More on the Mashey-Wegman issue. Part 1 is here
Guest post by Thomas Fuller
John Mashey has written one of those conspiracy theory plots full of colored dots and ink, accusing Edward Wegman of plagiarizing the work of Raymond Bradley and others in his key report to Congress showing the deep flaws in the paper Bradley wrote with Michael Mann and Malcolm Hughes regarding the Hockey Stick Chart.
Bishop Hill has so far said what needed to be said most succinctly:
there are two possibilities in play:
Wegman et al are guilty of plagiarism; short-centred principal components analysis is biased and can produce hockey sticks from red noise
Wegman et al are not guilty of plagiarism; short-centred principal components analysis is biased and can produce hockey sticks from red noise.
There is a bit of meat with John’s Mashed potatoes, sadly, and I’ll get to it in a minute. But let’s get rid of the twisted conspiracy theory garbage first.
In yesterday’s article I noted that it was extremely strange that Mashey would make as his first point the fact that the Congressional sub committee that commissioned Wegman turned over the results of the work they had done prior to Wegman starting his analysis. This is absolutely normal and uncontroversial, but Mashey writes as if it’s evidence of conspiracy, something he seems to find everywhere he looks.
It is also bizarre that Mashey thinks it wrong that works mentioned in the bibliography to Wegman’s report are not cited. This is clearly evidence that Mashey doesn’t understand very much at all about how anything really works. As anybody familiar with publishing knows, the reason a bibliography exists is to show the reader what the author read, precisely because the works may not be cited in the text. But again, this becomes black helicopter conspiracy for Mashey.
But there is a little meat with Mahsey’s potatoes. Please continue.
About half the plagiarization accusations in Mashey’s paper don’t even concern the Wegman report, targeting the recent McShane Wyner paper and dissertations and other collegiate work done by some of Wegman’s associates. Given that the title of Mashey’s report is Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, I don’t really see what criticism of other work is doing there. I guess it’s all there to prove a grand conspiracy.
But there is a little meat with Mahsey’s potatoes. Please continue.
In case you think I’m making this conspiracy stuff up, just read pages like 103 of Mashey’s report. It isn’t about Wegman at all. It’s about McShane Wyner,
In a report accusing Edward Wegman of plagiarism, Mashey writes this about an unrelated paper published 4 years later:
“MW, p.2, Paragraph 3
―On the other hand, the effort of world governments to pass legislation to cut carbon to pre-industrial levels cannot proceed without the consent of the governed and historical reconstructions from paleoclimatological models have indeed proven persuasive and effective at winning the hearts and minds of the populace. Consider Figure 1 which was featured prominently in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC, 2001) in the summary for policy makers1. The sharp upward slope of the graph in the late 20th century is visually striking, easy to comprehend, and likely to alarm. The IPCC report goes even further:
‖<B> ―world governments … consent of the governed‖
When one Googles the 6 words above,50 many hits espouse strong conservative/Libertarian political views. Those are fine in the political arena, but not in statistics papers people expect to be credible. From past experience, 51 strong political/ideological beliefs can cause a few physics PhDs to ignore basic laws of physics.”
But there is meat to go with Mashey’s potatoes.
Wegman’s report examined the relationships between the very small community of scientists working in and around the field of paleoclimatology. This is because after Mann’s Hockey Stick chart began receiving criticism, a flurry of papers were suddenly published supporting his results–and they all received prominent attention and temporarily saved Mann’s reputation. But, as Steve McIntyre pointed out, these scientists were all closely connected to Michael Mann, being co-authors, co-bloggers, mentors and advisers of his. Worse, they used the same suspect data and the same discredited analysis techniques.
Wegman formalized an examination of Mann’s compatriots using a relatively new discipline called Social Network Analysis. And in his report to Congress, when Wegman explains what Social Network Analysis is, he copies someone else’s introduction of the science and doesn’t attribute it at all. (It looks like Wikipedia is copied, which means that someone else probably got copied to get it into Wikipedia. There is even the slight chance that Wikipedia copied Wegman, considering dates and such, but that would be just too delicious, so it probably didn’t happen that way.)
So it looks like Wegman and his team did something wrong. They used someone else’s description of social networking analysis and didn’t credit them.
But as near as I can tell, that’s it. And to put their error into perspective, let’s look at how other independent professionals describe social networking analysis without attributing each other:
Social network analysis is concerned with understanding the linkages among social entities and the implications of these linkages. The social entities are referred to as actors that are represented by the vertices of the graph.
Wegman Report
It is concerned with understanding the linkages among social entities and the implications of these linkages. The social entities are referred to as actors that are represented by the vertices of the graph. Most social network applications consider a collection of vertices that are all of the same
WK Sharabati
A social network analysis must also consider data on ties among units” … The entities in digraphs are called nodes and the relations are ….. The density measure describes general level of linkage among the actors in the community
Kilkenny and Nalbarte
A relation is represented as a linkage or a flow between these … relationships among social entities. In Social Network Analysis we can ….. network is referred to this focal person, and every relation is reported by the ego. …. “nodes” of the graph, and the “ties” between actors in the network become “lines”
F Martino
Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of network theory consisting of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors.
Wikipedia
Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes.
Valdis Krebs
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
Elise says: October 10, 2010 at 3:47 pm
“@Nick
short-centred principal components analysis is biased and can produce hockey sticks from red noise”
Elise, tell me more. Who do you think has actually used “short-centred principal components? And when?
Actually, the wide circulation of Montford’s eccentric phrase “short-centred” is a giveaway. A lot of “let’s talk about the science” is just parroting.
But OK – Mann used decentred normalisation in 1998, probably by mistake. It isn’t a good idea, and the many reconstructions since that have shown a hockey-stick shape did not use it. Several of these were published prior to Wegman’s report. So Wegman’s structures against it are just empty.
But to complete that, Wahl and Ammann in 2006 showed that even if you analysed the Mann’s original data with centred normalisation, and with more PC’s (MBH lack of which was also criticised) it made very little difference.
So what else did Wegman say? Social Networks Analysis? Or was that someone else?
DL says:
October 10, 2010 at 6:11 pm
I have been a victim of plagiarism.
Me too.
bigcitylib says:
“Wegman led the team and signed off on the report. The issue is with him.”
Not in all circumstances. If I may speculate? Thank you:
For instance, if a postdoc had been given an assignment to write a preliminary report based on the Wegman et al. findings, and cut ‘n’ pasted parts to make his job easier, he probably wouldn’t go to the boss and admit it.
If someone cut corners but did not make Prof Wegman aware of it, you might re-think your absolute statement above. There are always exceptions, no? Certainly Prof Wegman would not accept any work product that he knew had been copied; why not just use it and give an attribution? If it turns out as you believe, that Wegman fiendishly schemed to purloin the intellectual property of others and deliberately refused to give them attribution, then he deserves whatever he gets.
But that is far from proven, in fact the different rules and opinions being quoted here show that there isn’t even agreement that anything improper has been done. In that case the accusation is a baseless diversion.
The real problem is Michael Mann’s deliberate selection of bad proxies like the upside-down Tiljander series, and using much smaller, carefully selected tree ring samples out of the large number readily available. This chart shows the hockey stick result of cherry-picking a few trees, compared to using the whole data base. And Mann knew beforehand about the sediment problem in Tijlander, but he went ahead and published using bad data anyway, because it gave him the hockey stick he was looking for.
Prof Wegman is one individual. If he’s as bad as you claim, it will come out and he’ll be toast. But if he’s brought front and center and found to be innocent, the spotlight will naturally turn to the misappropriation of taxpayer funds that originally involved Prof Wegman in this. If Mann skewed his results to obtain more funding by knowingly using faulty data to falsely show six centuries of flat temperatures, then that needs investigating. And it must be in an adversarial setting, with witnesses called by both sides. Otherwise it will be either a whitewash or a kangaroo court.
Mann’s chart made the current natural cyclical upswing of a few tenths of a degree appear to be extremely alarming. He greatly benefitted as a result. When the hand-waving about Wegman is settled, we can get back to the main focus: Wegman’s statistical methods and conclusions have never been falsified.
I thought Sen. Inhofe’s Minority Report on CRU Emails was an excellent example of how to cite references to Congress. If you’ve never downloaded & read this one, it is well worth your time!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/23/climategate-minority-report/
I agree with Eric@ur momisugly 6:19 pm that “…plagiarism is not an actionable offense under the law. Rather, it is an academic standard.” However, plagiarism is increasingly being used in the political arena to discredit opponents. It implies, but does not prove, dishonest intent.
Please see http://blog.ithenticate.com/2010/09/plagiarism-could-impact-midterm-elections/
A review of Bradley’s letter would be helpful, but my first impression was that his claim extended only to his own words. Bradley is the key here, not Mashy, even if he is trying to bootstrap and pile on to Bradley’s letter to obfuscate its resolution.
Also, why is this university involved? It had no part in this report. Their employment relationship did not extend to this report. Is the GWU willingly stepping in to save the TEAM?
Let me see if I can get this right…
-Anonymous (AKA Doug) via the Fanged Furry Death Site.
…close?
Nick Stokes says:
“But OK – Mann used decentred normalisation in 1998, probably by mistake. It isn’t a good idea, and… etc.”
Ah. The incompetence defense…
☺
Lazar says:
October 10, 2010 at 5:05 pm (Edit)
Steven Mosher,
“I would not see it as plagarism for they are not clearly trying to pass off the prefatory material as a piece of original work.”
plagiarism isn’t restricted to appropriation of ideas… when someone is copying an expression of ideas they are appropriating someone else’s ‘work’… expression comes under the definition of work… when you don’t use quotation marks you are laying claim to that expression… all definitions of plagiarism i’ve read cover this, e.g. from GMU’s Historical News Network…
#############
when I say ” I would not consider it to be plagiarism” you do not win points by directing me to definitions. I’m fully aware of the definitions. I am saying this.
As a person who had to decide on whether to bring my students up on charges, as a person in my department who people came to to figure out whether or not students plagiarized, I am telling you this: I would not consider it plagiarism. In full possession of the definitions you give I would still not consider it to be plagiarism.
By that I mean I would not refer such a case for charges.
The citizens of The United States of America are being intentionally misled, by some of its elected/appointed officials. Treason, due to the scope of possible damages, may best describe some policies, rather than pure incompetence.
Plagiarism be damned, this is now a fight for freedom.
For those like Nick Stokes that likes to keep pointing to a an old revision of the Wikipedia article on Social Networks (but not the one where was added to Wikipedia), you might want to go over to the Air Vent and look in the comments:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/as-copygate-turns/
Myself and others have found the so called wiki paragraph in other publications, books and journals prior to Wikipedia having it, Wikipedia just changed the words a little. Here is an example from a Masters Thesis done in March of 2005 and put on the Web in April 2005 (page 26):
http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/publications/paperlink/papag.pdf
Another example from Sept 2 of 2005 (4 days prior to Wikipedia adding it on the 6th):
http://www.knowledgestreet.com/Knowledge_Street_Report_-_BLL_ikonnect.pdf
What is interesting is that both papers basically say the same thing but they have no references in common in their bibliography and they do not have a cite on those paragraphs either to the place they got them from.
Dumbest debate ever:
1. Nothing alleged changes any conclusions reached.
2. As stated by others (a jones, 4:48pm), this was a congressional report and no plagiarism or copyright infringement can apply.
Well, I think this is a very good idea. When all the AGW proponents begin to flee the CO2 paradigm, and need a new home, they will have to reference me and the Kriegesmarine Hypothesis every time they refer to ocean surface pollution changing albedo, aerosol production, cloud physics and wind/surface engagement.
Off topic a little: I wish Lindzen would not embrace the ‘denier’ word. ‘Dissident’, Professor, you are a climate dissident. The first word has unpleasant connotations, the second is all positive, romantic, and has the advantage of being really irritating to those who would rather you toed the party line.
JF
Does any charge of plagiarism affect the substance of Wegman’s report, or is it merely a case of throwing mud at a wall? Looks to me that the result is not in doubt, so our alarmist friends are just hoping some of the mud sticks.
You know, this comes to mind…
DaveE.
boballab says:
October 10, 2010 at 7:16 pm
Let’s put this in perspective. Social Networking Analysis is NOT new. Ferdinand Toennies wrote about networks in the 1880s. Wegman’s text could easily date from the 1960’s or even earlier, making it “common knowledge”
When trying to find exactly how far back in time that particular paragraph reached (found one example from Nov 2004) I kept seeing references to works dating back to the 1930’s. The ancient roots of SNA plus finding examples of that particular paragraph all over the place, with no citations, led me to believe it is basically something that comes from a text book from back in the past.
Nick Stoke says
=========================
But to complete that, Wahl and Ammann in 2006 showed that even if you analysed the Mann’s original data with centred normalisation, and with more PC’s (MBH lack of which was also criticised) it made very little difference
==========================
The short centred PCA mined for the hockey stick shape and found it in PC1. it is the bristlecones. Standard PCAs do not mine for hockey sticks and therefore the bristlecone factor was demoted to PC4. Now Mann was presented with a problem, He needed the bristlecone PC but it had been demoted. So what was his solution — he used more PCs.So Mann had his solution, he could keep the bristlecones by using more PCs and so a rule was found to keep more PCs. Why 5 PCs and not 1; well why not; – well why not 50; why not 100 why not keep them all? As long as the bruslecones are there and you can claim that they represent temperature; all is right with the world.
So the shape of NA temperature history is revealed by examining tree rings in a particular stand of bristlecone pines in the southwestern US. That the bristlecones on the next mountain over do not exhibit the bristlecone shape is a topic that is not mentioned in polite company or around nervous climatologists.
A major difference between climatatolgy and scientific disciplines is that in science progress is made by falsifying ideas. In climatology nobody can admit that a result or theory has been falsified. it is always that the falsification makes “very little difference”
“Overall the network includes 112 proxies, and each series has been formatted into annual mean anomalies relative to the reference period used for this data, 1902-1980.”
When compared to MBH98, page 779, it does indeed look similar:
“The long instrumental records have been formed into annual mean anomalies relative to the 1902–80 reference period, …”
Doh. I honestly had no idea that was plagiarism. I thought it had to be verbatim to be plagiarism. Man, I used the plagiarize the hell out of my history reports in school.
boballab says: October 10, 2010 at 7:16 pm
“For those like Nick Stokes …you might want to go over to the Air Vent and look in the comments:”
Bob, I saw that, and was quite interested in what you had found. But I couldn’t see how the origins of the Wiki article are relevant. Could a student caught pasting a Wiki article into an assignment escape by arguing that the Wiki article wasn’t original?
The real issue is that the Wegman report was supposed to represent the considered opinion of an eminent statistician, and so to carry weight. If it turns out to include stuff pasted from Wiki, people feel cheated. And it really doesn’t help to say that the pasting was done by junior interns.
The fact remains that the text on SNA was copied wholesale from the Wikipedia article as it existed in January of 2006 w/o attribution. This is clearly plagiarism of the first order and is an attempt to cover up a lack of expertise in this area, just as the lifting of text from Bradley was an attempt to cover up a lack of expertise in the area of paleoclimate reconstruction.
Wegman might have been a fine participant on the NRC panel, but heading up a report on an area of science about which he knew nothing was not an appropriate assignment. He just compounded the problems by venturing into another area, SNA, about which he knew nothing. These facts bring into question all of his conclusions except the criticism of Mann’s use of improperly centered PCA, and even that is questionable since he ignored a comment from one of his “reviewers” which suggested that he redo the Mann analysis using properly centered PCA (something which Wahl and Ammann did do and showed that it had no effect on the conclusions of the papers in question). All of this is covered in the Mashey report.
The litigation mentioned in the USA Today article appears to be connected with Elsevier as mentioned in Donald Rapp’s somewhat intemperate comment in the threat attached to that article. So yes, copyright violations appear to be involved with regards to the wholesale copying from Bradley’s text.
Nick you missed the point. You keep stating that Wegman took it from Wiki, however since we have shown that Wiki isn’t the original source and that Wiki did not Cite where they took it from, you can not prove the Wegman report lifted it from there, they could have taken it from one of the other places I found it such as this:
http://clicks.weebly.com/social-networking.html
That comes from a link dated Nov 2004. So until we can trace it back to the original source we have no clue where the Wegman report got it from. Also take notice that each one of these links that I found that date prior to the Wiki Article including it on Sept 6, 2005 do not cite where they got it from, so that paragraph could be as common in people studying Social Networks as E=MC squared in Physics. Now do I need to cite where I got the equation E=MC squared to show where it came from? Oh look it’s on Wikipedia I must have plagiarized it from them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence
Getting the point now?
DL says:
I have been a victim of plagiarism.
Jimmy Haigh says:
Me too.
I say:
Me too.
It was back around ’55, in my eighth grade math class. C. Skinner would regularly plagiarize my test answers, that is, until the day I experimented with a little double booking–one test paper conspicuously displayed with close-but-no-cigar answers, and a second surreptitious page with the right answers, destined to be turned in. Sometime plagiarism carries its own reward. : >)
But tell me, how much of MBH 98 would any competent statistician want to plagiarize?
just like I pointed out to Nick, you can not prove that Wegman took it from Wikipedia since Wikipedia is not the original source and they did not cite it either. Since you can’t seem to grasp this basic point, it means Wikipedia copied it from somewhere else.
Now are going to tell me you have read the mind of everyone involved in the Wegman report and know for a fact that they took it from Wikipedia? or could it possibly be they took it from the same place Wikipedia did? Do you know where Wikipedia got it? coulfd it have been from a paper or book that a member of the Wegman committee wrote?
Until we know where that passage originated from and who wrote it, you can not state as fact that Wegman (the person) plagiarized it from Wikipedia. That is why you need to wait for the investigation to go forward and to interview the committee members as well as look at any notes and records the committee used to see where it came from.
And to put their error into perspective, let’s look at how other independent professionals describe social networking analysis without attributing each other:
Social network analysis is concerned with understanding the linkages among social entities and the implications of these linkages. The social entities are referred to as actors that are represented by the vertices of the graph.
Wegman Report
It is concerned with understanding the linkages among social entities and the implications of these linkages. The social entities are referred to as actors that are represented by the vertices of the graph. Most social network applications consider a collection of vertices that are all of the same
WK Sharabati
Hardly independent!
boballab says: October 10, 2010 at 9:28 pm
“Getting the point now?”
No, not at all. The point is that the text is presented as Wegman’s, and isn’t. To say it is of unknown provenance, rather than from Wiki, is not helpful at all.