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Hackers Forced Announcement of 10th Planet Find
JCY2K writes "According to The Inquirer, hackers gained access to the secure server where the data about the new planet was being held and threatened to reveal it. Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis."
That information wants to be set free.
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while they waited for full analysis
So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
The summary misspells "confirmed observations" as "withholding this information".
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
The people involved in this should be banned from using public equipment due to their clear lack of ethics!
No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated. The public doesn't track or care about retracted or falsified scientific studies, so to come out with unchecked data would end up confusing most people if the conclusion made based on that data was proven to be incorrect. And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.
Congratulations and Thank You to the Astronomers/Researchers involved with this discovery. Thank You for discovering something and then waiting for a full peer review and analysis before presenting your data to the public. WAAAAY too much today that process does not occur, because of bad scientists, and gives a bad name to good science and scientists.
Fuck you to the hackers who feel that something like this needed to be public without review. If it was 'revealed' and then found to be false, nobody would have remembered some script kiddie illegally, immorally, and unethically published the data before it was reviewed. Everyone would have jumped on the Astronomers/Researchers and science in general like a bunch of ignorant cattle (like they always do) and the true facts would have been buried in the mess.
You lack a basic understanding of how the scientific process works. Confirmation of an observation, analysis of the resulting data, peer reviewing of those data, and replication of the original observation ALL ensure the accuracy of the scientific find.
Ban them!?! The scientists were clearly planning on releasing their discovery but were forced to do it prematurely. They were abiding by scientific principles.
There are 'planetoids' that are bigger than pluto that are considered simple KBO even though some consider them to be planets.
Really, name one.
You cannot, as this is the first KBO discovered that is larger than Pluto.
SteveM
Seriously, I've seen less biased articles from the RIAA's anti-piracy campaigns. The reason Brown held onto the information was so he could get all the data before making an announcement. He wanted to be able to say, "New object is 2.73 times as large as Pluto," not "New object is probably bigger than Pluto." Is the existence of another Kupier Belt object really going to affect anyone? It's not like this was cancer research.
"This method of using intrusions to force 'full disclosure' by scientists is interesting, and begs why this information can be kept out of the public eye, where it would benefit the scientific community at large, and is instead held back to bolster the reputations of those who make the initial discovery."
If you release an announcement before you're finished with your research or due diligence, you expose yourself and your institution to controversy.
When you're making a claim as ostentatious as a discovery of a 10th planet, you might not want to put your name on it before you are satisfied that you're ready to stake your career on the paper.
Also, you're going to expose yourself to other people usurping your work.
And what if it's a different type of research? What if you're in the process of doing patent searches or negotiating something of that nature?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The astronomer who made the discovery has more details on this website. It wasn't discovered 2 years ago, just around Christmas of 2004. And it sounds like he and his team had already released some initial abstracts to a scientific audience (so they weren't hiding anything).
I think an announcement of the possibility of a tenth planet, larger than Pluto, would be quite newsworthy,
The press would have reported this using the following headlines:
Astronomer Claims 10th Planet Found
10th Planet Found?
New Planet Discovered
Because this sells advertisements. MAYBE, they would have commented about the fact that this was a preliminary discovery in the body of the article. All that said, if you read the astronomer's material on the website and the articles published by the press you see how horid their reporting actually is.
Releasing this information wouldn't have been a bad thing per se, but the original post I responded to specifically attacked them for NOT releasing the information, calling their behavior unethical. My position is that they did not act unethically.
And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.
Hell, even if they (or any other researcher) were sitting on a cure for cancer, they would have to analyse and test and be damned sure of the discovery because getting it wrong could a. wreck their careers b. kill people (possibly through unforseen side effects, etc) or c. not work at all.
I've been reading the threads and there seem to be two camps: the "they're bad people for withholding this information, information wants to be free" camp and the "well, they're just trying to confirm what they think they know" camp. I fall on the side of the latter camp. If anyone was unethical, it was the "hackers" who threatened to go public with incomplete information.
I work at the CDF collaboration at Fermilab, owned and operated by US DOE (yes, that means public) funds. The DOE requires that any analysis (yes, I said requires) be thoroughly reviewed by all members of the collaboration. This is a process called "blessing" the analysis. Since there are over 700 collaborators, this can take quite a while. However, if you think this is unethical, and think it would be far better to publish raw, unanalysed data, well, write a letter to the government. If you think that access to this data is a right granted by being a taxpayer, complain to the government that owns said equipment. Because if those telescopes are anything like our accelerator, that government doesn't allow them to do anything as abysmally stupid as releasing results that haven't been carefully considered.
You sir, are a fool, and have no idea how the scientific community operates on a daily basis, nor how it should operate. Do us all a favor, and next time there is an article relating to science, keep your mouth firmly shut. Better yet, buy yourself a muzzle. Wear it.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I was a National Geographic space article junkie when I was in grade school (mid 70s) and knew my textbook was wrong when it claimed Jupiter had only 12 moons, but my teacher would not accept any answer other than what was in the book.