«
»

Both Sad and Hilarious

September 24, 2009, 3:24 pm

Rick Trabino writes "How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 1 2 3 Easy Steps."  Not only hilarious, but it will make one despair for the future of science and academia, until one remembers that this kind of stuff has probably been happening since Euclid so somehow we make progress anyway.

Via Steve McIntyre, who has had similar problems of his own.  Particularly the parts where authors of studies published in journals refuse to share their data for replication, despite rules in the journals in which they publish which typically require such availability.

Tags: , ,
Category: Science

3 Comments

  1. Michael:

    I wonder how Steve McIntyre got his hands on Michael Mann's hockey stick data and algorithm? Steve was able to show Mann's algorithm would create a hockey stick with any randomly generated data set. He went on to show Mann cooked the historical data set he used to create the hockey stick.

    September 24, 2009, 8:36 pm

  2. EscapedWestOfTheBigMuddy:

    Well, it has been a while since I read up on the subject, but originally Steve was however given the input data set by the original authors (Mann et.al), but did not use the same code.

    He tried to reconstruct the method from the paper (as task which is always harder than you'd think), and his reconstruction made a hokey stick of a generated-to-be-null test data set.

    Mann et.al disputed that McIntyre's approach was what they had done. I never read a claim that they could feed in null data sets and get null results, which I would have expected to put the whole issue to rest. This really bothers me BTW, so if someone knows of a paper on the matter, please point me at it.

    There was also some argument over the quality of the data set that used and over some of the preprocessing applied to the data, and over the method of presentation, and over the conclusions.

    September 25, 2009, 10:06 am

  3. Michael:

    I get dinged by the spam filter if I try to post html, but at climate audit page id ?page_id=354, Steve lists presentations, commentary and correspondence of all the materials he has on the hockey stick

    September 25, 2009, 11:05 am