Slashdot Mirror
Billionaire Technologist Accuses NASA Asteroid Mission of Bad Statistics (sciencemag.org)
Taco Cowboy quotes a report from Science Magazine: Nathan Myhrvold, ex-CTO of Microsoft, is accusing NASA of providing bad statistics on asteroid size. Mr. Myhrvold alleged that scientists using a prominent NASA space telescope have made fundamental mistakes in their assessment of the size of more than 157,000 asteroids they have observed. In a paper posted to the arXiv.org e-print repository on 22 May, Myhrvold takes aim at the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope launched in 2009, and a follow-on mission, NEOWISE, which together are responsible for the discovery of more asteroids than any other observatory. Yet Myhrvold says that the WISE and NEOWISE teams' papers are riddled with statistical missteps. "None of their results can be replicated," he tells ScienceInsider. "I found one irregularity after another" Myhrvold says the NASA teams have made mistakes, such as ignoring the margin of error introduced when extrapolating from a small sample size to an entire population. They also neglected to include Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation in their thermal models of the asteroids. Based on his own models, Myhrvold says that errors in the asteroid diameters based on WISE data should be 30%. In some cases, the size errors rise to as large as 300%. "Asteroids are more variable than we thought they were," he says. He has submitted the paper to the journal Icarus for review. However, the WISE and NEOWISE teams are standing by their results, and say that Myhrvold's criticism should be dismissed. "For every mistake I found in his paper, if I got a bounty, I would be rich," says Ned Wright, the principal investigator for WISE at the University of California, Los Angeles. Wright says that WISE's data match very well with two other infrared telescopes, AKARI and IRAS. To find out how accurately those infrared data determine the size of an asteroid, scientists have to calibrate them with radar observations, other observations made when asteroids pass in front of distant stars, and observations made by spacecraft up close. When they do that, Wright says, WISE's size errors end up at roughly 15%. Wright says his team doesn't have Myhrvold's computer codes, "so we don't know why he's screwing up." But Wright archly noted that Myhrvold once worked at Microsoft, so "is responsible in part for a lot of bad software."
But Wright archly noted that Myhrvold once worked at Microsoft, so "is responsible in part for a lot of bad software."
That hurts.
Here's a link to the paper. Seriously, does this guy think the WISE team are a bunch of idiots? I'm personally not qualfied to judge the details of the physical arguments in Myhrvold's paper, but I would give it high probability that he's full of shit.
I think we're witnessing a new class of rich assholes who think they're superman or something. Where money is a substitute for intellect, beauty or inspiration.
Disgusting, but also scary. A danger to society as a whole.
Watch them meeting at Davos to "solve the big problems of humankind". Barf.
The worst kind of data problem is when the data appear reasonable enough to not trigger suspicions but are actually dead wrong. I've been there, where I had a result that looked reasonable enough that I presented it at a conference. I later discovered that the result was wrong enough to invalidate anything I had presented. The problem was a software package I was using, a programming and data analysis tool called NCL. Had a function worked as documented and in the examples on the website, my results would have been fine. But because of the bug in NCL that probably still hasn't been fixed, my results looked reasonable enough but we're wrong. Thankfully I discovered the problem before trying to publish the results.
NASA says their results look reasonable. However, if their methodology has errors, it might be a case of reasonable looking results that are wrong. I think it would be worthwhile to look into the concerns and see if any of them have merit.
The last statement in the summary is completely uncalled for. The ad hominem attack does nothing to defend NASA's methodology. It only serves to try to discredit the criticism. That's the biggest thing I have a problem with. If you're convinced the methodology is correct and that the concerns are unfounded, that's enough to fend off the criticism. That the critic was once an executive at Microsoft is totally irrelevant.
Well, he's patented a "Method For Locating A Stick Lodged In One's Butt", but unfortunately he sues everyone who tries to use the method, including himself.
Nathan only got his billions by riding the coat tails of Bill. he did nothing at all that was impressive, and honestly from insight read online during those yearst he CTO was not as competent as he should have been.
Bored Billionaire wants attention, attacks real scientists with pseudoscience, news at a11.
Now if he actually give them ALL the information including his Excel spreadsheet.... I mean software.... then we can start to take him serious.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Do we find the science too complicated? Too busy to actually read the papers? Too lazy to do a little digging? Never learned how to do the math? Never mind. We can always pick a side and run down the character of any and all opponents. It's quick. It's easy. It's fun. Science be damned.
Oh, please.
None of us, even the most scientifically sophisticated, is capable of developing sufficient expertise in every field in order to personally judge the scientific merits of technical arguments in highly specialized fields. Maybe one or two such fields, if we work very hard on it. This is why we rely on the opinions of experts. Putting every random crackpot who advances an argument on the same footing as established scientists in the field is false equivalence. Yes, every once in a great while, an outsider can point out an error being made by subject experts. But, 99.999% of the time, they're full of shit. The burden of proof here is on Myhrvold.