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Call For Scientific Research Code To Be Released
Pentagram writes "Professor Ince, writing in the Guardian, has issued a call for scientists to make the code they use in the course of their research publicly available. He focuses specifically on the topical controversies in climate science, and concludes with the view that researchers who are able but unwilling to release programs they use should not be regarded as scientists. Quoting: 'There is enough evidence for us to regard a lot of scientific software with worry. For example Professor Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies. For example, interface inconsistencies between software modules which pass data from one part of a program to another occurred at the rate of one in every seven interfaces on average in the programming language Fortran, and one in every 37 interfaces in the language C. This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error — just one — will usually invalidate a computer program. What he also discovered, even more worryingly, is that the accuracy of results declined from six significant figures to one significant figure during the running of programs.'"
One significant figure?
I'm perfectly OK with the fact that their job is science and not coding, but would they go to the satellite assembly guys and start gluing parts at random ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
1) Do you seriously think that the whole climate science depends on one scientist's data?
No, but his work does include suggestions that regulators pay close attention to based on his status within the community. If he were posting on this very same topic, but was not being used as a primary source by regulators then I could see your point. However, that is not the case and theoretical situations are not really relevant.
2) CRU was trolled by FOIA requests. They are nuisance to deal with, as far as I was told.
Then hire someone to handle them for you, or have grad students do it.
I could say the same thing about publishing and peer review. It's a major PITA to get formatting done just right, making sure that those outside of my small sphere of research can understand what I did without getting lost in all of the jargon. Suck it up! It is an unfortunate, but necessary part of doing research at a public institution.
3) Scientists are people, people have emotions. That's why peer review is used.
Not sure what this has to do with anything. Peer review is valuable and necessary, but it has never pretended to be about accuracy of the data. It's about cleaning up the presentation so that it is clear, reproducible, and free from OBVIOUS error.
As a reviewer, I don't know what exactly was done, but if a list of numbers that should add up to 100 instead adds up to 120, then I can catch that. Whether the problem is due to a typo, or sloppy data fabrication, or a computer error is not something I can ascertain. I have to trust that the authors explanation and fix are true and accurate, in which case I am trusting that they are honest, competent and attentive. The more of their data and methodology that they expose to scrutiny, the less faith I have to have and the more I can ascertain for myself directly.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Scientists need to realize that if they're going to get public support, they really need to be very careful with their choice of wording. Like it or not, the scare mongers, and I mean scare mongers in the sense that there are people who are trying to scare folks into believing that Global Warming is some sort of wealth redistribution scheme by the socialists, are going to use any hint, real or not, that scientists are making up their findings.
Scare mongers? Let's take a look at some of these "hints" that scientists are making up their findings. From May 7, 2002
Dozens of mountain lakes in Nepal and Bhutan are so swollen from melting glaciers that they could burst their seams in the next five years and devastate many Himalayan villages, warns a new report from the United Nations.
From January 17, 2010:
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.
Do I need to pull the quotes that claim NY and Florida will be underwater?
As for the "fear mongers" saying that GW is a socialist wealth redistribution scheme.
Some officials from the United States, Britain and Japan say foreign-aid spending can be directed at easing the risks from climate change. The United States, for example, has promoted its three-year-old Millennium Challenge Corporation as a source of financing for projects in poor countries that will foster resilience. It has just begun to consider environmental benefits of projects, officials say.
Industrialized countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact rejected by the Bush administration, project that hundreds of millions of dollars will soon flow via that treaty into a climate adaptation fund.
Strange. When did Rush and Hannity start writing for the NY Times?
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