UWA Vice-Chancellor Refuses Lewandowsky Data
Steve McIntyre writes:
Over the past 15 months, I’ve made repeated requests to the University of Western Australia for a complete copy of Lewandowsky’s Hoax data in order to analyse it for fraudulent and/or scammed responses. Up to now, none of my previous requests were even acknowledged.
I was recently prompted to re-iterate my longstanding request by the retraction of Lewandowsky’s Fury. This time, my request was flatly and permanently denied by the Vice Chancellor of the University himself, Paul Johnson, who grounded his refusal not on principles set out in university or national policy, but because the University administration’s feelings were hurt by my recent blogpost describing the “investigation” by the University administration into the amendment of Lewandowsky’s ethics application .
In September 2012, I carried out several preliminary analyses of Lewandowsky’s data using a grey version then in circulation. Like Tom Curtis of SKS, I concluded that some of the responses were fraudulent. In response, Lewandowsky argued that I had not “proved” that the responses were fraudulent. The grey version of the data lacked important metadata for the individual responses, all of which was necessary for a forensic examination. In addition, Lewandowsky had removed several questions (including CYIraq) from the grey version and had removed numerous responses for various reasons, including duplicate IP addresses, incomplete data or implausible consensus or age responses.
In order to carry out a thorough analysis, I particularly wanted to see metadata that included the questionnaire used by each respondent and the date of each response.
In February 2013, I sent a polite request to Lewandowsky, who did not acknowledge my request.
Subsequent to this, Roman Mureika obtained from coauthor Oberauer a version of the dataset that included the CYIraq and life satisfaction questions, but still without metadata on questionnaires and dates as well as the several hundred responses that Lewandowsky had excluded.
After waiting a couple of months, I sent a polite request to Caixing Li of the UWA Human Resources Ethics Office. Again no response.
Reminded of these past refusals by the recent retraction of Fury and Barry Woods’ efforts to obtain Lewandowsky data, I once again requested data, this time writing Murray Mayberry, Head of the School of Psychology, copying the Human Resources Ethics Office, the Vice Chancellor and the Australian Research Council, as follows:
Read it all here: http://climateaudit.org/2014/03/28/uwa-vice-chancellor-refuses-lewandowsky-data/
Steve McIntyre has his latest thread up regarding this shameful action by UWA.
For some odd reason (meaning that I do not know why) I am blocked from posting at Climate Audit. I tried to email Steve to inquire why and to see if he could correct the situation. No go, none of the supposed email addy’s on his contact page worked; all were rejected by the server (either mine or his depending on possible address errors).
Steve’s last post had some interesting comments pointing out where to submit comments at both UWA and at the ombudsman.
Not in any particular order”
The UWA web page has little “comment (0)” options under each header. It doesn’t say, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some poor webmaster or sysop has to do something with the comment.
Keep all comments civil, short and single topic! When commenting about the Vice C do not mention Lewandowsky! Comment on Lewandowsky separately!
Refusing to release data to other researchers, against stated policy.
Hmm…. what could possibly go wrong with that ?.
Maybe they don’t consider Macintyre qualifies as ‘other researchers’. In which the problem could easily be solved by getting someone who is considered ‘another researcher’ to get it. By law the case would be watertight.
Cry for me. I have a UWA degree.