Dipping Into The Sour Mash, Part 2

Leaving aside the fact that this is insubstantial WRT the reasoning and conclusions of the report, how serious is not correctly citing the group efforts at Wikipedia and how is it remedied?
Or put another way, what should Wegman (or one of Wegman’s, ahem, proxies) have done in the first place to avoid this desperate coal-raking some years down the line?
Wikipedias guidance on the subject is that for short excerpts (3 – 4 sentences is the example), no attribution is required; for longer excerpts, the source should be attributed under the license specified:
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Readers#What_is_the_license_agreement_on_the_contents_of_Wikipedia.3F[/url]
So many of the excerpts may require no attribution of ant kind.
This is the situation now; what the prevailing conditions were at the time the report was compiled, I don’t know, but I’d be very surprised if it had been *more* rigorous; the norms and mores surrounding use of Wikipedia would certainly have evolved in he intervening years.
No story to tell from Wikipedia’s angle.
From the pespective of any readers, they are misled to the extent that they would not have known the text came from Wikipedia. No-one is saying that text is incorrect or inappropriate either.
In short then, the conclusion we should draw is that SHORT-CENTRED PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS ANALYSIS IS BIASED AND CAN PRODUCE HOCKEY STICKS FROM RED NOISE.
I forget where I found that quote. Sorry.

Tom,
Thanks for the article, but you might like to review it – it’s a bit garbled and repetetive in places. Maybe some kind of formatting glitch?

Mike:
The Bradley material WAS attributed. The failing there was not plagarism but rather copyright violation. And the failure to use quotation where it would be required.
But be careful those words of bradley have appeared elsewhere without attribution.

Mashey’s allegations are primarily intended to discredit Wegman right before he testifies before Congress in January in the ClimateGate hearings. The vast majority of American citizens won’t understand the details, they will just read the headline about Wegman being investigated for plagiarism. That is the way the left plays politics in the USA.
Of course Wegman quoted much text from Mashey, Wegman was analyzing Mashey’s work. Wegman’s team should have not been so sloppy about attribution but a lot of pro bono work is done not quite as rigorously as it should be. Let’s be clear, Wegman was not publishing original research in his area of research, he was merely auditing substandard work and pointing out the flaws in the audited work. Anyway, Wegman will be cleared of the charges and much more motivated to do a good job come January.
From a skeptic’s perspective, anything that draws attention to the work of Mann is good.

Anthony wrote:
“REPLY: It has yet to be determined if the issue is with Wegman himself of an assistant – Anthony”
Wegman led the team and signed off on the report. The issue is with him.
REPLY: Well, that’s not something you get to determine. George Mason University does. – Anthony

‘a relatively new discipline called Social Network Analysis.’
SNA is a collection of very old practices that “recently” was collected into a unified collection of “refined” approaches and given a nerdy-information-age-name. It’s like the label social engineering which just means how to fool information out of someone.
What’s really funny with the statement is the concept of “relatively new” in a information-age context, since in the information-age context SNA is frakking old news. The weird thing is that the intelligence community who loves their labels can’t move on to the new stuff even though they’re mostly made up of jit-geeks-n-nerds. Of cours it’s only weird in the sense that society today give the bureaucrats the leeway it does even though everyone who remembers their history of ancient greek and roman society know full well that a shit load of the problems with advanced societies is too much information ordered in too old rules. Standard bureaucracy is always to blame as long as it’s designed by the old standards of being firm, fixed and stiff, but continuously applied to new standards, new information (and lest not forget that what once was deemed important has a tendency to end up on the nearest old and abused scrap heap rather quickly), new ideas, ideologies, morals, rules and regulations, hah even new formats for both the old and new information makes bureaucracy outdated faster ‘an light.
Personally I think bureaucracy killed SNA as a viable option. Bureaucracy works when stuff don’t change too often because then bureaucracy has time to change with the time it lives in. The standardized definition of the bureaucracy version of SNA is how people behaved in their communication back in the day when interaction was more static like up to 1995. Today people interact amongst each other in like a fluid dynamic way in a chaos complexity environment. People interact, communicate, more and more whit each other, with whom ever even, based on how they feel at a specific point in time rather then by standardized (physical world) social formula.
SNA I believe was dead even before it became live so to speak what with bureaucracy only is an effective filter for limiting information that can be standardized (was very effective during the height of the industrial mass production age) or put another way one-size fit all.
SNA works when you keep it 19th century simple because then you only use standardized information and are only concerned with that information. Now days though people initiate a communication with each other because one reduced or uped the likeability level of someone else on some site and had to tell it to that someone who got uped or reduced or the person who got uped or reduced just has to know way he was uped or reduced, nine days later they’re bestest of frakking friends and have made it known to all their virtual friends and hopefully everyone else as well and preferably then some, and three days later they have no more contact. Maybe if every analyst also was a full blown behavior psychologist/scientist and into graphology, criminology, statistics, and what not, it could work but otherwise everything is just white noise because nobody really took the time to quantify red noise, instead the red noise the intelligence gatherer want is what’s predefined by what bureaucracy decided was important (i.e. what bureaucracy could standardize so to speak.)
Why do you see so many red flags when it has been determined that you can only account for red flags in an environment of white noise consisting only of supposedly white flags?

Nick Stokes says:
October 10, 2010 at 3:19 pm

It’s not summarising climate papers – it’s a new topic and argument that the Wegman report is introducing.

I agree it is a new topic but it is still part of a report on how the MBH paper and climate science in general has developed, so it is a still on the topic. He uses Social Network Analysis as a tool in much the same way I’d use the Unified Modeling Language when designing a database. He gives an explanation of the the terms, he is not in an way presenting Social Network Analysis as a concept he invented.
I don’t think we can be considering this as plagiarism as defined in the Oxford:

the wrongful appropriation or purloining and publication as one’s own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas… of another

Though I would agree he should have included where he obtained his knowledge of the tool in the bibliography but I don’t think such an oversight meets the above defintion either.

Wiki;

“Definition of plagiarism
Plagiarism isn’t identical to copyright infringement. Material from the public domain still needs to be attributed properly.
Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines the act of plagiarizing a source as follows:[2]
transitive verb:
1) to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
2) use (another’s production) without crediting the source.”

The accusation of Wegman committing plagiarism is one of those “So What?” issues.
Just because Wegman may have copied some Wikipedia or other source does not mean it was plagiarism. It was not presented as his own original academic work.
At most it was improperly referenced material. This does not rise to the level of the dishonesty of the IPCC in making up non-existent sources, or including shallow, non-pier reviewed sources.
Wegman’s work is honest, and makes a vital point. Mann’s work is BS, and Wegman showed too much respect for Mann’s work by not calling it fraudulent.
The level of panic in such shallow assertions as Mashey’s doesn’t fool anyone. AGW advocates don’t worry about facts. They just attack the messenger. What kind of mentality is that?

I am using words in this sentence that come from the English language; each word has a rich history and often various meanings exploited in many works before I emitted these copies of the words here. Each sentence of every book I’ve ever read or that you’ve ever read also contains words of similar pedigree. Yet we don’t bother to provide citations for each work we’ve read where we learned of these words since we started learning words now do we? There are many situations where we don’t cite things at all and many cases where we do. More often than not it’s the meanings of the words that matter, not the source. While I cite where I quote from many people don’t as a practical matter and as a matter of style.
As for reports meant for Congress would not the meaning be more important than exactly how it was cited? Or does the report all of a sudden become null and void?
Is it claimed that the allegedly cited material which lacks citation is fabricated science or incorrect science somehow?
Would not a revised version with an erratum be permissible to be published? Book authors and publishers of many technical books in my twenty plus bookshelf library provide errata and revised versions with corrections. Heck authors such as Donald Knuth offered a $2.56 reward for each error found. Assuming that the lack of an expected citation by some would be deserving of a reward the person who, ahem found such, would need to ask the authors if they are giving said rewards out.
Certainly if failing to provide a reference for quoted material is of grave concern what about the meaning of the report itself? Surely it’s meaning is still valid regardless of the source of the materials? Or because it lacks a citation the flaws it points out in Mann’s bad science suddenly become alright and acceptable? I think not.
So it’s nothing more than a forgotten reference. Move along, nothing to see except the relevant contents that slam Mann to the mat for his fabricated science.
With nothing better to do the real deep climate deniers should really learn to focus on the actual science rather than diverting attention with a few valid yet not properly cited references which can be corrected with the issuance of a new version of the report fully annotated. Mann’s science on the other hand is seriously flawed due to it’s methodology and little Mann can do will ever fix it up to be valid science since it’s been falsified left, right and center by Nature herself too boot (see Girma Orrsenago’s papers).
No works were copied in here. Any words or sequences of words that appear here that also appear elsewhere are the result of multiple groups of 100 monkey’s typing their tiny fingers off. Every word used was learned by me from some source of material long forgotten thus I can’t cite where I learned it from. Some words like the word word were likely learned in grade school but I don’t remember which one. So shoot me. Also I’ve not provided the definitions of any of the words used in this comment so you’ll have to figure out which meanings for each word I meant. Oh, and while I mentioned the works of a couple of scientists I’ve not listed any references to their materials, for that you’ll have to look up their works. This is the internet after and you have a bing googler you can yahoo! Besides alarmists rarely define their terms and haven’t provided as far as I’ve seen in years of looking even a basic definition in writing of their alleged alarmist CAGW hypotheses; there seems to be more than one and they keep changing which can’t be a good sign as Feynman pointed out. It’s more like the alarmists are in a climate of changing hypotheses as each one is debunked. Damn another science reference not referred to with a citation. So shoot me.

I have been a victim of plagiarism.
I described my work to a professor at a major university. He seemed to show little interest and so I put the meeting out of my mind. About a year later, I attended a local conference at which the professor gave a talk describing his new work. I was very surprised to hear my ideas bing described with no modification. He had a year to work on the ideas but had not made any progress. A short time after the talk, the professor and I crossed paths in the exhibition area outside of one of the lecture halls. We made eye contact and it was clear that we both knew what was going on. I had made progress on the ideas in the year but he was still spouting the same ideas that I had told him a year before under a signed non-disclosure.
I was even more surprised a year later when I opened a Scientific American in a bookstore near my home. There was a major article describing the professor’s work. My ideas were still there and in much the same state as they had been when I told him about them years before.
I also know of some one who went to a C level engineering manager to obtain advice on how to make an idea known within a research organization. He was surprised when he then saw a report from the manager describing these ideas and attributing them to himself. He complained to the divisional VP who took care of the matter.
I was a victim of plagiarism and I know the effect of the idea theft. I did the hard work and a lazy professor stole the result of that work. I know what plagiarism is. I do not see any plagiarism in the descriptions of Wegman’s report. he did not try to obtain credit for the work of others. he did not attempt to steal any ideas.

AntoonDV said:
“Plagiarism means using the exact words, opinions, or factual information from another person without giving that person credit.”
Fair enough. Let’s also keep in mind that there is a concept of generally-understood information in a field. A physicist who writes a book and has an introductory chapter on basic physics concepts would likely in that chapter include much information, even descriptions, that are very similar to what a thousand other people have said before. But if it is generally-understood information in the field, it is not necessary to scour the world to determine if someone else wrote about it first and then cite them.
Where it crosses the line is with the word “exact” in the university’s definition you cite (and “exact” doesn’t have to be quite “exact’ in the logical sense; taking a long passage with only minimal changes would be “exact” enough). In cases where exact language, or specific opinions or factual information that is not generally known in the field come into play, a citation, reference or acknowledgement is appropriate.
It sounds like there are some passages in Wegman’s report that cross that line, just as there is a similar situation with Team members that ZT cites at 3:49 above. If so, Wegman should acknowledge the failure to cite/refer/acknowledge and strive to do better.
Now, then, the question is whether Wegman’s analysis of the hockey stick is affected as a result? Well, we might have slightly less trust in Wegman’s ability to be scrupulously accurate in everything he wrote, so in that sense it is relevant. But only just barely. On the substance of the statistical critique of the hockey stick, the analysis remains and the main thrust of the Wegman report stands.
I have to agree with some commenters that the Team can’t be happy with all this renewed attention being paid to the Wegman report. It will come back to bite them.

In my experience of observing some pretty vigorous social movements, the ones who cry ‘conspiracy’ the most are the ones engaging in it.
AGW promoters, from Hansen to Gore to Mann, to Pachurai, to Obama to Holdren all depend on conspiracy to keep their faithful in line.
AGW is a fascinating social dysfunction.