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
Poor Nick Stokes. He feels cheated because Wegman may possibly have copied a definition of something.
Tell me Nick, did you feel cheated when you found out that the bristle cone pines were discredited? How about when the statistical analysis turned out to be so poorly done that incompetance barely explained it? Did you feel cheated upon learning about a reconstruction that turned out to be based on just 7 trees, with 50% of the weighting from just one? Did you feel cheated when you learned that 60 years of tree ring data had been quietly replaced with thermometer readings because the tree rings “diverged” but we’re still supposed to accept the previous 940 years as accurate?
Really Nick? A definition in common use was possibly copied from somewhere which changes the conclusions not one bit and you feel cheated? Because of a skipped foot note? If Mann’s work had stood up, Copenhagen would have resulted in 20% or so of your pay cheque being transferred to people like Robert Mugabe. Would that make you feel better?
Nick Stokes says:
October 10, 2010 at 3:19 pm
“Here’s just one of the para’s taken from Wikipedia “Social Networks”
Nick, you’ve just implicated Wikipedia in plagiarism. I did some research, the paragraph in question, with minor changes, has been on Wiki unreferenced from 30Oct2004 to 3July2008, when it was footnoted as you would see it now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
“Scott, John. 1991. Social Network Analysis. London: Sage.”
The Wiki user who originally entered it wrote
“The shape of the social network has been found to be a key factor in a network’s usefulness to the individuals it includes. Tighter networks, for example, are actually less useful to their members than networks with lots of empty spaces (social holes) or loose connections to other individuals outside the main network (weak ties). More open networks, with many weak ties and social holes, are more likely to introduce new ideas and opportunities to their members than closed networks with many redundant ties. In other words, a group of friends who only do things with each other already share the same knowledge and opportunities. A group of individuals where each has connections to other social worlds is likely to have access to a wider range of information.”
Seems that User’s last contribution was that same day in 2004, and left a question about where he got it from unanswered
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Goodoldpolonius
This still leaves the next paragraphs in question. Goodoldpolonius did leave an “external link” (not specific to the paragraphs in question):
“Introduction to Social Network Methods (PDF) is a free online textbook that explains the details of social network theory.”
This goes to a UCR.edu server, file not found. Today the second paragraph is not footnoted, but the third is, to
“Wasserman, Stanley, and Faust, Katherine. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.”
Make up your own mind where Wiki got all this, whether it is correct, and whether Wegman plagiarized someone else’s writing. It may be a good guess, but Wiki isn’t the place for evidence.
I thought students weren’t allowed to quote wiki, because unattributed. It can be made up by anyone.
But if what is being disputed here is simply bog standard knowledge of the background then how is this any reflection on the skills Wegman brought to this?
Whatever. You guys are splitting hairs and you’re all falling into the trap of divide and conquer. The warmers want to create dissension and take the spotlight off of the real point. The more they can do that the less lethal the result to their cause.
The quibbling is about a technical detail, forget it and concentrate on the end result.
Lets take translations. Can there be an accusation of plagiarism in translations?
Particularly poem translations.
I will give you an example. There exist translations of poetry from greek to english on the net. I found that my favorite greek poet was translated woodenly. All it needed was a shift in syntax and a change in a few words to make it closer to the original spirit of the poem. I did it and put it up on the web ( as a physicist I do not publish on poems 🙂 ), never thinking of attributing the first translation, since google translate would do about the same job of finding words from the dictionary.
Where does plagiarism accusation stop?
The introductory paragraphs that are used for the accusation, as far as I can see could be entries from an encyclopedia. If so it should have been in the bibliography. If it is from standard textbooks they should have been in the bibliography. I doubt it that any students used the Wiki: even if they went there for first information they would go to the source for confirmation. Who trusts wiki? Now if they found the paragraph in one of the bibliographies of wiki they should have quoted the text book.
btw I would be happy if somebody plagiarized 🙂 my translations of the poems. It is the need to have the spirit correct and not the attribution that is important, and as far as I can see the spirit is correct in the report.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
October 10, 2010 at 9:22 pm
“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”
No, that is neither clear nor a fact, at least not on the evidence of a Wiki article that Wiki later cites as belonging to someone else. As to your claim of covering up a lack of expertise in the area of social networking, the Wegman Report prefaced the section with “2.3 Background on Social Networks”. Even assuming he plagiarized parts wouldn’t indicate a lack of expertise, nor was he claiming original work with respect to social networks, but provided a primer to Congress.
Mann publicly admitted on BBC that his hockey-stick graph was so uncertain that it should not have become an icon of the climate movement. The graph itself shows these huge uncertainties; a flat line can be dawn through the middle of the gray-colored uncertainty background. Furthermore, any reasonable person instantly suspected the appending of the instrument record to the end of the paleo-record. Why not just show the paleo record without the instrument record? Mann’s work is clearly highly uncertain and clearly cannot be taken for the proposition that it has gotten significantly warmer. Even if it could, it tells us nothing about CO2 caused warming. Except, as Mosher pointed out, is does show that climate sensitivity to CO2 MUST be very low.
The Weggman report is a report to congress not a scholarly paper. The only valid question one can ask of the report is this; was it correct in stating that the hockey-stick was invalid? However, since Mann publicly admitted early this year that the results were too uncertain to constitute a valid icon of the movement, any further discussion is moot and probably aimed causing confusion in the very important legal investigation of Mann’s use of federal and state grant money.
Of course, if Mann is guilty of gaming the grant-process that will tell us nothing about the validity of his work. But, since he admitted that the work was so uncertain as to be virtually worthless, we really don’t need to ask that question anymore.
We seem to be arguing for the sake of argument. Personally I think Mashey can be safely ignored. Let GMU sort it out.
dT
Glenn if you look up that broken reference in google you can find that document, it’s an online textbook and the paragraphs in question do not appear in it. Here is the document:
http://www.analytictech.com/networks.pdf
Nick are you taking the position that Wegman wrote the entire report himself without any input from the other committee members? You do realize that it was a committee?
That means until you know which committee member did that work you can’t pin it any one member. Also you keep wanting to say he got it from Wikipedia without one piece of evidence that any of the committee members took that passage from wikipedia. For all we know one of the other committee members, David W. Scott for example, found that passage in the same place the person that inserted into the Wikipedia article. If that’s the case (and we have just as much evidence for that as your Wegman plagiarized Wikipedia theory) you got the wrong person, copying from the wrong source, hence Wegman will be cleared.
Also you just stated he was passing it off as his own work. Nick the section it is in is titled:
http://noconsensus.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/07142006_wegman_report1.pdf
and nowhere in that section does any of the committee members use the words my research or my work. It is given as a text book background for the readers of the report. You are implying motive not actually showing motive, because nowhere in that section do they claim it as their own work. In section 5 of the report is where they do their own work and they show it.
I’m with Mosher on this, it was background that should have been cited for which text they took it out of but they were not trying to pass it off as their own research.
Here is something interesting that I found when looking up Yasmin Said who was on the committee. He along with Dr. Wegman in 2008 wrote a paper on Social Network Analysis and in it they reference a Text book from 1994 that myself and one other had narrowed it down to as where we think Wikipedia might have got it from:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1316213
I bolded the text book that it might have come from.
It does seem bizarre to draw attention to the social networking section of the Wegman report with a claim of plagiarism against the background preface. Especially after the Climategate leak showed that the situation was worse than Wegman indicated. Perhaps the Weman report was deficient. Possibly it did not go far enough. Could it be that Mann’s email 31/10/03 which included the line –
– Let’s let our supporters in higher places use our scientific response to push the broader case against M&M. –
requires further investigation? Just who were these supporters in higher places?
This looks like an exercise by a painter “Mashey” desperately trying to patch a portrait of Satan (Mann) to look like that of an Angel.
Stop being an idiot, John.
Nick Stokes says;
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.
————————————————————–
Nick, Nick, Nick. It was only yesterday that I called you out on this. These studies that you keep claiming vindicate the hockey stick, have been shown to use the same false data (bristlecone pine trees) that the NAS has accepted should not be used as temperature proxies. Without them, and that tree in Yamal (YAD06) that is also an awful and improperly used temperature proxy, you don’t get a hockey stick! Yet on an almost daily basis you are posting to blogs trying to convince someone that these studies have supported Mann’s work, when you know that they are fatally flawed and worthless. These studies deliberately used the bristlecone pine data, and the YAD06 data knowing that it is incorrect to do so. Of course they knew that they had to include them to arrive at the desired conclusion. 😉
Oh, and their statistical techniques were wrong too, as McShane and Wyner showed in their paper (they also included bristlecone pine data, and did NOT get a hockey stick!).
And these studies were not meant to refute Wegman’s report, but McIntyre and McKitrick’s report in 2003. Wegman’s report wasn’t until at least 2006. So your statement to that effect was pretty meaningless.
—————————————————————————-
You also said;
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.
—————————————————————————-
Oh please. As shown many times on many blogs, etc., McShane and Wyner showed that it mattered greatly. A dozen corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent studies can’t change that. In the future, more and more people will come to believe McShane & Wyner, because their science (i.e. the mathematics) is correct, and will withstand the test of time. Their work was
Like you accuse others of, almost everything you say is just empty. But worse than that, it is just plain dishonest.
Rattus Norvegicus says:
October 10, 2010 at 9:22 pm (Edit)
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.
#########
1. The purpose of quoting background material is NOT to establish that one has credentials in the area, but rather to establish that you have read the relavant texts.
Nobody thought before or has since thought that Wegman was a paleo guy. He was brought on to assess the statistics. The purpose of the bradley text is NOT to establish Wegman’s credentials in paleo. The best evidence of this is how skeptics have USED his report. They dont argue that “wegman was an independent paleo guy” they argue, “wegamn was a statistician, correcting the paleo guys stats”
So, your simply wrong about how the bradley text functions rhetorically. Freshman F.
You have a self defeating argument. The SNA work.. that’s a different matter.
Since I’m always chastising the skeptics here for focusing on weak arguments, I’ll suggest that the only meat in this story is in the SNA stuff.
Wahl and Amman have been brought up.
This is a helpful link about their paper:
The Jesus paper
(because it resurrects from the dead)
Bishop Hill – Andrew Montfort http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
McIntyre had to ask them several times to have them include R2 in their paper; which they didn’t want to do because it was close to zero.
‘Teacupgate’ overstates the importance of this very thinly-plotted and scored comic opera from Mashey et al – more like ‘Thimblegate’!
So Anthony, how does this proclamation compare to the use of your data etc from surfacestations by the US gov agencies without an form of ackowledgement. These people are pathetic. Oh and I note Stokes has had to poke at it. Unbelieveable.
Nick
page 131, lloks like these guys stole from Bradley as well. If he expects to defend his copyright then he has to go after them as well. after all They are selling a BOOK with his words
The Oxford Companion to Global Change, David Cuff and Andrew Goudie
“Variations in tree-ring widths from one year to the next have long been recognized as an important source of chronological and climatic information. [See dendrochronology] The mean width of a ring in any one tree is a function of many variables, including the tree species, its age, the availability of stored nutrients in the tree and surrounding soil, and a host of climatic factors, including temperature, precipitation and availability of sunlight.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=xuOdG6jNjl8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Oxford+Companion+to+Global+Change,+David+Cuff+and+Andrew+Goudie&source=bl&ots=Diyr6QZJ4z&sig=rpgVS7pDCnSErZrzR-IM0Lx_c_g&hl=en&ei=JcGyTPanJ4KqsAOxq9WHDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=tree-ring%20%20%20%20&f=false
NO attribution that I can see, unless [see dendrochronology counts]
So, I expect Bradley to be incensed by this
For Tom Lehrer fans … just substitute “socio” with “climate” (or dendro)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX5II-BJ8hI&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]
Nick Stokes says:
“But OK – Mann used decentred normalisation in 1998, probably by mistake. It isn’t a good idea, and… etc.”
Just to note that the idea that it was a mistake was raised with Mann et al by MacIntyre and Mckitrick. Mann denied that it was a mistake. And Mann used it again in 1999. And several other studies use Mann’s “PC1” which is a short-centred PC. The real issue, which all the discussion of numbers of PCs avoids, is that a pattern of growth which in fact only arose from the bristlecone pines and their cousins, was represented as a major component of tree ring growth in the northern hemisphere instead of a peculiarity of a few groups of non-randomly sampled trees mainly from the south west of the US which did not even correlate with local temperature.
Steven Mosher says:
October 11, 2010 at 1:01 am
You didn’t cite the source showing Bradley said that. And at the end of the section of Cuff and Goudie’s book on the next page after the quote, page 132 shows this:
“Bradley, R.S. Quaternary Paleoclimatology: Methods of Paleoclimatic Reconstruction. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985.”
Steven Mosher says: October 11, 2010 at 1:01 am
“No attribution that I can see”
I can’t see whether there is or not. Maybe US users get to see a more complete version. All I see is a tiny window with a fragment of the para – no context at all. Various people, including Glenn, say there’s a reference on the next page – I don’t know how it is connected to the quote.
Steven Mosher,
… so, using a highly non standard definition of ‘plagiarism’, you would not consider it to be ‘plagiarism’… is what you’re saying… ok
Nick Stokes says:
October 11, 2010 at 3:33 am
Steven Mosher says: October 11, 2010 at 1:01 am
“No attribution that I can see”
“I can’t see whether there is or not. Maybe US users get to see a more complete version. All I see is a tiny window with a fragment of the para – no context at all. Various people, including Glenn, say there’s a reference on the next page – I don’t know how it is connected to the quote.”
Click on Steven’s link, click on p.131, scroll down one page. Look under the Bibliography. It appears this is an end of chapter bibliography. It isn’t correctly cited, of course, since readers do not know which parts are referenced to a particular source, so we really don’t know if the paragraph in question is attributed to Bradley. Which is why I asked for the Bradley paper containing the quote.
Plagiarism and copyright have no standing in reports to Congress. All of Mashey’s and DC’s public psychotherapy is based upon this being an academic work. The Wegman report could have included a Blu-ray disk of Bambi and there would be nothing that Disneyland could do about it. It’s the whole point of reports, details only no cruft, no need to cover one’s backside, include what you deem necessary and let the lawmakers decide.
Boballab,
The word for word copying is unequivocal. Since Wiki is the best known research tool on the web, it is highly likely that Wiki was the source. Even if it wasn’t, it was still copied wholesale from some other source. You posit that this could have come from something written by Wegman or Said which would be possible, if either of them had written anything about social networks in the past. But they hadn’t, so that possibility is out the window. Now the Wiki article might have been written by the author of the weebly article you link to or we might have an instance of chain plagiarism here.
In the early 1990s I had a demonstration from Network Analytics who had a remarkable piece of analytical software called NetMap which ran on a Sun station for analysing the relationships in “social networks” (their words) – they were demonstrating commmunication linkages in a business organisational context and how the relationships could be inferred from the answers to seemingly non-intrusive questions [I understood that their major source of income came from organisations seeking to understand the shape of criminal networks]. That software still exists and I understand is still in used by Police and other analysts.
My point of course is that descriptions of Social networks were extant outside academic circles well before MBH98 never mind any paper which referred to it in a citation.