A poll follows.
Over at Bishop Hill, he’s listed some quotes from Geoffry Boulton on scientific integrity that I found interesting. He writes (with apologies for posting in full, I couldn’t see any way to excerpt this short article):
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Geoffrey Boulton is giving a speech to JISC, the goverment body which “inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies, helping to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education”. (Austerity, what austerity?). His comments are being widely tweeted under the hashtag #jiscmrd. Here are a few interesting ones:
Bolton from Royal Society saying that its “malpractice” to not publish underlying data to research at same time as paper published
“@ScienceBL: Boulton says publishing of data should be concurrent with the paper. #jiscmrd #datacite” <- very much agreed.
Boulton: cures for scientific fraud: open data for replication, transparent peer review, personal and system integrity #jiscmrd
#jiscmrd Geoffrey Boulton: open data is our responsibility to citizen science.
It’s funny to see Boulton calling for transparent peer review after failing to investigate allegations of journal nobbling – probably the single most important issue to have emerged from Climategate – during the Russell inquiry.
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The idea of having all the data and methods up front ahead of time make a lot of sense. In my view, this is central to effective peer review. Without it, it boils down to a “trust us” situation with the authors of the paper. Given all of the mess surrounding Marcott et al and the failures of peer review to catch its problems, and the uptrend in paper retraction in science in general, I thought it might be a good time to ask this question.
UPDATE: Some people wondered about whether they could join such a professional organization or not if it existed, not being accredited in the field. It should be noted organizations like the AGU and the AMS accept “associate members” i.e. people that have an interest in the science but who may not be accredited in the field. There’s no reason to consider why that could not be the case for a new organization. – Anthony
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@Alan Dunn Everard, my sentiments exactly, without a society grounded in the scientific method,we are going to suffer.
However science is going to get pounded in the backlash that this fraud is generating.
The fall of the NGOs, enviro empires will give me great pleasure, however the loss of credibility the real sciences are suffering is sad.
Gary Pearse says:
March 26, 2013 at 8:40 am
“Engineers generally have high integrity because the proof of their good or bad work is in the product. You can’t get away with cooking a design for a bridge or airplane, nor would one want to.”
Having worked for the government, I can’t say that about military contracts. As you are usually punished for making a design error by being paid even more money to correct it. Even belonging to a professional organization would have little effect in these cases as the government contractors are almost always sheltered from lawsuits. Me thinks that this is probably the major issue with the climatologists, too much grant & contract dollars from government sources. Now providing the data requirements along with the research paper (and any other requirement to try to ensure integrity) could easily be made a legal requirement in the grants/contracts. Interesting that this is not so.
I am just a Simple Red Neck. A highly technical journal would be wasted on me. However, if the journal was of the character of the OLD Scientific American i.e. a detailed synopsis written for a more general audience but now with links added to access the body of the work, I’d be interested.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Theo Goodwin says: March 26, 2013 at 1:27 pm “Please do not panic.” Thanks Theo, but my “panic” goes further back and deeper than this post-modern kerfuffle. Once upon a long long time ago and in a far away place, there were about 200 of us with my job description. After Admiral H. G. Rickover called us his “evil necessities”, we sought professional status for a big pay raise. Professional is to US FedGov quite arbitrary so we didn’t get it. I am jaded to claims of professionalism as political correctness.
The Real Problem is that there is never time enough to do it right the first time, but always money to do it over. N. N. Taleb suggests Hammurabi’s (“an eye for an eye”) bridge building engineers had the proper doxastic committment, they died if their bridge collapsed.
@ur momisugly wamron &ray , Although you are correct about some of your info and conclusions (but not all), that does not take away that slavery is alive and well today. (that is why the statements are incorrect)
And the slavers play (and pay) on that guilt. Even today what people would consider highly paid and respected positions they are much the same as what you describe.
Re AD Everard…all of science going down the pan.
This has recently become a recurring and very pertinent theme on this and other web forums.
What I have not often seen mentioned is that there is actually an agenda among so-called “Post Modernist” science academics to actively pursue the destruction of what has been known as “science”.
They do not balk at refuting the very existence of objective reality. It is actually taught now that the “discovery” of facts is an out-moded paradigm and that “science” is in future to be regarded as the “creation of knowledge” and implicitly, a cultural practice indistinuishable from argumentation about belief, based in ideology.
This is of course principally a disease of the Social Sciences. We see it in Lewandowsky. But it has metastised into forms now migrating into all other areas of activity. For example, via the generation of particular concepts and interpretations of “ethics” that will circumscribe the pursuit of knowledge even in engineering. More and more often we will discover that certain discoveries (or lines of development) have not been pursued because their implications have been deemed liable to”unethical” effect. “Ethics” is in my opinion purely ideological.
No amount of concern for the continued practice of science will avert the disaster this is going to bring upon Western societies. Its like worrying about decorating the facade of a building from which the internal structure is being quietly removed out the back door, beam by beam.
As I have said before, in my opinion Western culture is in its declining phase, but we can hope that the good it produced will be inherited by its successors in the East.
Having worked in the Nuclear Industry (power plants). Having submitted testing DATA to the NRC.
Having supplied QA Records to the NRC. Having marginal association with a case where an “low level” engineer, submitted a document which because of LAZINESS had an “incorrect answer” to an NRC inquiry Bulletin (high level, requiring documented response). Also having helped narrowly avoid a charge of “deliberate false information” (punishable by fines and imprisonment).for said lazy work: My sympathies are ZERO for the data with-holders.
HANG THEM HIGH FROM THE HIGHEST NETWORK DATA TREE!
PS: NRC = Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Doug Huffman says:
March 26, 2013 at 3:16 pm
Now that I know about your experience, I see that you have more complicated issues that you might want to address later on. .
WOW, that is a huge onus on the researchers, to have someone ELSE replicate before they even publish.
At the same time, WTF are they publishing for, if they themselves have not replicated the results? A one off result isn’t anything to hang one’s hat on.
O/T but maybe not: On another controversial subject, the Carolina bays, there is an oft-cited study – Kaczorowski 1977 – that purportedly shows that wind blowing across a circular shallow depression, and switching directions in an oscillatory manner, will tend to make the circle elliptical – and elongated CROSSWAYS to the wind (not exactly intuitive).
Unfortunately, Kaczorowski never got his study published ANYWHERE, much less a peer-reviewed journal. And to boot, he only reversed the wind every 15 minutes and only ran the experiment for FOUR hours (16 reversals, or equivalent to only 4 years). The Carolina bays have existed for no less than 13,000 years, so wind reversals equivalent to 4 years is utterly and abysmally insufficient. Running the experiments for, say, 2,000 reversals (=1,000 years) would certainly give more definitive results. Since there were 4 reversals per hour, 13,000 years would take all of 3,250 hours, or ~135 days. No extrapolation would even be necessary.
My point here is that half-assed experiments DO get accepted, especially if their results reflect kindly on the existing paradigm. Certainly ones that contradict the current paradigm would not be accepted after such a pathetically low number of cycles.
ALSO: NO ONE has ever even bothered to replicate his work, as sophomoric as it is. That it is widely cited and STILL not replicated – all you can do is shake your head.
Steve Garcia
p.s. The elongated circles did not even look anything like Carolina bays, being pointed nearly like the corners of the eye. It might be a shame, because K’s experiment MIGHT have shown bay-like elliptical shapes, had he let it go on longer.
Goofed on one math thing: 13,000 years would be 26,000 reversals, so double the 135 days…
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The UK has had a crap education system since the 1970s before that it was a world leader, we gave you the industrial revolution and we got socialism in exchange and that screwed the schools!
Maybe I am going against the grain here, but I do not think that being able to replicate the results from the published source code and data is not the most important aspect to improve. Most people – even scientists in the field – cannot spend time to replicate all but the most important papers. This includes the peer reviewers. Most people will just look at the conclusions.
There are three other ways that are much easier to understand.
Firstly is making novel statements – predictions about the world. This means making the hypotheses vulnerable to refutation.
Secondly is encouraging diverse approaches and different hypotheses to explain the same phenomena. Competition should lead to higher standards, including clearer presentation of results.
Thirdly is encouraging more “literature” reviews on the state of a particular topic. In economics there were a number of journals that did just that – The Journal of Economic Literature being one of the most prominent. This encourages comparing and contrasting different papers, making the subject more accessible, and also pointing to gaps in the knowledge. The UNIPCC reporting every seven years from a particular perspective is a much inferior outlet to many diversified approaches.
In summary there should be competition and pluralism – a reversal of the trend to block out contrary views and get scientific organisations to promote unitary views.
i will repeat a suggestion made long ago.
wuwt can lead by having data amd code for all posts. willis does this. its a good example.
i would brand it as well.
RE feet2thefire:
I don’t believe a Journal should limit itself to only replicated papers. A Journal exists to give desemination to observations and theories for which other people can replicate and build upon.
That said, I would certainly applaud an editorial / peer review comment about the reliability of each paper. In fact, Add it as a standard clause to the abstract. It can be a set of standard clauses such as
“This paper describes a one-time event or observation that cannot be replicated”
“Models from top to bottom. No raw data. Models not reviewable.”
“Raw data is not publically available”
“Raw data is provided. Process is not in public domain”
“Raw data and Processing code provided”
“Raw data and Processing code provided, results replicated by reviewers”
Remember the quote from Asimov: ”
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny…” There needs to be a place to publish “something weird just happened. Any of you seen it, too?” The issue is that the paper needs to be clearly identified as to how established, how well founded, how well checked, or how one-off-weird is the phenomenon about to be described in the paper.
Some thoughts on peer review by an editor of an engineering journal.
To be honest, I would prefer if they skipped the study/publication step and just gave us the raw data.
The study always has to say “global warming” while the processed data and the raw data that comes along with.the study says the opposite. So, I’d rather not have to read the same garbage over and over again only to find out that the data says the opposite.
The science does not allow the scientists to be objective. But the numbers are objective entities in and of themselves.
Chris Edwards says:
March 26, 2013 at 4:29 pm
“The UK has had a crap education system since the 1970s before that it was a world leader, we gave you the industrial revolution and we got socialism in exchange and that screwed the schools!”
Now ain’t that the truth! Joint blame holders Wilson and Heath!
Tobias..your comment makes no sense; neither of us said anything about modern slavery.
On the contrary, the continued large scale practice of slavery throughout large parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia is one more reason why the perpetual harping on about the relatively short-lived trans-Atlantic slave trade is a sick joke. Why the hell arent those people,instead of ranting about crimes of two centuries past applying their attention to the current practice of slavery?
Partly for the same reason that we have had slavery being practiced in Britain for more than the past decade with thousands of teenage girls being passed about as chattels without the authorities, until recently, doing a damn thing about it. That shibboleth has now been broken and without identifying the community responsible for sexual slavery in Modern Britain members solely of that community (whose victims came solely fromthe host community) have nonetheless been convicted of the crime in droves.
It is very useful for certain parties toharangue us continually with the historicalguilt about long ended versions of slavery. It would be very unhelpful to the agenda of those parties, on the other hand, to shine a spotlight on the current practice of slavery and invariable identity of those responsible.
One point in that regards: Saudi Arabia refuses to sign the relevant UN declarations on ending slavery.
The full frontal assault has begun. It’s a mop-up operation from here out.
wamron, sorry I expressed myself poorly, what I meant was that educated slaves years ago did a lot of the work as you mentioned, what I was (poorly) trying to say that currently today’s educated workforce is in much the same situation. They are slaves to their jobs and the companies they work for, trapped in circumstances that may have looked within their control as they started out with high hopes and ideals but soon are bound by forces beyond their control just a few years later, I am sorry but that is the best way I can describe it.
The Hansen’s, Trendberth’s and Mann’s have ruined the AGU and AMS … irrevocably.
What were institutions of Science, Geophysics, and Integrity have been reduced in less that 30 years to extremists, Evangelical, Anti-Evolution, Anti-Science tribes lurking the back streets of Washington, D.C. (K Street) seeking to prey upon the citizens and promote their bigotry, perversions, sexisms, to anoint an ‘Age Of The Central Man’ the Anthropocene Reich of Creationism upon all.
The AGU and AMS must be destroyed.
RE: Dan Hughes – “some thoughts” link to Rajagopal editorial
WHEW! That was tough sledding!
And for the most part…. Doubletalk!… Hiding behind words like “autoschediastically”, “ephectic”, “sagacious”, and “tyranny of consuetude” (for which Google could find usage only if transposed)
For the most part, he was complaining that there are commonly used metrics that purport to give an importance to papers, authors, and journals by their citations and linkages. By these very metrics, the University of Alexandria, Egypt is the 4th most important research university in the world. The citation metric system is being gamed.
His fourth paragraph is a beaut of obfustication. I distill it down to: We need metrics to rate things. So we have to quantify the unquantifiable. He conflates mathematical proof, established fact in science, with these heuristic ephemeral metrics so subject to gaming.
And this guy is editor of an Engineering Science journal?
The famous speech from “I, Claudius” came to my mind. Citation metrics fail because all papers are not created equal. One perceptive paper is worth ten good papers and far better than a hundreds of junk papers.
While we are on the subject of double speak and integrity, NatGeo posted this article:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130326-arctic-sea-ice-global-warming-science-environment-spring/