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Open v. Closed Source-Climate Change Research
theidocles writes "The ongoing debate over the 'hockey stick' climate graph has an interesting side note.
McKitrick & McIntyre (M&M), the critics, have published their complete source code and it's written using the well-known R statistics package (covered by the GPL). Mann, Bradley & Hughes, the defenders, described their algorithm but have only released part of their source code, and refuse to divulge the rest, which really makes it look like they have some errors/omissions to hide (they did publish the data they used). There's an issue of open source vs closed source as well as how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose - should they be allowed to generate 'closed-source' solutions at the taxpayers' expense?"
should they be allowed to generate 'closed-source' solutions at the taxpayers' expense?
No. I paid for it I want to see it. How else will we know if it works the way they say it works?
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose
All of it, baby. We're paying for it -- we should have the right to:
a) Know what you're spending our money on
b) Have the right to make it better ourselves
c) Learn of security flaws early so we can correct them
Especially when there is some doubt about the nature of the results in the closed source model from Mann et al.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
is in the interest of the science in this case.
The problem with most of these studies is that they refuse to release the raw data.
... but no thanks !!!
A lot of times they select subsets of the data and then normalize or otherwise massage the data.
Thanks
For all we know, there could be a very valid reason why they haven't released all of it. I'm not sure what that reason could be, but given that we don't have anything to go on, we're stuck to just guessing.
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Science, like government, should be transparent. The public should be able to see and evaluate every part. Any science, or government, that hides it's implementation is inherently suspect to corruption.
Closed science is half a step from religion. You are expected to have faith in the researcher's methodologies, analysis, assumptions, and motives. Sorry, but good science does not rely on faith.
I'm of the opinion that anything that gets published should be published in its entirety, at least at some point. For example, people who publish protein structures can put the coordinates "on hold" for up to 18 months.
And to say because the research is done with "taxpayer's money" is missing the point: If you can't reproduce every step, it's voodoo, not science. And we make policy decisions based on science, not voodoo (I hope).
While I would like all works performed for the government that are not of National Security importance to be more open I don't think it is necessary.
A lot of work peformed for government agencies is contractual with businesses. These same businesses employ tricks of the trade and such to deliver what is required. To have them detail how the work is just suicidal. The same goes for software they develop for use by the government. Unless specifically addressed in the contract I do not believe there is a right to disclose the code, let alone make it available to the public.
That last part is key. Even if they disclose the source to the government there is no obligation on either party to make it public.
This argument that they have something to hide is childish. It is designed to provide no leeway. Simply put, once labeled as such what other option other than disclosure exist? You might as well say "You have to release it, its for the children" and then proceed to use whole "hates kids, wants kids to die" guilt trip that is far to common in politics today.
Summary. Release it if only its an upfront requirement of the project and agreed upon by both parties. In the future a requirement by law that all government projects must be fully disclosed to include the source of any software may be nice but I bet it would have so many exceptions written into it that it would result only in a "feel-good" law.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That Global Warming is a manmade, real phenomona is accepted by 99.9% of scientists in the fields involved. To trot out the "only a theory", "some experts dispute" etc routine is like getting the Flat Earth Society involved every time someone talks about circumnavigation. "Heads in the sand" is going to be on our culture's gravestone when the next lot of intelligent life evolves here and starts wondering why parts of Nevada are 10,000 times the normal radiation level.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Most projects the ideas are free, but the results are not. Seems strange...
Everything funded by the taxpayers should be free, regardless; ideas, results, and any tools built to obtain those results.
It shouldn't. But of course there are two ways to resolve this inconsistency:
Option 2 please.
Cheers,
Ian
In science you don't simply show the results of your research, you also describe you arrived at them. Science has always been like that. With more and more science becoming dependent on computers, it naturally means that one must describe the algorithms used to arrive at those results.
The easiest way to do that is to show the source code.
These "closed source" scientists need to remember their high school math teacher's admonitions to show their work.
Actually, 99% of the well-educated people today incorrectly believe that 99.9% of the scientists in the middle ages believed in the concept of a flat earth.
The has been a generally accepted notion that the earth is round since the 1st century A.D.. Disputes have only been about (1) whether the sun revolves around the earth or the other way around, and (2) what the radius of the earth is.
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Public funded means owned by the public. I am not talking about abvious things, like miletary secrets, but reasearch like this.
I asume this research has been done to widen our understanding and knowledge, not for profit. To achieve this goal the best thing is to check, check, recheck and then let others recheck as well. This can only be done if you give up all your findings and ways of how you found it.
This is about knowledge and not about being right or wrong (or at least it should be). The knowledge of proving that the theory is right is just as importand as proving it is wrong.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Most of the "arguments against open-source science" mentioned here are not about science at all. The secrecy surrounding commericial and national-security "science" is good only in a financial or political sense: they do not help science, per se, at all. And personality conflicts are a factor as well: I suspect that Mann et al's reluctance to release source stems from an extreme personal frustration at McKitrick et al's persistent and (in my view) not always well-supported attacks.
I think there is no reason to demand that scientist should publish their source code, since scientist usually reuse their code and share their code with people they work with, but should not be obliged to help other scientist that they are competing for funding with to get their own simulation programs.
The demand on scientist are clear though, they should give enough information in their publications so anyone interested (or who want to refute their results) can reproduce what they have done. So any statistical or mathematical methods used should be mentioned. And if they use commercial packages (with closed source usually for all parties), mention which packages they use would be wise so that if there are found bugs in these programs, any influence on their results can be taken into consideration. If enough information is given, then any scientist who can program, can check out the literature how to implement the nummerical algorithms and write their own program. Often they can buy (fairly expensive) commercial packages or even find open source liberies that have already implemented these algorithms, and then reproduce the results.
If these two economist were able to reproduce the results of some major climate scientist, then these climate scientist have given enough information to their fellow scientist and the general public. So lets forget about these two guys, or buy their book if you want to believe they know better about climate changes than the general scientific community.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
So the climate change critics' site has direct links to everything that supports their position, but when they mention "realclimate.org" they don't make it a link so you have to cut and paste into the URL to get the other side of the story. That pretty much sums up their intensions and intellectual honest right there.
IOW, it's just more FUD from the corporate lobbies. The "hockey stick" is real, it's too late, and we're all doomed to live in a bio-dome... sad but true.
So we are supposed to believe the govt expert who says that a missile is impossible, based on his examination of the wreckage
instead of
the fighter pilot from vietnam who has had direct experience in blowing up stuff with missiles who claimed it was a missile, and the other 95 eye witnesses who claim they saw a missile
Thank god people who work the government never lie, because otherwise I might believe the people who actually witnessed the event.
Two different things. As a taxpayer you have a right to decide if there IS medicare and who gets it. Representative republic, you vote in your congresscritter and he/she/it does your bidding. Theoretically, of course.
Once you have decided that there shall be Medicare and that there shall be a bureacracy to take care of it, you have no particular rights to anything that happens inside it, unless its happening to you. Doctor/patient confidentiality applies irrespective of who's paying the doctor, both moraly and legaly.
The researcher taking public money is a completely different case. He's doing research for the government, which means for you. Theoretically, of course. Absent pressing matters of national security, there is no reason that the results of publicly funded research should not be available to taxpayers. You paid for it, you should get to look at it.
One caveat, if the researcher used a proprietary method or machine or software to either acquire the data or process the results, you are only entitled to the data and results, not the proprietary device. The government rented the use of it, they didn't buy the rights to it.
"Their argument since the beginning has essentially not been about methodological issues at all, but about 'source data' issues [...] Only if you remove significant portions of the data do you get a different (and worse) answer."
You're over-trivializing a DRAMATICALLY IMPORTANT POINT. The original study is focused on North American data almost exclusively for certain time periods. That data (from a single species of tree) skews the results in such a way as to make the current trend seem unique and drastic. On the other hand, if you treat that data source in such a way as to balance it with the other data that is available, you see a VERY DIFFERENT TREND!
The response has been to claim that weighting the data in this way reduces the number of data points unacceptably (I would agree, but that doesn't make MBH98 right).
That's the whole point here, and the other side continues to say, "you're throwing away data" when any competent researcher would have thrown it out in the first place (note: there's an exception. if you produced a report that was specific to N. America, MBH98 would be your model, and it seems to be a fine model for that... N. America is seeing record warming as compared with the last few centuries, and that's all you can extract from MBH98).
Also keep some perspective in mind here. We're in a period where temperatures could rise MORE than ANYONE is predicting and not make a dent in the graph over the last 10million years. If you graph out the last 10 million years, you see that temperatures over the last 10,000 years have been part of a huge, cyclical spike in temperatures. We're at what is likely the peak of a drastic temperature swing, and it WILL plumet again into a new ice age (unless we decide to and are capable of coming up with a way to prevent it). I'm not drawing any conclusions from that, just pointing out that there are natural forces at work here, capable of making temperature changes that we a) cannot yet conclusively explain and b) the likes of which no human has ever experienced.
It's important to keep a sense of perspective and to remember that we have very impressive climate models... all of which might be wrong.
Medicare, etc, are services. The intellectual property in that case is of little market worth and belongs to the patient as the interest in health privacy trumps the need to know.
However, in the case of research, federally funded research should have a complete disclosure. If you have a scientist doing work, and not disclosing the entire body of it, then in reality, the end product must not be regarded as science, but opinion. If Mann does not disclose his entire body of work used to comprise his conclusions, then how else can we assess whether his conclusions are accurate or not?
Science must be open source.
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Where's that wealth of information about the secret US wars in Central America in the 1980s? Or in Angola in the 1970s? Or in Chile in the 1970s? Or in Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s? Iran in the 1950s? These secret wars are secret largely for *political* purposes - the military secrecy benefits evaporate within months. But the political purposes - covering liability for abuse, war crimes, and just plain lying about the causes, effects, and benefits of the war - those last forever.
--
make install -not war
But then there's all that very troubling evidence of missile propellant on seats, etc etc.
The point I was making is not that TWA800 was shot down, just that the CIA and NTSB released a 'closed-source' animation purporting to totally refute the many, many, many eyewitness accounts of a "streaking light" intercepting the aircraft. The animation is hugely flawed but they refuse to let anyone subject it to analysis.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
How many times have you asked someone, "What does your code do to solve this problem?" and got a description of an algorithm which, when you finally get to see the source, does not match the code?
In my case, the answer to that question is, "Lots." I have had it happen in pure science (neutrino physcis), applied science (medical physics) and software development (database programming, data analysis, etc.)
I am painfully aware that my own published descriptions of algorithms have often left out minor details that may be critical in some applications, but that page limits in peer-reviewed journals necessitate. It is not uncommon to get a call from someone doing similar work asking for details about what you've done, how you've done it, and in some cases, asking to look at source code.
In contentious areas of science such requests are not always met with full disclosure, which is a sign that the people involved are no longer doing science. They are doing politics. This happens a lot, and it brings the scientific process to a halt on the question at issue.
In the case at hand, the original authors have done a very poor job of describing what they have done, and an extremely poor job of defending their work. Their refusal to publish their source code for their analysis gives credibility to their critics.
There are certainly legitimate cases where code ought not be published. If a lab has spent many, many years developing a framework for solving a certain type of problem and wants to get the most advantage out of that framework before releasing it, they may reasonably want to limit it's disemination for a while. But those sorts of reason don't apply in this case, and the source should be made available to anyone who wants to reproduce their actual results. That would just be good science.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
But if the consensus has arisen because the hypothesis has been 'proven' (ie hasn't failed any of the tests it has been subjected to so far) then you're golden. The problem for the guys on the skeptic side of this argument who keep repeating the 'science isn't about consensus' mantra is that the scientific consensus regarding GHG/CC is of this latter type.
Fact (1) Global warming via GHGs (including, but not restricted to, CO2) is most definitely real - observations of the conditions on Venus, Luna and Mars give clearcut demonstrations of the effect in action.
Fact (2) The rise in CO2 concentrations in the earth's atmosphere is most definitely real - we have ice core records going back 700k years and CO2 levels have never been as high as they are now. The second order delta is also extremely large, which is likely to prove significant as we go forward.
Fact (3) The anthropogenic origin of this CO2 is most definitely real - the isotopic measurements of atmospheric CO2 point to fossil sources for this rise over the past 250 years and we have estimates of the state of the significant carbon sinks that correlates well with our estimates of fossil fuel consumption since 1750.
The combination of facts (1) and (2) gives rise to the hypothesis that we should expect to be observe a measurable warming signal that is world-wide and across many different categories of instrumentation and temperature proxies. This signal has indeed been observed in many different places, across many different data series, using many different instruments and observational protocols - promoting the hypothesis to a theory and bringing us to fact (3) which strongly implies that doing something about this CO2 forcing is within our capability as a civilisation if we decide that the potential downsides of the forcing warrants an intervention. An assessment of the likely effects of the observed forcing and investigations of the practicality of various potential interventions would seem to be in order. Metaphorically sticking fingers in our ears and shouting 'Lalala. I can't hear you!' would be.... unwise.
The MBH98 and subsequent papers are a very small part of the supporting data for Climate Change Theory, so in many ways the MM critique is a bit of a sideshow - it would (if it proves well founded, which is very much in doubt) knock out one piece of a much larger observational corpus, the implications of which would still need to be addressed in the policy arena. The extent to which the MM critique is spun up into 'Climate Change Theory Is Bunk' by people who want to forestall any consideration of the policy implications of fact (3) and carry on with the finger sticking/lalala shouting is a matter for some concern however.
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
One's interests in keeping clients does not entitle you to make a scientific claim that cannot be peer reviewed. If a paper such as Mann is now regarded as fact, and indeed, makes policy, despite the obvious sloppiness regarding its data management process, then, what is the point of science anyway?
Science is supposed to be about peer review, rigor, that every assumption behind every assertion can be challenged. If, all we have is someone with a Phd can claim that they have a fact as our science, then, what is the point of even trusting them?
Without independent verification and an open process, there's nothing to separate scientists from creationists, and the people are going to pick whoever makes the most attractive sales pitch.
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You also funded Microsoft if you purchased anything from them. It does not mean you should be able to see the source for anything at all.
Why not?
There is a bill before congress right now that says basically that - in relation to automobiles. It says basically that people have a right to be able to fix thier own autos and manufactures do NOT have the right to make you go to a dealer for repairs because they hide the source for automotive computer systems.
Now living in a country where so many people can fix software, is it so hard to see that indeed ther should ALSO be a right for a consumer to fix his or her own software if it is not working? Why should you have to go back to the software "dealer" to fix a problem. There's not even anything like a software Lemon Law to protect you!
It's not that hard to see a bill like that passing someday - perhaps twenty years before the heads of government reach that degress of sophisitication is thinking, but it is not unlikley to see in our lifetimes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, now someone's reputation is all that's important to their scientific work? Better throw out relativity because that was written by a lousy patent clerk.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
The whole point of science is not so that we can trust the opinions of scientists, it is so that scientists can give us repeatable steps to demonstrate a new point.
This whole notion of "it makes the scientists happy so we should just trust them" goes against every single thing that we in the west have fought for since the renaissance.
Your whole argument illustrates this problem precisely. You argue that, "well, even though the key piece of statistical evidence in global warming is questionable, we should still believe in the conclusion."
This is so wrong.
Maybe if scientists published all of their data in a uniform format, to a uniform site, with exact steps to reproduce, all of their source data, and how they draw conclusions from them, then, you might have a field that is useful. But right now, you have got hyper expensive journals all over the place as a repository for articles that only sketch out a discovery and not actually do it, and that simply is not good enough to be taken credibly.
The scientific process is excellent. But today's scientific product sucks.
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