speaking!) quite average. You can look up the numbers. The annual reports for the Survey of Earned Doctorates is available at the NSF website. In 1998, the median, not mean, time to degree in the physical sciences was about 8 years. The median age for males receiving a Ph.D. in the physical sciences was about 34 yo.
According Mann’s CV, which is posted on his Penn State site, he began his graduate studies around 1989, the year he received his bachelor’s from Berkeley (at age 23-24, btw) and defended his dissertation in 1996. This means that it took him about 7 years to complete the program. The Ph.D. was not conferred until 1998, because he did not submit the final copy of the dissertation to Yale until that year. This time lag is not, in and of itself, unusual either. There are all sorts of reasons that can delay the submission of the final copy of the dissertation: revisions, work, family issues, etc. Really, there is nothing unusual about this timeline.
What I find somewhat extraordinary, however, is that Mann was not “officially” a Ph.D. until 1998, but from 1996 to 1998, held a post-doc at the DOE while ABD (the dreaded All But Degree status). Post-docs can typically begin their appointments during the provisional period between defense and degree conferral, with the understanding that there is sometimes a few months delay between these events. Was Mann given special consideration at the DOE? I am not familiar with DOE post-doc rules to say, but I do wonder. At any rate, he then moved to several temporary academic positions before landing at UVA.
I imagine that Mann’s academic backstory and the history of his collaborations will shed a lot of light on the makings of Climategate.
Kay (06:00:58) : “You’ve got to be kidding. But as a non-scientist, non-PhD, could someone tell me if it’s standard practice for a junior scientist (after all, he’d just gotten his PhD) to end up as a lead author so quickly?”
Lead author of articles generally? It’s standard. Lead author of an IPCC report chapter – I’d say it’s not standard at all, and in Mann’s case it happened because the IPCC folks just loved MBH98 as it told them exactly what they wanted to here. They loved the hockey stick, so Mann became a star overnight. That the paper was essentially bogus is something they didn’t even think about.
“Why, oh why, didn’t they use statisticians to check their work?”
I guess they thought they didn’t have to, since they (or Mann) already knew everything and mere statisticians know nothing of “climate science”, so what do they know?
I think it’s really as simple as this: a guy who’s technically incompetent – Mann – got results that satisfied an ideological-political need that was up in the air (“we got to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”). His hockey stick “proved with data” what they “knew to be true” – that the recent warming was “unprecedented in the last 1000 years”. So they did not even think of checking his work statistically, internally or externally. Until Steve McIntyre got interested.
@ur momisugly Peter B (06:31:39) : I think it’s really as simple as this: a guy who’s technically incompetent – Mann – got results that satisfied an ideological-political need that was up in the air (“we got to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”). His hockey stick “proved with data” what they “knew to be true” – that the recent warming was “unprecedented in the last 1000 years”. So they did not even think of checking his work statistically, internally or externally. Until Steve McIntyre got interested.
Thanks, Peter. I think you hit the nail on the head.
@ur momisuglyLead author of articles generally? It’s standard.
Really? I’d have thought that the most senior scientist got top billing. Interesting.
Taking SEVEN years to get his PhD is academically unusual. 7 years marks the time when classes you took the first year start to ‘disappear’ from your transcript. IOW, if you don’t have that PhD by year 7 you have to start retaking classes. If he didn’t get his PhD until 98 that would be NINE years from 89. Did he have to retake any classes? Inquiring minds/etc.
Kay (06:00:58) :
You’ve got to be kidding. But as a non-scientist, non-PhD, could someone tell me if it’s standard practice for a junior scientist (after all, he’d just gotten his PhD) to end up as a lead author so quickly?
Kay, in my experience there’s various methods to determine lead author, following this order.
1. The person who receives (or supplies) the funding is first.
2. The originator of the concept or idea may also be first. Usually this person requests others with appropriate expertise and/or credibility. It is a decision between them.
3. Sometimes during the development of the research it becomes apparent that one facet of the project is taking considerably more time and that person, by mutual consent, is given lead.
4. In the case of the inclusion of lesser rank or non-PhD authors, the one with the highest rank.
Most of the time the authors know, or know of each other prior to cooperation. In a particular field, egotists develop a reputation, and others would not ask he/she to participate knowing they would demand lead authorship. IMHO, Mann falls into both groups 1 and 4.
Also, in my field, it was implicitly understood that a statistician within the University would be consulted and usually included as an author. That was 25 yrs ago. Things have changed.
Mom2girls (09:59:39) :
Taking SEVEN years to get his PhD is academically unusual. 7 years marks the time when classes you took the first year start to ‘disappear’ from your transcript. IOW, if you don’t have that PhD by year 7 you have to start retaking classes. If he didn’t get his PhD until 98 that would be NINE years from 89.
Mom2girls, please understand that the requirements and organization of Ph.D. programs is quite unlike undergraduate study. Credit hours, grade-point averages, transcripts, these things matter very little. What matters is time spent in the labs or the libraries doing research and making one’s faculty advisers happy. Seven years from bachelor’s to Ph.D. is not unusual at all. It really does take that long. And this process almost never goes smoothly. There are any number of facors working against the graduate student at all stages, even in the revision stage.
Mann defended his dissertation 6-7 years after beginning his graduate program at Yale. That means he had accomplished enough research and put it into a draft form that satisfied his faculty advisers that he had fulfilled the major requirement for the Ph.D. degree, the dissertation. There would have been no question of “retaking” classes at that point, but rather making any necessary revisions to the draft and then putting it into final form to be deposited with Yale. By passing his dissertation defense in 1996, Mann *technically* became a Ph.D., but the actual degree was not awarded by Yale until he submitted his dissertation to the university. As I said above, this time lag isn’t unusual either, only that Mann was allowed to assume a post-doctoral position without the “degree in hand” for an unspecific period of time, somewhere I’m guessing between 10 to 24 months.
I am not defending Mann here, but only trying to show that his graduate career was, in terms of time to degree, typical. If I still have not convinced you, please go to the NSF website to look up the relevant statistics compiled from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, or check out the requirements for Yale’s Ph.D. programs in physics, geophysics, applied math., or indeed for any Ph.D. program at a top-tier American university.
@Tim Clark (11:38:28) :
Kay (06:00:58) :
You’ve got to be kidding. But as a non-scientist, non-PhD, could someone tell me if it’s standard practice for a junior scientist (after all, he’d just gotten his PhD) to end up as a lead author so quickly?
Kay, in my experience there’s various methods to determine lead author, following this order.
1. The person who receives (or supplies) the funding is first.
2. The originator of the concept or idea may also be first. Usually this person requests others with appropriate expertise and/or credibility. It is a decision between them.
3. Sometimes during the development of the research it becomes apparent that one facet of the project is taking considerably more time and that person, by mutual consent, is given lead.
4. In the case of the inclusion of lesser rank or non-PhD authors, the one with the highest rank.
Most of the time the authors know, or know of each other prior to cooperation. In a particular field, egotists develop a reputation, and others would not ask he/she to participate knowing they would demand lead authorship. IMHO, Mann falls into both groups 1 and 4.
Also, in my field, it was implicitly understood that a statistician within the University would be consulted and usually included as an author. That was 25 yrs ago. Things have changed.
Tim, thank you for your response. That’s much clearer. Point 1 I can understand–the person bringing the money gets the credit. Fair enough. #2 also makes sense. It’s #4 I struggle with. Maybe it’s just my particular area and as I said I’m not a scientist, but a lesser ranked person would never appear before a more experienced person on even the most trivial of publications. Of course, the higher ups usually have advanced degrees, but that doesn’t mean they actually did the work. They get the credit for something they were only minimally involved in. The pecking order is clearly defined and the elitism is rampant.
No offense intended to anyone–just a layperson’s view here, but I don’t have much respect for PhD’s and Mann’s behavior illustrates why. The fact that you can earn one doesn’t mean diddly in the real world. Many of them are very bright but aren’t very smart, IMO. Most of them can’t find the door without a map and yet they get credit for everything even though they can’t string two sentences together coherently.
Dear Kay,
No offense taken. Please know that I am as appalled as you are at Mann and the Hockey Team’s behavior. It saddens me that the general public’s perception of Ph.D.s, and scientists in particular, is too often shaped by revelations about their bad behavior and not by their positive contributions, which far outnumber instances of corruption and deception.
However, Climategate was bound to happen sooner or later, I think. Bad science and badly behaving scientists are always exposed when there is openess in the research process, something The Team fought long and hard to prevent. Climategate reveals once again that a mixture of science, politics, and celebrity is a very dangerous brew. But, Climategate also shows that the standards of good scientific and academic practices are being upheld.
So, there is hope, Kay, even for absent-minded Ph.D.s. They need love too!
One look is worth a thousand reports. Go outside. In the Northern Hemisphere where it is currently winter it is colder than last year and the year before that. Actually, colder than it’s been in a long time.
Before man figured out that the Earth is not the center of the universe, technically skilled people were well paid (by the church) to build mechanical models that depicted crazy planetary motions to explain what people were actually seeing…and Galileo was ex communicated for speaking the truth.
All one needs is a basic education in physics to know that the only thing man made about AGW is the data. The science only gets difficult to explain/understand when someone tries to get a predetermined outcome from an “un cooperative” data set.
When will the Thermostasi stop saying “just because it’s getting colder doesn”t mean it’s not getting hotter”. If I’d known that this was the level of logic they deal in I could have saved us all alot of trouble over the last several years with this statement. “Just because it”s getting hotter doesn”t mean it”s not getting colder”
Seriously….How much colder does it need to get and for how long? Will I need to send postcards from my San Fernando Valley backyard while hunting Polar Bears to put an end to this stupidity?
How intelligent does one need to be to realize that inputting garbage values can only output garbage values? How can anyone argue their case without validated data? Why does this whole thing have the stench of religious dogma and the Big Lie Theory?
And why are there so many supposedly educated people that can’t seem to grasp such a scientifically simple subject? Maybe if our teachers stopped indoctrinating our youth with UN propaganda…stopped telling us to drug our boys for acting like boys… spent more time teaching and less time molesting …and spent less time complaining that they make less than half what a prison guard makes with overtime…maybe then there would be enough intelligence and critical thinking ability in our college grads to approach this subject with science instead of irrational fundamentalism.
And if all else fails…keep it simple…like this:
I’m cold…Global Warming? Really? You promise? Then BRING IT ON!..[snip]..