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VA Supreme Court: Michael Mann Needn't Turn Over All His Email
RoccamOccam sends news that the Virginia Supreme Court has ruled that Michael Mann, a climate scientist notable for his work on the "hockey stick" graph, does not have to turn over the entirety of his papers and emails under Freedom of Information laws. Roughly 1,000 documents were turned over in response to the request, but another 12,000 remain, which lawyers for the University of Virginia say are "of a proprietary nature," and thus entitled to an exemption. The VA Supreme Court ruled (PDF), "the higher education research exemption's desired effect is to avoid competitive harm not limited to financial matters," and said the application of "proprietary" was correct in this case. Mann said he hopes the ruling "can serve as a precedent in other states confronting this same assault on public universities and their faculty."
If your point is so proved and plain, why hide as AC?
Do you want all your email and documents published to the public? If not, what do you have to hide?
"Why do these people always have something to hide" may not be the very stupidest question to ask in this situation, but it's certainly high on the list. Scientific transparency does not require laying your entire online life open to muckrakers.
Odd to see someone arguing on Slashdot in favor of publicly funded academic research being kept from the public.
Nobody is arguing for that. His private emails are not "publicly funded academic research". Publicly funded researchers should be required to publish their data and research results. They should not have to give up their private lives.
Just remember what Neil Degrasse Tyson said in Cosmos, "Question Everything".
Why should we?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Odd to see someone arguing on Slashdot in favor of publicly funded academic research being kept from the public.
I'm sorry, is the research somehow being hidden from the public? The public funding argument applies to papers, software, and not hiding them behind a paywall. It does not mean the public gets to see EVERY freaking email ever sent by someone who happens to get grant money through a government organization. You're just being ridiculous now. Should every private company who received ARRA funds have to lay down all their private emails for the entire public?
(Though note that the public does fund classified work they can't ever see as well, we can ignore that for the sake of argument.)
If you read the article, it what was denied was unpublished research. The research the plaintiff's are challenging is available to them. He doesn't have to defend arguments that he hasn't made.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
This wasn't a request to release research. This was a request to release emails between colleagues.
As was seen with the hacking into the East Anglia university mails, the objective of which is to find phrases to misrepresent.
Scientists publish their completed research in scientific journals. There is no genuine reason for publishing emails that were exchanged whilst the research was still in progress. Only in-genuine and dishonest reasons.
What seems to be missing from this article: Mark Steyn, a conservative talk show host, called Mann a fraud. So, Mann is suing Steyn for defamation. As his defense, Steyn is trying to prove that the data was manipulated and cherry picked. Therefore, proving that Steyn's comments were justified. So, Steyn requested the data under the FIOA, since Mann's work was publicly funded.
But Mann - the scientist who warns us that global warming is real and dangerous based on a computer model - refuses to give out the computer code and data that he used to form his assertions. To me, this doesn't sound very scientific or very honest.
The key details for models are not published
Citation Needed
Public employees working for hire on public research paid for by the public should have no "proprietary" exemption to FOIA for papers related to the public work for hire.
It's not papers. Papers are available in scientific journals. This is an attempt to root in the trash looking for something to misrepresent.
Another question is about the scientific integrity here. If the data is true and supportive of his assertions, he should WANT to publish it.
What wasn't published? His work WAS published.
Show the papers and the data, unless of course you have something to hide.
Ah yes. The age old excuse of the surveillance state. Please post the web site where your own work emails are published, HighOrbit. Unless of course you have something to hide.
Asking for vacation, sending in sick leave requests etc.pp. is all business, and none of them belongs to the public.
The tradition is you make an accusation after you have evidence, not before so you get sued and can go hunting through someones correspondences looking for muck to rake. If there is evidence that the emails not being released here are relevant to some ongoing legal action then you might have a point, but there is precisely no evidence Mann has done anything other than do a PCA in a way which might have introduced some ambiguity. This was corrected in numerous later publications which validated his findings. If you suggest I'm a murderer with no evidence then you may find yourself with a lawsuit and you can be sure I'm not going to let someone who throws around frivilous accusations have access to my correspondences without a court mandate.
My understanding of the idea and purpose of an academic research paper is to lay out a hypothesis, method to collect data to test the hypothesis, data (results), statistical analysis of data, and conclusions. A properly written research paper will not be published in a peer reviewed journal unless the method of data collection is clear. This makes the research reproducible. The publication of reproducible research is a crux of the scientific process.
What the proponents of the FOIA request are doing is trying to cheat. If you want to disprove research, you may:
- Show that the method of data collection produces biased data
- Show that using the same method of data collection produces different data than that shown in the original research
- Show that statistical analysis was not done properly
- Etc.
All of this is done by hiring experts to analyze the methodology and statistical analysis and by commissioning a study to reproduce the original research. If the research is not reproducable, then there is something wrong.
That is how science works--you make reproducible research and then other people reproduce it. When they can't, the scientific community tries to figure out what went wrong. Maybe the underlying scientist made an error, maybe s/he made up data, maybe there is no explanation.
But this idea that you can cheat by looking at the researcher's emails? That's new. And not useful. If the study was not done properly, then reproducing it will catch that. If the research was done properly, then it needs to be reproduced anyway in order to determine the strength of the conclusions. So, don't try to cheat the system, just do this the old fashioned way--reproduce the research.
Even if you use your email only for work, there's still a lot of stuff in there which needs to be kept confidential for one reason or another. Payroll matters, student grades, personnel issues for example.
Does your daughter work an on-campus job? Does she ever use a university email account? Does she use university networks?
These all are public resources, and as a creepy stalker, I demand to be allowed full access to the email and browsing history of all attractive undergraduate students. I want to know who their professors are, which websites they visit using university networks, and any other private information that I can find out.
I demand full access! The government should not be able to hide the information from me. We don't want to be forced to go back to the dark days of rooting through trash and peeking through windows!
Depends on what you consider "hiding the research". A fishing expedition through a scientist's personal correspondence is an invitation to judge his work on *political* grounds.
In science your personal beliefs, relationships, and biography are irrelevant. There are evangelical Christian climate scientists who believe climate won't change because that would contradict God's will as expressed in the Bible. These scientists may be regarded as religious crackpots by their peers, but that hasn't prevented them from publishing in the same peer-reviewed journals as everyone else. Since their papers invariably are climate-change skeptic, clearly they are publishing work which supports their religious beliefs. But their motivations don't matter. What matters is in their scientific publications.
In 1988, Gary Hart's presidential bid and political career were ruined when he was photographed cavorting on a yacht named "Monkey Business" with a woman that wasn't his wife. Now I didn't care how many bimbos he was boinking, but a lot of people *did*, which made it a political issue (albeit a stupid one in my opinion). Do we really want to use the coercive power of the state to dig through the private lives of controversial scientists?
It's a pretense that that would serve any scientific purpose. Maybe Mann is intent on overthrowing capitalism and creating a socialist utopia. That would be relevant if he were running for dogcatcher, but it's irrelevant to what's in his scientific papers. Scientists publish papers all the time with ulterior motives, not the least of which is that they're being paid to do research that makes corporate sponsors happy. As long as what's in the paper passes muster, it's still science.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Probably not. My thinking is that this is a precedent that states that any information that is used to guide public policy (read: laws that affect you and me) can be hidden from the public, skirting the intent of FOIA laws, by having that data be produced and/or curated by a private entity or person. This has further implications than just global warming squabbles; this could give groups like the NSA incentive to privatize spying, among other things.
An easy fix for this IMO is that nothing can be used to guide public policy or legislative actions unless the information used to glean them is already public. That would allow people like Michael Mann to keep their data private if they want, but stuff they produce can't be used to guide government decisions and/or actions unless he publishes it into the public domain before that process even begins. That would also satisfy climate skeptics IMO.
And really, why shouldn't it be this way? I mean I really don't like the idea that some derp could in theory dictate laws by claiming the world is about to end if we don't do it his way, meanwhile being able to hide his source of information and claim we just have to trust his work.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
This isn't a case "insisted upon by a conservative group". This is Mann suing a journalist for libel, and the journalist requesting info from the university under FOIA to prove his case.
That would be interesting, if it were true. Here's what TFA says:
The ruling is the latest turn in the FOIA request filed in 2011 by Del. Robert Marshall (R-Prince William) and the American Tradition Institute to obtain research and e-mails of former U-Va. professor Michael Mann.
"Del." I assume is short for "delegate". According to their website, the American Tradition Institute's tag line is "Free Market Environmentalism through *Litigation*" I assuming this means they aren't pals with Greenpeace, or even The Sierra Club, any more than the National Socialists in Germany were pals with the socialist Republicans in 1930s Spain.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That was his point, don't you think? ... and many, many more.
Wasting 30 seconds searching would have given you http://simplex.giss.nasa.gov/s..., or http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/model... or http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/S...
Funny thing, the code, the data, the explanations, everything has been avalable for years, and yet so many of the public believe they're not. I wonder why that is?
It's like there was this massive political campaign against science. Of which you just became part of. Congratulations!
There is one thing that, above anything else, determines a scientist's career: getting original research published. Where "original" implies "before your competitors". Which means letting your competitors look into what you're doing before it's published is career suicide. If you're gonna attach strings to your funding stipulating that every small tidbit you find should immediately be publicly available, then the only scientists who will want to work for you are the ones who publish dull uninnovative research.
Not to mention all the unnecessary animosity surrounding the many results that later turn out to be untrue but were thrown before the public before the person producing them got the chance to double-check (which often takes months). This is enough of a problem as it is already; given the breakneck competition, people often tend to publish too soon rather than too late.
Science. Truth.
Correct. They are distinct. Science doesn't deal in truth. It wouldn't be useful otherwise.
Truth is squarely the domain of logic and philosophy.
Required reading for internet skeptics
You want Mann's data? - Here, chew on this.
Mann's unpublished work has nothing to do with government policy making. As for abusing the intent of FOIA, Mann and others have received thousands of them in an organised campaign to bury them in paperwork. At the height of the "climategate" beat up they were receiving ~25 FOI requests a day (mostly for stuff that was already published). There have been dozens of high level political inquisitions of Mann and co since the hockey stick paper was published, not to mention constant death threats. Everyone from the VA attorney general to the US senate have had a go at him, none of them found a scrap of evidence showing impropriety on Mann's part.
All they have done is waste millions in taxpayer funds trying to prove he's a witch on behalf of their corporate sponsors. That US politicians are willing to do the bidding of FF corporations by character assassinating a world renowned scientist is sad, but somewhat expected these days. For so called "educated" citizens to cheer them on is fucking disgraceful.
That would also satisfy climate skeptics IMO.
The American Tradition Institute who filed the suit are not skeptics, they are "for hire" lobbyists masquerading as a charitable institution. The only way they will be satisfied is if Mann is shut down permanently and his work expunged from the collective knowledge of mankind. Mann is the skeptic in this story by virtue of the fact that all scientists are skeptics. Lobbyists don't believe in anything but a pay check, they are paid liars, the very definition of "propagandists". If you want to be a real patriot there's no better place to start than by learning to spot political propaganda when you see it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.