One of the bloggers over at ScienceBlogs, this happy looking guy at left, seems to have a real problem with people (me) interpreting Twitter feeds in ways that perhaps the originators didn’t intend (or like).
I don’t follow Twitter feeds, though my blog does provide a feed to notice new posts. That’s all I use it for.
I find it hilarious that James Hrynyshyn can get upset about this, citing my “lack of research into a Twitter quote”, which I found on the Bishop Hill Blog in this post http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/1/16/mooney-on-climategate.html
(note the h/t to Bish and quote in my original article)
But truth is often stranger than fiction.
Had Bishop Hill not noticed and blogged on it, this lone tweet would never have been known by me, because as I said I don’t follow Twitter feeds. Bishop Hill’s blog is where it started, but it seems you missed that story and the 109 comments with it.
And while we are in the vein of Hrynyshyn’s “no serious journalist uses Twitter” discussion, I’ll point out that NYT’s Andy Revkin seems to put quite a bit of substance into Twitter.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/vanishing-planet-in-140-amusing-characters/
Mr. Hrynyshyn laments the 140 character limit as not being worthy of a serious journalist.
“The point is, why would anyone ever assume that a tweet was accurate, representative or useful for anything more than a starting point for further research. I mean, there’s only 140 characters to go on…”
Well, newsflash buddy, radio/TV sound bytes and quotes in newspaper articles aren’t much different in size. Take this quote in yesterday’s Guardian from NASA GISS Scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt, International Man of Mystery, who sounded the alarm on the impossible claims of a climate paper:
In an email, Gavin Schmidt, a Nasa climatologist wrote: “2.4C by 2020 (which is 1.4C in the next 10 years – something like six to seven times the projected rate of warming) has no basis in fact.”
Let’s see…using this free online tool, it counts 137 characters for Gavin, including punctuation. That’s comfortably a tweet sized quote in a major globally read newspaper.
But, being the big evil tweet mangling guy that I am who doesn’t apparently understand the role of full context journalism, I offered my forum to Dr. Petersen in good faith to allow his side of his story (with fuller context) to be told, even though I’m not in agreement with him on many issues.
Unfortunately Mr. Hrynyshyn while at the same time bashing me for “incomplete Twitter research” (my take on his post) and supposedly holding a grudge, doesn’t do any research of his own at all and misses the facts as to why Dr. Peterson and I are at odds over surface data.
Dr. Peterson ghost wrote a critique of the surfacestations project via NCDC:
Science done anonymously from a government agency to harangue a nationwide citizen effort (650 volunteers) where we found only 1 in 10 climate stations in compliance with NOAA’s most basic 100 foot rule? It seems rather revealing that Dr. Petersen would not put his name to that. Unfortunately for him he did, but just didn’t know it at the time and he got exposed for it.
And then later, his NCDC companions “borrowed” (against my protests) my preliminary non quality controlled data (published on the website for the volunteers to check progress and compare notes) to beat me to publishing a paper before we had the surfacestations project even finished:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/rumours-of-my-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated/
That’s “quality science” according to Hrynyshyn? Heh. It’s more like a dark political game if you ask me. On the plus side, being first does not always mean being best.
Dr. Peterson and the 2011 Sci bloggers conference have probably learned a valuable lesson. If you don’t want people to write about something without full context, don’t provide a live Twitter feed left hanging in the Ether afterwards without also providing a recording of the live video/audio feed afterwards.
Having a live feed of an event is great, but not everyone can catch it; as Bish lamented: “I discovered the talk too late to pick up the live stream…“. A video/audio recording is what’s really needed. I looked for one, and found none that day I wrote about Peterson’s “knife fight” comment. It’s dead now:
I would venture that if you don’t want people to draw conclusions you don’t like from Twitter, don’t use it to post a stream of snippeted consciousness. But they seemed pretty big on the idea of Tweets, as it got top billing on the website header:
In fact, they seem pretty darned proud of all the @scio11 tweets, as the top entry in the Scio2011 conference blog displays:
Gosh, almost 10,000 tweets from 1200 contributors and 3000 tweets the day that Dr. Petersen spoke. It seems like a veritable Tweet Orgy. But Mr. Hrynyshyn seems to think that I should not have paid any attention at all to this mass of well advertised (and apparently proud of) tweeting. He writes:
Clearly, the major offender here was not Chris Rowan, but Anthony Watts
For those who don’t know, Chris Rowan of Highly Allochtonous is the guy who made the tweet about Dr. Peterson. He made no follow ups to explain the context, as his next few tweets on his feed show (timeline runs bottom to top):
It seems nobody else was much concerned about the “knife fight” context then either. Ditto for the main Scio2011 Twitter feed at the same time:
Had Scio2011 provided a web accessible recording of their live video/audio feed, anybody could check the context in which Dr. Peterson delivered the “knife fight” remark. As it stands now, many (involved or not) seem to be speculating about the context that Petersen delivered that remark.
So if there’s any recording from the conference, let’s settle that issue once and for all by putting up a video/audio recording of the 2011 Sci Bloggers conference during the session Dr. Peterson spoke in, so we can all see exactly what that context was.
So far, the video recordings they’ve produced out of Scio2011 amount to a whole lotta nothing. Hopefully that’s just a temporary oversight while everyone is letting their thumbs recover.
UPDATE: Bishop Hill writes in comments:
I actually emailed the organisers about when the archive of the “knife fight” session would be available. No reply.
Sorry Anthony,
I have just had a very successful dinner party with Professor Tony Kelly, one of the gang of four who got the Royal Society to tone down their alarmist position on climate.
I can barely type. It started with Veuve, and then a number of very good McLarne Vale shiraz, or whateve the plural of shiraz is.
All I want to say is, woudn’t it be better if Twitter was in haiku?
REPLY: Be sure to take a cab back to the hotel. Heh, yes. I’m sure Lucia can come up with a Twitter haiku, as well as our many readers. – Anthony
Promoted to “pseudoskeptic” eh?
So, a “communications consultant” organises a conference session and the “communications” go wrong… Pseudo what now?
I actually emailed the organisers about when the archive of the “knife fight” session would be available. No reply.
I just don’t understand the whole concept of Twitbook & Facetwat….why are people so obsessed with there own self that they need to megaphone the world thier opinions.
Said me, blogging on a forum to a bunch of people I don’t know….
Er……
The polite response (in English) to ” Hrynyshyn”, is “Bless you”, and in German “Gesundheit”.
So now Hrynyshyn is a literary critic as well? He apparently is not into Reader-response criticism. He doesn’t believe his tweets take on a life of their own.
Apparently he’s into authorial intent. So the burden of proof is on everyone to check his intention every time they want to dialogue with him or about his content. Seems very inefficient and immature.
“The point is, why would anyone ever assume that a tweet was accurate, representative or useful for anything more than a starting point for further research.”
Because some people know how to be terse and accurate.
I take it there will be no guessing where that webcam was or what Mr Hrynyshyn was doing when that photo was taken then?
Ukrainian (to my knowledge, mostly Western Ukraine – Lviv and so). That region supplied the most Ukrainian immigrants to the New World, and today there are hundreds of Hrynyshyns in Canada, most of them with English first names.
The original Ukrainian spelling is Гринишин, however.
Makes you wonder what’s going on in someone’s mind…
…when they think that’s a glamor shot
“mikef2 says:
January 20, 2011 at 8:18 am”
Twitter, I just don’t get. Who cares if I have just had a dump, or opened a book? Facebook OTOH, is where almost everone I know, knows I am there, and, largely, they are there too. I recently found a school mate from the 1970’s! So its, “sort of”, community IMO.
[snip unfair to Mr. Hrynyshyn]
“…had his reputation impugned by those who have no respect for the facts…”
Who is he talking about? Surely not Anthony or Bishop Hill or CA. I’ve learned more about the facts from these three sources than from anywhere else.
Twittering Heights and Knife Fights, bloggers issuing 140 character comments; snapshots of consciousness w/o context …
Noise; turn up the squelch control or enable CTCSS or DPL …
.
Now “MapleLeaf” wants Watts and McIntyre in front of the courts… (see comment section in Dave Clarke’s latest post at DC).
Pfff this guy is still working on his PhD and has too much time on his hands…
REPLY: Can’t find it, looks like Deep Climate must have removed it. – Anthony
It would have been entertaining to see a character count in every comment in this thread… 🙂
I kinda thought my post would be snipped. I decided to try it as a test of your standards. Now I know. But he is a little creepy.
Patrick Davis says:
January 20, 2011 at 7:59 am
“Jeremy says:
January 20, 2011 at 7:14 am”
Anthony has provided a link ( see the second line in the post). Go there. Then note you are on a blog called “Class: M” that derives from a Star Trek reference (link there) as explained by Mr. Hrynyshyn. Mr. H seems to have started out with an interest in a variety of subjects but latched on to climate change as the big issue. One would have to read some of his postings to know why. Perhaps he can point to the one or two postings that expound on his conversion to AGW.
(or Anthony could invite him to summarize his ideas and post here at WUWT)
———————————
On a side note: Predicador responded to John Marshall about Mr. H’s last name – in reference to vowels. Vowels are sounds as well as symbols. Y and W were tacked on at the end of the list in my grade school classes. An explanation is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel#Written_vowels
John Marshall says:
January 20, 2011 at 6:26 am
If I wanted a name with no vowels that would be the one.
Name = “Hrynyshyn”
Number of vowels = 3
Vowels = A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y (emphasis mine)
For some reason this reminded me of The Man With Two Brains, with Steve Martin as Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr.
As the immortal Bugs Bunny once said “Whatta maroon!”. 🙂
I wonder if they will ever realize that skeptics are not armed with knives or nukes
… merely questions.
naughty, naughty Hoser says: [snip funny but unfair to Mr Hrynyshyn]
3×2 says: “I take it there will be no guessing where that webcam was or what Mr Hrynyshyn was doing when that photo was taken then?”
Absolutely not. We’ll just have to use our imaginations. (I did, and I agree, it would have been very, very unfair not to snip that.) But maybe Mr. H could amplify on the limits of tweeting, itself; as SSam says: “Consider me a Luddite if you wish, but I believe tweets are for twits.”
From Wikipedia (even though not always the most reliable source):
Communication is a process whereby meaning is defined and shared between living organisms. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender’s intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space. Communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of communicative commonality. The communication process is complete once the receiver has understood the sender.
As “James Hrynyshyn is a communications consultant and freelance science journalist based in Western North Carolina.” , he should realise that Twitter is an extremely poor communication device, SO DON’T USE IT.
One would disappear up one’s fundamental orifice if you use Twitter to ask for the context of a Tweet as you then need to ask for the context of the request for context, then the context of the context of the (……..ad infinitum).
In Australia, even our politicians are using Twitter to make major policy announcements, then wondering why they are so misunderstood. The only benefit is that we only have to put up with 140 character at a time from a politician, so it’s not all bad.
Well played Ant Man. This guy comes across as a total Tweeb.