Post updated below – see my own experience with plagiarism by NOAA and how it was solved easily – Anthony
I get word that USA Today reports that the caterwaulings of the anonymous Canadian named Deep Climate and his accusations of plagiarism made against Dr. Edward Wegman in the Wegman report to Congress, which later became the paper Said et al, (published in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis) has succeeded.
The paper, which revealed some questionable behavior by climate scientists has been yanked by the journal’s legal team after it went through a private 3 person review. Here’s what USA Today says:
The journal publisher’s legal team “has decided to retract the study,” said CSDA journal editor Stanley Azen of the University of Southern California, following complaints of plagiarism. A November review by three plagiarism experts of the 2006 congressional report for USA TODAY also concluded that portions contained text from Wikipedia and textbooks. The journal study, co-authored by Wegman student Yasmin Said, detailed part of the congressional report’s analysis.
Wegman’s attorney told USA Today:
“Neither Dr. Wegman nor Dr. Said has ever engaged in plagiarism,” says their attorney, Milton Johns, by e-mail. In a March 16 e-mail to the journal, Wegman blamed a student who “had basically copied and pasted” from others’ work into the 2006 congressional report, and said the text was lifted without acknowledgment and used in the journal study. “We would never knowingly publish plagiarized material” wrote Wegman, a former CSDA journal editor.
Well, congratulations to Deep Climate for being able to attack a man in another country without having having to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.
So, no problem from my view. I expect the report will be rewritten, with citations where needed, maybe even adding extra dictionary definitions of words and their origins to satisfy the imagined slights against our lexiconic ancestors envisioned by DC and Mashey man, and they’ll resubmit it with the very same conclusions. That’s what I would do.
UPDATE: Some folks have erroneously come to the conclusion that I’m siding with the idea that plagiarism is OK . Let me be clear, that’s not true at all. My issue is how this whole affair was conducted. I had my own issue with plagiarism in the case of NOAA/NCDC which I dealt with in an easy, simple way. Here’s the issue:
More dirty pool by NCDC’s Karl, Menne, and Peterson
Menne solved the attribution issue at my request…and here’s the solution and path forward I offered, with a hint to DC, Mashey, et al to take it.
How to solve attribution conflicts in climate science
I wrote then:
So, apology made, attribution added, document updated, and the problem was solved. Simple, I’m satisfied. Of course I could have been a jerk about it and demanded all sorts actions via formal complaints, copyright claims, etc. But I didn’t. It simply didn’t rise to that level.
It would have been easy for DC and Mashey to follow that example, instead they chose the “dark side” and demanded that pound of flesh along with a national newspaper writer acting as an accessory for public flogging. It’s ugly the way it was handled. Again, the best way forward, now that they have their pound of flesh, is for Said et al to make the appropriate edits and citations were needed, and resubmit the paper. – Anthony
How can WUWT’s 5,000 blog postings go unplagiarised as its Editor’s one peer reviewed paper?
This glaring Warmist discrimination merits scrutiny by the Attorney General of Virginia and the Canadian Civil Rights Commission.
Just about everything I think I know came from somewhere . . . . with very very few exceptions . . . does that make me a walking, talking “plagerist” especially if I can’t recall exactly where I learned it?
Plagarism by anyone is dishonest. Such a paper must be withdrawn. Also there must be an investigation (and sanction) of anyone who does this.
This has the smell of vengeance over ClimateGate. Now when someone brings up ClimateGate to a global warming believer the believer can put back Wegman. Maybe they will feel they’ve neutered ClimateGate now by tit-for-tat.
I know Who DC is, well that is to say I know his name. Other than that it means nothing to me here in the UK. Why this individual sees fit to attack papers that don’t toe the warmist line or why he has a vested interest in causing issue by trying to discredit authors of those papers ( if his concern is for the protection of science and the peer review process then I could point out a few papers he ought to be looking more closely at ) I simply can not fathom.
As I said, this is probably because I don’t know ‘who’ he is. Even if he turns out to be the most famous DC that Canada has produced then I still don’t have a clue who he is and nor would I ever care. But you know us in Britain, not fond of keeping tabs on the old colonies.
As has been pointed out. All that matters here is that this is not allowed to be used by warmists to represent some form of victory for warmists and that the findings of the Wegman report are not discredited because Said et al was pulled on the advice of the lawyers after a complaint that that the wording of some methodology has been copied from another source.
My understanding is that the findings remain the same and unchallenged.
I forgot to add that this will be a storm in a teacup if it turns out to be a small matter of citation and attribution.
Let’s hope that the author has the will to rewrite and resubmit with a huge supplement given the knowledge that has come to light since.
Doug in Seattle says:
May 16, 2011 at 6:21 am
I wonder if Said et al. will be asked to correct the problem and produce an amended paper. From what I have ascertained about the content that was cribbed all it lacked was attribution. Sounds like a pretty simple fix.
Indeed but rather embarrassing to have a significant part of the paper attributed to an unknown author on Wikipedia!
Better late than never
REPLY: So inspired by your buds DC and Mashey, you are finally going to give attribution to the photographer? From that post:
“By the way, since “Rabett Run” didn’t provide a source, to give proper credit where it is due, the photo of Alma, MI was taken by http://www.surfacestations.org volunteer Don Kostuch, whom is our most prolific and dedicated volunteer.”
Go ahead, make my day, screwy wabbit, watch the journals too. – A
If I remember correctly, Deep Climate found the programming trick McI used to select for the 100 ( out of 10,000) curves that were the flattest. The hockey sticks and the anti-hockey sticks were conveniently forgotten . As DC pointed out Wegman, knowing little about climate science blindly regurgitated McI’s tricks.
Deep Climate didn’t just find the plaigarism: he found the scientific faults.
Who is Deep Climate?
The USA Today item unintentionally conflates the Said,
et al., 2008 report with the Wegman Report, 2006. The crowing
verbiage at Deep Climate covering the retraction deliberately
obfuscates the differences. The current coverage at Deep Climate
still doesn’t disprove (or actually dispute) the conclusions of the
original Wegman Report.
The Said, et al., 2008, Computational Statistics and Data
Analysis paper being with withdrawn for a legal consideration:
usage without proper attributions, a.k.a. plagiarisms, does not
invalidate the earlier Wegman Report of 2006.
Deep Climate and its fellow travelers carefully avoid any guidance
on how one might cite anonymously authored or edited text
material from an amorphous source such as Wikipedia. The
Wikipedia material itself may have unattributed plagiarisms
throughout. Most high school students would lose a grade on
any report using any material from Wikipedia no matter
who claimed to be the author. Using such less-than-pristine
source material as was done by Said should have been
considered problematic from the start.
The original Wegman Report of 2006 can be found at:
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/WegmanReport.pdf
With proper citations appended to the original Wegman
Report via the Congressional Record, known as an addendum
in academia, it will be an unassailable piece of history.
Thanks to Symon says @ur momisugly July 19, 2009 at 2:57 pm,
on WUWT, the old rockers among us will always have the
mnemonic ”The DC5” when we contemplate material and
opinions originating from Deep Climate.
Deep Climate and it followship will continue to agitate and
foment a ruction trying to blogmail George Mason University
into opening an academic misconduct investigation of Said, et al.
Perhaps they feel left out of having the vicarious thrills of
shouting, “Whitewash !” as other have had with the multiple
Mann and UEA “investigations”.
John McManus, I don’t think you remember correctly . . .
Just a suggestion, never cite Wikipedia.
So DC is a guitarist. Fascinating. Tamino is a musician and the inimitable dhogaza os a photographer. Next I’ll be learning that Joe Romm is a juried artist and Michael Mann has won awards for his ballet performances. What is with these sensitive types?
Plagiarism in the Wegman report and article make headlines but they aren’t the core problem. The core problem, which plagiarism highlights, is that Wegman was in over his head, using an analytical approach (social network analysis) that neither he nor his coauthors understood, and drawing from that unjustified conclusions. The USA Today article brings this out by interviewing someone who actually does know social network analysis, and turns out to have briefly instructed Wegman’s student (perhaps the poor soul on whom Wegman is now blaming the plagiarism). The retracted paper likely would not have been published had not Wegman’s friend, the editor, waved it through with no peer review.
The surprising thing is that a similar problem applies to the Wegman Report’s statistics, an area where Wegman has fine credentials. But he turns out to have copied code directly from McIntyre, without understanding or being able to explain what it did — where that “hockeyfest” graph really came from, or what McIntyre meant by persistent red noise.
Found at my previous post:
Hey, no problem. I already had dug up that post while researching a highly questionable claim by Gneiss against UAH (namely Dr. Spencer and Christy) where he also attributed to Tami what that 2009 post shows is better attributed to DC. (And why has no one responded to that Gneiss post when it was a mis-characterization per Christy’s 2009 post?)
I had thought you might have simply forgotten those comments. That was, what, more than 400,000 comments ago?
BTW, I hope you didn’t think I was implying you’d do anything nefarious with my “edit the archives” remark. But I did wonder if you’d be “retroactively consistent” with your gentlemanly pledge to not out DC on this site once you were aware it had been done before. 😉
John McManus writes,
“If I remember correctly, Deep Climate found the programming trick McI used to select for the 100 ( out of 10,000) curves that were the flattest. The hockey sticks and the anti-hockey sticks were conveniently forgotten .”
That’s oddly wrong.
What DC found is that McI out of 10,000 replications, McI had picked 100 with the highest “hockey stick index” (and only the upward-turning or positive ones; about half apparently turned down) for this famous graphical “proof” that a sort-of random procedure could make hockey sticks.
Another problem turns out to be what McI was actually doing with that sort-of random procedure, the persistent red noise. DC had to reverse-engineer this because McI would not clearly describe it, and Wegman simply did not know and described it incorrectly in his report.
Poptech says:
May 16, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Who is Deep Climate?
More evidence that “manmade global warming” is a poorly put together rickety contraption that can be found out with just a little bit of research—where’s the substance!
Re: Gneiss on May 16, 2011 at 6:43 pm
All you’re doing is recycling the same garbage that was tossed around last year around (American) Thanksgiving when Wegman came up then.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/23/wegman-responds-to-usa-today/
From that post comes numerous references debunking that nonsense.
From Ross McKitrick:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/22/escape-from-jonestown/#comment-245719
From Steve McIntyre:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/08/the-hockey-league/#comment-245884 and http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/08/the-hockey-league/#comment-245886
The same bile was spewed at the slightly-earlier WUWT post about Wegman:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/22/wegman-whiners-this-posts-for-you/
DC’s “mistaken” assumptions and flawed analyses were taken apart before when Wegman was brought up, the above was six months ago. Why bring them up now? Are you hoping to make all the many new WUWT readers believe this is some brand-new cutting-edge damning criticism of Wegman and McIntyre and McKitrick that is sitting here unanswered, rather than the same smelly muck that was flushed away and forgotten half a year ago?
>>
Shub Niggurath says:
May 16, 2011 at 3:43 am
It began with the word ‘rat’, with a four-letter word attached right behind.
<<
Rat-fink?
>>
steven mosher says:
May 16, 2011 at 11:15 am
. . . I still watch susan sarandon movies.
<<
Yuck!
Jim
Let me get this strait.
Deep Climate showed that Wegman copied and pasted text from Bradley’s book, and then modified it so he could conclude that Bradley’s work is invalid. Wegman then adds McIntyre’s fabricated hockey sticks, concludes that Mann’s work is invalid. He then and sends his reports to US Congress.
Now it turns out that Wegman dodged peer-review in his scientific publication, where chief editor Stanley Azen (a friend of Wegman) personally accepted it within 5 days after submission. Records of the paper’s external review “were destroyed in an office move” according to Azen.
Wegman meanwhile tosses an unnamed student under the bus to protect himself against the allegations of scientific misconduct and plagiarism.
Deep Climate discovered possibly the most blatant violation of scientific ethics and the peer-review process since the Soon and Baliunas controversy (not to mention the possible legal implications about misleading a US Congress) and Anthony still insist that Wegman and Said should “resubmit it with the very same conclusions” meanwhile critisizing Deep Climate, whose only role here was to discover the truth.
And you guys call yourself skeptics ?
kadaka, here is the reason we have had to endure much of these attacks,
http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/25/the-team-defends-paleo-phrenology/#comment-236353
“Gavin Schmidt’s inline responses to Judy Curry here relies heavily on Wahl and Ammann … 2007 includes a complaint that we haven’t published a rebuttal of Wahl and Ammann in the peer-reviewed litchurchur….Doubtless it would have made things easier for people if we’d responded to Wahl and Ammann/Ammann and Wahl (the SI to which only became available in summer 2008) and it’s on my list of things to do.” – Steve M.
“It’s on my list of things done a long time ago, which might eventually see the light of day if my coauthor would get around to returning the draft. Ahem.” – Ross M.
“… resubmit it with the very same conclusions. That’s what I would do.”
Please do. Choose a nice name, e.g. W. (for ‘Watts’) E. (for Eschenbach) Gman, make up the same old story of CO2 being anything but a greenhouse gas without saying this in any direct manner, copy some stuff from well known frauds like http://www.climategate.nl and publish and get attention, much attention 🙂
REPLY: Heh. You really are a tool, aren’t you? – A
Rob says:
May 17, 2011 at 12:37 am
You must not get out much. The Climategate e-mails showed a much larger violation of the peer-review process and probably a larger ethical violation too. And if you dug a little, you’d find that there are frequent violations of scientific ethics all over, just most of them get swept under rugs by universities (only the politicized topics get out, and often even they only get out if it’s convenient for the MSM bias). Just this past year my university had a professor just disappear overnight once his students turned him in for data fabrication…a little digging showed improper actions in roughly a dozen publications. This never made the newspapers…didn’t even warrant a headline in the school newspaper! The only way I found out about is from my wife’s lab that works with some of the students of that professor.
These things happen all the time. Many times no one reports it because it’s not a big deal. No, that doesn’t make it right and I’m very disappointed in the Wegman group for this. But to declare it “the most blantant violation” in 8 years?…hardly. Maybe in the last 8 days.
-Scott
McManus and Gneiss apparently miss the obvious: The IPCC no longer uses Mann’s Hokey Stick chart because it was shown to be fraudulent. The IPCC loved Mann’s chart. It was visually perfect for scaring the public into opening their wallets. They never would have stopped publishing it if they had not been forced to. The IPCC had to stop using Mann’s chart due to the unarguable fact that it was proven to be bogus.
OTOH, Wegman’s conclusions were valid. Mann, however, deliberately hid important data [in an ftp file labeled “censored“], which would have falsified his conclusions. And Mann knowingly used the corrupted Tiljander proxy to produce yet another bogus hockey stick chart.
Mann’s shenanigans amount to clear scientific misconduct. Seems to be quite the double standard here, no?