Retractions are good self-correction, there's no disagreement there. The problem is how many other papers out there make it into publication, affect the thoughts/understanding of other scientists, yet have glaring deficiencies? How many peer-review networks, which are essentially usually a group of people who know each other, turn into unshakeable pillars of one particular way of thinking?
Peer review fails because when turns into pal review, and it does this often. What's more, the system is abused by unscrupulous researchers to learn about what their rivals are working on, so that they can delay your paper enough to write something very similar. I've personally watched this happen.
When Joe Blow who works in Industry XYZ cannot see your paper until it is published, even though he has information that would improve the paper, that is a failure of peer review.
Peer review is old, it is outdated in the internet age, it should essentially be replaced with something more like what Watt's is doing. This is my opinion, but I believe it is a well-informed opinion.
Disagreement is invited and not unwelcome in publicly discussed research. Disagreement on whether or not public discussion on publicly funded research is worth your participation is a free speech argument. Do you truly wish to discuss freedom of speech? Is the invitation to poke holes in public research done like this truly flamebait?
No, not really.
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/category/by-journal/science-journal-retractions/
Sokal was just the most egregious example of scholarly writings gone bad.
If you want an example of peer review that failed, that is quite modern, you only need to look at NASA's much touted "life living in arsenic" paper that came out just a few years ago.
Oh, that's better then. They would still need calibration though. That would also not jive with the surface temperature measurements taken of the ocean, such as how they attempt to measure the ENSO. Perhaps they're looking for microwave from H2O?
Well, there are multiple problems with the initial statement to begin with.
1) You don't peer review evidence. You peer review written papers. Evidence is what you use to write these papers, it is subject to fact checking, and method analysis, but peer review is not something directed at evidence.
2) As such, scientific papers are not objective evidence of anything. They are an attempted explanation for what we see in nature, they do not constitute evidence of how nature actually behaves.
3) Peer review as a practice is well over a century old, it's outdated. What's more, the established institutions that practice it are no better at preventing outright fraud from getting through their processes than the New York Times. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
1) His results contradict enormous amounts of well-scrutinized other scientific work on both the same and related topics, and explanations offered for that contradiction are grossly inadequate;
Contradiction of previous work is not a pre-requisite to dismissal of new work, if this were so, scientific inquiry would not advance, it would halt in its tracks.
2) His past results appear to have involved deliberate deception;
In what way? That's a serious charge, back it up with something.
3) His past results, and a casual reading of these results, suggest a serious ignorance of science;
Again, this is a claim without backing, it's closer to a direct insult than an actual claim to begin with.
4) His past results were thoroughly wrong;
Incorrect results on a previous paper are not cause to dismiss a new paper. If this were not so most people could disregard your next comment, oh wait, you posted anonymously. Hello Michael Mann! Or is it Gavin this time? Yes, likely Gavin.
and 5) He is quite plainly in this to produce a particular result he wants.
All writing has bias, so please explain how the bias has been removed from the consensus viewpoint. Bias is not removed through magical means, it is exposed and acknowledged. I've yet to see a consensus scientist confess that they have a bias, they seem to instead imply that they are "Correct" and all who disagree are "incorrect".
But they have likely saved me a few traffic stops, to say the least. My Truck hasn't had up-to-date registration stickers on the plates in nearly a year, and I haven't been pulled over once. I paid registration, but CA DMV simply sent the stickers to the wrong address and I decided it wasn't worth my time to correct their mistake. Mind you, I've had a lot of cops suddenly pull up behind me, only to lose interest and change lanes/move away about 30-60 seconds later. So.... yeah, an invasion of privacy is likely, but it does improve police work.
Certainly it's trying to expose local effects around the sensors that have not been accounted for, yes. Clearly, even the well-sited stations have a positive trend (+0.15 C/Decade), so this paper is not arguing that temperature is going down.
There are many potential problems if you cannot trust your surface temperature record. Consider the problem of putting temperature sensors in space. You can certainly image surface infrared emission from space. However, with an atmosphere like we have that's like trying to image and accurately determine the surface temperature of a human body through blankets. In order to get the temperature accurate, you have to calibrate against something you know. The surface temperature record almost certainly provided a check/balance for the satellites since they began telling us temperature. If you note, John Christy (UAH guy) is on Watt's paper as a co-author. That man knows this study impacts his work, he was smart to get involved. Unfortunately, most of the land surface temperature records have nothing to say about 70% of the earths surface simply because water covers most of the planet. So the limits of these networks should be clear, they're devices that tell us the temperature where we live, they don't tell us about Earth so much.
If the UHI affect is real and significant, that's actually good to know. If humans can control local temperature, it's important to know this and quantify just how much we are controlling the local temperature. It could affect everything from climate to building materials used in the future. It means we can begin to lessen the heat waves that rock our urban centers, that saves lives. It also means we can try to adjust our city planning such that we lower air-conditioning energy use when by minimizing how much heat surrounds the habitable zones in cities. Also, Earth has a recent history of dropping into ice-ages for many thousands of years, so if humans can affect the local temperature with technology, our survival may depend on that ability.
However, I don't see Watt's paper as talking about UHI as much as the localized temperature around the sensors.
The politicization of the subject only favors the dirty politicians, it gives them flags to wave to get re-elected regardless of which side they are on. It's best to keep that aspect out of it.
In what way? I explained what Watts claims to have done, I explained what he's claiming, and then I explained that this method of crowdsourcing your data collection, and writing/presenting your work to the world first is a new method of doing research that is worth your participation. What part of that was flamebait?
Peer Reviewed is not synonymous with truth. You would be wise to learn this. There were peer reviewed articles about the ether before physicists demonstrated that it doesn't exist.
for saying you were not prepared for class at a public school.
I went through public schools through 12th grade and I know for a fact that there were days, weeks even, when some teachers were clearly mailing it in. They would spend most of their time talking with students on those days, or just showing a movie.
Don't give me this nonsense that the average public school teacher is either prepared for class, or they get fired, that just aint so. In fact it is so so so far away from being realistic it's scary.
...but wouldn't have tipped anyone to what they can actually do
I disagree. Local law enforcement get a lot of our scorn, but they are not stupid people, they're trained both in classes and on the job to be suspicious of what they see. If they suddenly saw a pattern of "anonymous" tips showing them guys like this, it doesn't take some Sherlock Holmes type to figure it out. Besides which, I'm sure any group of individuals working on data mining algorithms like this get a lot of false positives, so a better use of their debugging job would be to (quite horrifically) ALLOW the murderers to perform their grisly task so that the data is preserved and the algorithm can be refined.
Well, I don't entirely disagree with AC... however please remember that not all implementations of AES are bulletproof. I'm sure the NSA has a gigantic database of vulnerabilities that they use regularly.
...but didn't think it worthy of revealing their abilities by spending time trying to arrest him. This is the inherent problem with government surveillance, it will ultimately just serve the government, not it's people.
no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, and no I do not believe 9/11 was an inside job.
I am a woman, I worked in tech (and now work in research doing tech) and I experienced quite a bit of sexism at a level that most any man, we're hey to hear it said about a woman he cared for, would have lost his fucking mind. THAT is a problem.
Here's examples of pig behavior that girls have confided in me:
1) (in college) Undergrad friend in the same department and classes, same major. She had taken one particular thermodynamics class 2 times already. The professor never changed his exams much, so she had all the answers to each question because she had been through it before. The jackass still failed her on the second midterm, even though lots of us guys in the class knew we had done worse on the exams than her. Straight out mysogynist, everyone hated his ass. That was completely actionable, but the departments solution was to bury it and pass her through the program some other way.
2) (same dept, different girl) Full time lecturer made one dirty joke. One girl got offended and used it against him in a grade dispute after the semester. The grade wasn't ever changed, to my knowledge. This one was petty, as far as I'm concerned, but the grade dispute might have been real.
3) (aerospace industry) Pregnant friend was standing in line at the cafeteria to pay for her meal. Older gentleman standing in front of her points to her belly and says, "is that what I think it is?"... She akwardly replies, "yes, yes I'm pregnant."... after paying for his meal, he walks off while saying, "well I hope you wanted it." I consider this not actionable. It's asshole behavior, but no good can come from making a stink about it. The adult thing to do is to consider the person a prick and move on.
4) (aerospace industry) Same girl, but before she was pregnant and recently hired. She was asked to work with this one (admittedly asian) gentleman. So she begins chatting with him in his office. He starts going off about how it's a waste that she went and got an engineering degree, because women should be at home making babies or something. Again, I consider this horrific behavior, but not worth starting a corporate fuss about. That guy is old, he's an idiot. If he's going to be a jerk she can either directly confront him about the offense at the time of offense (my preferred solution), or try to avoid him. But creating some blanket rule on behavior through the HR department, stupid.
Ya, if women started behaving like that to me at work, I wouldn't like it. I also wouldn't expect HR to fire anyone for it, nor would I like it if an entire company's rules had to change because of my problem with a few people. I'd rather confront the b**tch about what she said before it ever got that far.
Being an adult means having a sense of humor and moving on. Asking everyone around you to conform to your wishes, that's being childish. You will do well to learn this.
Yes it is. I'm being told I can't speak a certain way. I'm being pre-emptively controlled in terms of my speech and behavior because someone might find it offensive. That is prior-restraint, it's wrong particularly when used to justify curtailments on inalienable rights. Please try to understand where rights actually begin and end and stop focusing on preventing offense. People will be offended, there is no stopping this. The fact that a certain behavior MIGHT speak to a FEELING of institutionalized anything is not cause to pre-emptively tell people not to behave a certain way. If a woman FEELS she is being demeaned in a professional environment, the appropriate course of action is direct confrontation with the offenders, not a set of arbitrary language rules that we apply to all of society.
I don't know why some (most?) men think that's okay. I LIKE the women I get to work with; the last thing I want to do is make them uncomfortable to be around me or in the office at all.
The fact that I should be offended has nothing to do with the issue of what action is taken in response to offense. The fact that you can't understand why some men think it is or is not ok has nothing to do with it. Their behavior and speech are their god-given right, and even if I disagree with it, it's their right to speak it. I don't like it when women get offended, most women in my industry confide their horror stories to me all the time. We joke and laugh at the offenders. But I would never go find these offenders and try to instruct them on how to behave, that is completely outside the scope of acceptable human interaction, and it is truly like wrestling with pigs.
LET THE PIGS BE PIGS. They have that right. It's not cool, it's gross, but it is their right. Racists have the right to be racist. Systematic racism or sexism is something else entirely. When women or minorities are passed over for promotion or not hired for no good reason, that is actionable. Simple expression or behavior IS NOT actionable. This is why we don't try to hunt bigots down and alter their perception of the world. Eventually there will be enough generation turnover that this wont be an issue. But if you try to make behavioral change such a big issue you're damaging a generation with what is effectively a form of bigotry.
Yep. The point of a directory structure is to help you find things. And there's simple scripting commands (find, grep, etc in Unix/Linux) to help you find what you're looking for. For example, it's just not that hard to grep compressed files in a directory structure for email addresses of the targets you're looking for. The average script kiddie probably knows enough to do the automated searching.
I disagree on one implied point you make. Directory structures may be intended to help you find things, but in the hands of near-retirement-professors who's last trip through a unix shell was 50 years ago, they turn into a complete mess. Everyone knows this. Most people are horrendously disorganized in how/where they store files, professors spend so little time on organization they're doubly so.
Also, I think my original point was that their conclusion was unlikely, not impossible.
to be a jackass to you if I so choose. You cannot take that right away from me, it is inalienable. You can believe in not being a jackass all you want. That's fine, most people do. That fact doesn't change the fact that you cannot dictate the behavior of others simply because you are offended. Forcing a re-write and apology is imposing on someone, it's curtailing their freedom of expression through arbitrary standards of offense.
I wish I had mod points, I would sacrifice a days worth of comments to mod you down for that.
I have *zero* control over your feelings. Those are yours and yours alone. If something about the world bothers you, if something about someone else's behavior bothers you, your choice is very clear. You either put up with it, or you remove yourself from exposure to that behavior. My right to behave and speak and express how I want only ends when it actually infringes on your right to behave and speak and express how you like. IT DOES NOT END when you start to feel offended. If freedom ended whenever someone else felt offended, human life would essentially cease to exist on this planet.
Your feelings are your responsibility, and your problem. Deal with it.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmuzrHwMkMU
That's fine. What happens when that first step turns into an obstacle because of familiarity between reviewers?
Retractions are good self-correction, there's no disagreement there. The problem is how many other papers out there make it into publication, affect the thoughts/understanding of other scientists, yet have glaring deficiencies? How many peer-review networks, which are essentially usually a group of people who know each other, turn into unshakeable pillars of one particular way of thinking?
Peer review fails because when turns into pal review, and it does this often. What's more, the system is abused by unscrupulous researchers to learn about what their rivals are working on, so that they can delay your paper enough to write something very similar. I've personally watched this happen.
When Joe Blow who works in Industry XYZ cannot see your paper until it is published, even though he has information that would improve the paper, that is a failure of peer review.
Peer review is old, it is outdated in the internet age, it should essentially be replaced with something more like what Watt's is doing. This is my opinion, but I believe it is a well-informed opinion.
Disagreement is invited and not unwelcome in publicly discussed research. Disagreement on whether or not public discussion on publicly funded research is worth your participation is a free speech argument. Do you truly wish to discuss freedom of speech? Is the invitation to poke holes in public research done like this truly flamebait?
The best ones do, yes you are correct in that.
No, not really. http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/category/by-journal/science-journal-retractions/ Sokal was just the most egregious example of scholarly writings gone bad. If you want an example of peer review that failed, that is quite modern, you only need to look at NASA's much touted "life living in arsenic" paper that came out just a few years ago.
Oh, that's better then. They would still need calibration though. That would also not jive with the surface temperature measurements taken of the ocean, such as how they attempt to measure the ENSO. Perhaps they're looking for microwave from H2O?
Well, there are multiple problems with the initial statement to begin with.
1) You don't peer review evidence. You peer review written papers. Evidence is what you use to write these papers, it is subject to fact checking, and method analysis, but peer review is not something directed at evidence.
2) As such, scientific papers are not objective evidence of anything. They are an attempted explanation for what we see in nature, they do not constitute evidence of how nature actually behaves.
3) Peer review as a practice is well over a century old, it's outdated. What's more, the established institutions that practice it are no better at preventing outright fraud from getting through their processes than the New York Times. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Contradiction of previous work is not a pre-requisite to dismissal of new work, if this were so, scientific inquiry would not advance, it would halt in its tracks.
In what way? That's a serious charge, back it up with something.
Again, this is a claim without backing, it's closer to a direct insult than an actual claim to begin with.
Incorrect results on a previous paper are not cause to dismiss a new paper. If this were not so most people could disregard your next comment, oh wait, you posted anonymously. Hello Michael Mann! Or is it Gavin this time? Yes, likely Gavin.
All writing has bias, so please explain how the bias has been removed from the consensus viewpoint. Bias is not removed through magical means, it is exposed and acknowledged. I've yet to see a consensus scientist confess that they have a bias, they seem to instead imply that they are "Correct" and all who disagree are "incorrect".
But they have likely saved me a few traffic stops, to say the least. My Truck hasn't had up-to-date registration stickers on the plates in nearly a year, and I haven't been pulled over once. I paid registration, but CA DMV simply sent the stickers to the wrong address and I decided it wasn't worth my time to correct their mistake. Mind you, I've had a lot of cops suddenly pull up behind me, only to lose interest and change lanes/move away about 30-60 seconds later. So.... yeah, an invasion of privacy is likely, but it does improve police work.
Certainly it's trying to expose local effects around the sensors that have not been accounted for, yes. Clearly, even the well-sited stations have a positive trend (+0.15 C/Decade), so this paper is not arguing that temperature is going down.
There are many potential problems if you cannot trust your surface temperature record. Consider the problem of putting temperature sensors in space. You can certainly image surface infrared emission from space. However, with an atmosphere like we have that's like trying to image and accurately determine the surface temperature of a human body through blankets. In order to get the temperature accurate, you have to calibrate against something you know. The surface temperature record almost certainly provided a check/balance for the satellites since they began telling us temperature. If you note, John Christy (UAH guy) is on Watt's paper as a co-author. That man knows this study impacts his work, he was smart to get involved. Unfortunately, most of the land surface temperature records have nothing to say about 70% of the earths surface simply because water covers most of the planet. So the limits of these networks should be clear, they're devices that tell us the temperature where we live, they don't tell us about Earth so much.
If the UHI affect is real and significant, that's actually good to know. If humans can control local temperature, it's important to know this and quantify just how much we are controlling the local temperature. It could affect everything from climate to building materials used in the future. It means we can begin to lessen the heat waves that rock our urban centers, that saves lives. It also means we can try to adjust our city planning such that we lower air-conditioning energy use when by minimizing how much heat surrounds the habitable zones in cities. Also, Earth has a recent history of dropping into ice-ages for many thousands of years, so if humans can affect the local temperature with technology, our survival may depend on that ability.
However, I don't see Watt's paper as talking about UHI as much as the localized temperature around the sensors.
The politicization of the subject only favors the dirty politicians, it gives them flags to wave to get re-elected regardless of which side they are on. It's best to keep that aspect out of it.
In what way? I explained what Watts claims to have done, I explained what he's claiming, and then I explained that this method of crowdsourcing your data collection, and writing/presenting your work to the world first is a new method of doing research that is worth your participation. What part of that was flamebait?
Bledri, for one.
Peer Reviewed is not synonymous with truth. You would be wise to learn this. There were peer reviewed articles about the ether before physicists demonstrated that it doesn't exist.
for saying you were not prepared for class at a public school.
I went through public schools through 12th grade and I know for a fact that there were days, weeks even, when some teachers were clearly mailing it in. They would spend most of their time talking with students on those days, or just showing a movie.
Don't give me this nonsense that the average public school teacher is either prepared for class, or they get fired, that just aint so. In fact it is so so so far away from being realistic it's scary.
I disagree. Local law enforcement get a lot of our scorn, but they are not stupid people, they're trained both in classes and on the job to be suspicious of what they see. If they suddenly saw a pattern of "anonymous" tips showing them guys like this, it doesn't take some Sherlock Holmes type to figure it out. Besides which, I'm sure any group of individuals working on data mining algorithms like this get a lot of false positives, so a better use of their debugging job would be to (quite horrifically) ALLOW the murderers to perform their grisly task so that the data is preserved and the algorithm can be refined.
Well, I don't entirely disagree with AC... however please remember that not all implementations of AES are bulletproof. I'm sure the NSA has a gigantic database of vulnerabilities that they use regularly.
...but didn't think it worthy of revealing their abilities by spending time trying to arrest him. This is the inherent problem with government surveillance, it will ultimately just serve the government, not it's people.
no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, and no I do not believe 9/11 was an inside job.
Why be offended at a two word phrase of a body part unless sexually objectifying that part offends you? Is there another reason I'm not aware of?
Here's examples of pig behavior that girls have confided in me:
1) (in college) Undergrad friend in the same department and classes, same major. She had taken one particular thermodynamics class 2 times already. The professor never changed his exams much, so she had all the answers to each question because she had been through it before. The jackass still failed her on the second midterm, even though lots of us guys in the class knew we had done worse on the exams than her. Straight out mysogynist, everyone hated his ass. That was completely actionable, but the departments solution was to bury it and pass her through the program some other way.
2) (same dept, different girl) Full time lecturer made one dirty joke. One girl got offended and used it against him in a grade dispute after the semester. The grade wasn't ever changed, to my knowledge. This one was petty, as far as I'm concerned, but the grade dispute might have been real.
3) (aerospace industry) Pregnant friend was standing in line at the cafeteria to pay for her meal. Older gentleman standing in front of her points to her belly and says, "is that what I think it is?"... She akwardly replies, "yes, yes I'm pregnant."... after paying for his meal, he walks off while saying, "well I hope you wanted it." I consider this not actionable. It's asshole behavior, but no good can come from making a stink about it. The adult thing to do is to consider the person a prick and move on.
4) (aerospace industry) Same girl, but before she was pregnant and recently hired. She was asked to work with this one (admittedly asian) gentleman. So she begins chatting with him in his office. He starts going off about how it's a waste that she went and got an engineering degree, because women should be at home making babies or something. Again, I consider this horrific behavior, but not worth starting a corporate fuss about. That guy is old, he's an idiot. If he's going to be a jerk she can either directly confront him about the offense at the time of offense (my preferred solution), or try to avoid him. But creating some blanket rule on behavior through the HR department, stupid.
Ya, if women started behaving like that to me at work, I wouldn't like it. I also wouldn't expect HR to fire anyone for it, nor would I like it if an entire company's rules had to change because of my problem with a few people. I'd rather confront the b**tch about what she said before it ever got that far.
Being an adult means having a sense of humor and moving on. Asking everyone around you to conform to your wishes, that's being childish. You will do well to learn this.
Yes it is. I'm being told I can't speak a certain way. I'm being pre-emptively controlled in terms of my speech and behavior because someone might find it offensive. That is prior-restraint, it's wrong particularly when used to justify curtailments on inalienable rights. Please try to understand where rights actually begin and end and stop focusing on preventing offense. People will be offended, there is no stopping this. The fact that a certain behavior MIGHT speak to a FEELING of institutionalized anything is not cause to pre-emptively tell people not to behave a certain way. If a woman FEELS she is being demeaned in a professional environment, the appropriate course of action is direct confrontation with the offenders, not a set of arbitrary language rules that we apply to all of society.
The fact that I should be offended has nothing to do with the issue of what action is taken in response to offense. The fact that you can't understand why some men think it is or is not ok has nothing to do with it. Their behavior and speech are their god-given right, and even if I disagree with it, it's their right to speak it. I don't like it when women get offended, most women in my industry confide their horror stories to me all the time. We joke and laugh at the offenders. But I would never go find these offenders and try to instruct them on how to behave, that is completely outside the scope of acceptable human interaction, and it is truly like wrestling with pigs.
LET THE PIGS BE PIGS. They have that right. It's not cool, it's gross, but it is their right. Racists have the right to be racist. Systematic racism or sexism is something else entirely. When women or minorities are passed over for promotion or not hired for no good reason, that is actionable. Simple expression or behavior IS NOT actionable. This is why we don't try to hunt bigots down and alter their perception of the world. Eventually there will be enough generation turnover that this wont be an issue. But if you try to make behavioral change such a big issue you're damaging a generation with what is effectively a form of bigotry.
I disagree on one implied point you make. Directory structures may be intended to help you find things, but in the hands of near-retirement-professors who's last trip through a unix shell was 50 years ago, they turn into a complete mess. Everyone knows this. Most people are horrendously disorganized in how/where they store files, professors spend so little time on organization they're doubly so.
Also, I think my original point was that their conclusion was unlikely, not impossible.
to be a jackass to you if I so choose. You cannot take that right away from me, it is inalienable. You can believe in not being a jackass all you want. That's fine, most people do. That fact doesn't change the fact that you cannot dictate the behavior of others simply because you are offended. Forcing a re-write and apology is imposing on someone, it's curtailing their freedom of expression through arbitrary standards of offense.
I wish I had mod points, I would sacrifice a days worth of comments to mod you down for that.
I have *zero* control over your feelings. Those are yours and yours alone. If something about the world bothers you, if something about someone else's behavior bothers you, your choice is very clear. You either put up with it, or you remove yourself from exposure to that behavior. My right to behave and speak and express how I want only ends when it actually infringes on your right to behave and speak and express how you like. IT DOES NOT END when you start to feel offended. If freedom ended whenever someone else felt offended, human life would essentially cease to exist on this planet.
Your feelings are your responsibility, and your problem. Deal with it.