In a statement to Polifact today, NCDC made the following statement:
“… our algorithm is working as designed”
One wonders though, about these sorts of things that have been found wrong in their data file for USHCN, which is represented to the public as “high quality”.
Here are few other things that worked as designed:
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940):
Early NASA Rockets (1950’s-60’s):
The Titanic (1912): On 14 April, the RMS Titanic, described by its builders as practically unsinkable, sinks after hitting an iceberg.
The de Havilland Comet (1952): Twenty-one of these commercial airliners were built.The Comet was involved in 26 hull-loss accidents, including 13 fatal crashes which resulted in 426 fatalities. After the conclusive evidence revealed in the inquiry that metal fatigue concentrated at the corners of the aircraft’s windows had caused the crashes, all aircraft were redesigned with rounded windows.
Mariner 1 (1962): The first US spacecraft dispatched to Venus drifts badly off course because of an error in its guidance system. The error is a small one — a wrong punctuation character (a hyphen) in a single line of code — but the course deviation is large. Mariner 1 ends up in the Atlantic Ocean after being destroyed by a range safety officer. It has been called “The most expensive hyphen in history”
The Mars Climate Orbiter (1998)
![marsClimateOrbiter[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/marsclimateorbiter1.jpg?quality=83)
The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the surface of the planet, because its orbit was too low.
The primary cause of this discrepancy was that one piece of ground software produced results in an “English system” unit, while a second system that used those results expected them to be in metric units. Software that calculated the total impulse produced by thruster firings calculated results in pound-seconds. The trajectory calculation used these results to correct the predicted position of the spacecraft for the effects of thruster firings. This software expected its inputs to be in newton-seconds.
The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed.
The NCDC Climate at a Glance plotter for the public (2014):
While being told that “all is well” and and that “our algorithm is working as designed”, it is easy to discover that if one tries to plot the temperature data for any city in the United States like Dallas Texas for example you get plots for high temperature, low temperature, and average temperature that are identical:
Try it yourself:
Go here:
Change settings to go to a statewide time series, pick a city, and what it does is and it gives you data where the min temp, avg temp and max temp that are the same. It is unknown if it is even the right data for the city.
h/t to WUWT readers Wyo_skeptic, Gary T., and Dr. Roy Spencer
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Re the Comet: over 100 were built, and it continued in passenger service until the early 1980s. The Nimrod derivative continued in military service until 2011.
It’s also worth noting that the Comet would have worked better if built as designed. If I remember correctly, the measured stress around the window turned out to be about twice what their engineering model predicted, but the cracks started at rivet holes around the window, and the original design was for the windows to be glued in, not riveted.
You didn’t read it properly:w e’re dealing with AlGoreithms working exactly as designed….:0)
Lysenko is alive and well, working at NCDC.
When we had code that didn’t work but met the specs we used to call it “broken as designed”.
GM could say the same of its ignition switches.
What a question-begging thing to say.
They’re really asking for it.
(A congressional investigation.)
Its a political no answer and at the same time a silent admission!
If it works is decided by reality not the design of the algorithm. Its the lack of a real answer that reveal them. Dont accept this supid and dishonest statement!
NCDC: ‘our algorithm is working as designed’
This actually says nothing, of course it works as designed, the question is whether it was designed correctly.
Whether that is poor wording or deliberate evasion ( bureaucratic responding whilst not replying ) is another question. Incompetence or misdirection.
But what they are in fact saying is that they see no problem with 40% of the data in the USHCN database being non-observational numbers.
AlecM says:
You didn’t read it properly:w e’re dealing with AlGoreithms working exactly as designed….:0)
AlGoreithms, very astute ! I think that will get reused.
Come on, at least the average was calculated correctly. [/s]
AlecM says:
You didn’t read it properly:w e’re dealing with AlGoreithms working exactly as designed….:0)
AlGoreithms , very good. I think that will get reused.
It is of course purely coincidental that this ‘verified correct’ algorithm was put in place just prior to the National Climate Assessment. Perhaps its outputs were validated against its sponsor’s requirements too.
“The de Havilland Comet (1952): Twenty-one of these commercial airliners were built.The Comet was involved in 26 hull-loss accidents, including 13 fatal crashes which resulted in 426 fatalities. After the conclusive evidence revealed in the inquiry that metal fatigue concentrated at the corners of the aircraft’s windows had caused the crashes, all aircraft were redesigned with rounded windows.”
It was not the passenger windows that failed but a radar “window”. Lessons learnt were applied to passenger windows.
David Dohbro : Question now is “what is it the algorithm designed to do?”
A detailed specification is now required. Firstly to check whether what is supposed to be doing scientifically justifiable, secondly so someone outside the organisation can check whether the AlGoreithms are working. You know, the old validation bit.
Twenty-one of these commercial airliners were built.The Comet was involved in 26 hull-loss accidents,
??
temp:
You fail to acknowledge a classic ‘Catch 22’ when at July 1, 2014 at 8:40 pm you ask
No, the fact of the frequent changes prevents publication of a paper which reports effects of the changes.
More than a decade ago I tried to publish a paper on the matter and it was blocked from publication by this problem. This Parliamentary Submission discusses an email (from me) leaked as part of ‘Climategate’ that complained at the blocking of the publication. (Its Appendix A is the email and its Appendix B is a draft of the paper).
It seems that if the corrupted scientific publication problem is to be corrected then that corruption to be addressed by political action in the US. The global warming scare was started by Margaret Thatcher, and now in the UK and much of the EU the scare is continued by the ‘rabid right’ supported by the political center and left so there is no possibility of correcting these matters here. WUWT is US-based and the excellent Senator Inhoffe has recently bolstered his political position.
Richard
Well, I used the month of July , start year is 1950 and interval is one month, for Seattle. The plots are all the same, but in the table shown below each plot there appears to be something strange that I haven’t figured – the rankings are the same for the first 7 years in my series, all I could screen capture, however there are different anomaly numbers. I was going to blame the “plot” software as being FUBAR, however now, not so sure if the problem(s) lie deeper.
Its late here, I’m tired, to be continued, perhaps others can pick their cities and help expand the query. Note to self: better investigate dropbox.
Louis says:
July 1, 2014 at 10:14 pm
george e. smith has a point. Saying that an algorithm works “as designed” doesn’t say anything meaningful about its accuracy or correctness. Those who designed the algorithm could have had a certain end result in mind without caring at all about it being correct.
Louis
There’s “sleight of hand” and there’s “Sleight of tongue”
“… our algorithm is working as designed”
Yes, sure thing… as designed to give a rising temperature trend.
Look, to suggest an algorithm is working as designed says everything we need to know about the fudged temperature data we have been warned about again and again. As a reminder, check out the following link:
They use a hash code of the station name as seed for a pseudo random number generator, add a constant upward drift, and generate your station-specific global warming data on the spot. I presume.
Because they had a harddisk failure and the real data is unrecoverable, as happens always in government institutions.
Another Ian and Louis:
Louis emphasises an important point when he writes at July 1, 2014 at 10:14 pm saying
There is a clear meaning to the statement
This can only mean that the algorithm is doing what it was “designed” to do and the OED definition of “design” is here and says
In other words, the statement
“our algorithm is working as designed”
means
our algorithm is working as it was intended to function before it was made.
As I said on the other thread, I am astonished that any civil servant would provide so incompetent a reply as that! Perhaps NCDC needs to employ a British ‘Sir Humphry’ to teach their spokespeople how to provide an answer which says nothing in so obscure a manner that few can understand it.
Richard
This is the second bug found in that Climate at a Glance site. A couple of weeks ago Paul Homewood found that they had forgotten to divide by 12 to get an average.
Yes, absolutely get the point, but accuracy please.
“The de Havilland Comet (1952): Twenty-one of these commercial airliners were built.The Comet was involved in 26 hull-loss accidents, including 13 fatal crashes which resulted in 426 fatalities.”
There were 3 hull losses due to design with a loss of 87 lives. What’s your point here and where did you get these figures?
Stephen Skinner says:
July 2, 2014 at 1:28 am
Yes, absolutely get the point, but accuracy please.
Alright. Shot with my own gun. Besides the 3 hull losses due to structural failure there were 2 other s due take off characteristics which led to wing leading edge redesign. What should be noted is the manufacturer worked hard to fix the design, which they did.
Stephen Skinner:
I think you make an important point but you understate it in your post at July 2, 2014 at 1:48 am where you write
The illustration goes to the crux of the issue raised by the document reported in the above article.
The aircraft manufacturer needed to know why their design caused planes to crash. Their failure analysis induced investigations which discovered metal fatigue was a more serious problem than previously imagined and – very importantly – the shape of components (in their case the corners of windows) could concentrate stress to very high values in small localities. These were important findings of great importance to much engineering (i.e. not only aircraft engineering).
The reported document cites a question and provides this answer
This reply to the asked question is a clear declaration that no investigation is intended and, therefore, nothing can be learned from the investigation.
The reply denies science.
Richard
CAGW defending the indefensible, as long as the budget holds out..