The nuclear waste problem is overblown. Absolute safety far into the future cannot be guaranteed, but that is an unreasonable standard. The ore wasn't safe before we dug it up, so a reasonable standard would be to make the waste as safe as the ore was when it was in the ground. This is not horribly difficult.
Dirty bombs are not that big a deal. Oh noes we need to clean up some contamination what ever will we do! Leakage would be a far bigger deal.
They are not that big a deal in terms of loss of life, but they are a very big deal in terms of economic cost and disruption. The problem is that radiation is detectable down to very low levels. And people are very afraid of radiation. Every bit will have to be cleaned up, because people won't believe your assurances that the levels are so low that they present negligible risk, even if it is true (and there is an unfortunate history of such assurances having been made when it was not true). The cost will be enormous, not to mention the cost of relocating everybody in the affected area until the cleanup is complete.
I've worked with Na-22. It definitely puts out plenty of gamma. I could easily read the radioactivity through a lead brick. But I agree that with a half-life of a couple of years, it's not much of a concern in terms of nuclear waste.
To put it a perhaps bit more elegantly, it means that they went through with the design despite knowing it had a reception problem.
It depends upon what constitutes a problem, doesn't it? If having reception less than the best that can be achieved is a problem, then pretty much all modern cell phones have a problem, because the best reception clearly will be with a protruding antenna that won't ever be covered by the user's hand. On the other hand, if Apple's testing found the same thing that independent tests are showing --performance that in the worst case is still as good as their older phones--it is easy to see why they would not recognize that as a problem.
Perhaps, instead of hiring antenna engineers, Apple should have been hiring psychologists to tell them that providing a visual indicator of the worst place to grip the phone is a bad idea, because just as some people can't resist testing the truth of a "wet paint" sign, some people won't be able to resist squeezing the gap.
If they have all these testing facilities and the testing procedure were in fact not flawed, then this problem is not caused by negligence but rather deliberate prioritization (i.e. time to market and/or development costs were more important). It other words, it would mean they really did not "give a shit".
Steve Jobs said explicitly in his press conference that Apple's decision to use an external antenna was part of a design tradeoff to house the phone in a slim case while offering extended battery life. He even acknowledged that there are designs that would provide substantially improved reception, such as an antenna protruding from the case. So Apple tested the reception of the design, and found that no matter how you hold it, performance was similar or better to that of their previous phone, as independent testers have since found, and concluded that Apple's customers would be happy with the design. So far, the phone is selling quite well, and returns are lower than previous models in the line, suggesting that Apple's estimation of its customers' priorities is pretty accurate.
I'm not sure how that translates into not giving a shit.
There are lots of iPhone 3gs's being sold by new iPhone 4 owners for about the price, or less, than an iPhone 4 (and no contract, so you could buy an iPhone 5 when it comes out next year if its better). So if you don't think the 4 is an improvement, buy a 3gs.
If you're in an area of strong signal strength, like the Apple campus, you aren't going to notice it. If you use it in disguise, like the leaked one was, you aren't going to encounter it, since insulating the antenna from the hand solves the problem. If you don't hold it in a certain way, the problem won't happen. Moreover, this sort of thing happens to all phones, to a greater or lesser extent. Hold it in a certain way, and it'll lose signal.
And concluded that since, no matter how you hold it, the reception is as good or better than the previous model, it was just fine. What they didn't realize was that the "gap" in the case gave people a visual indicator for the "worst case" grip, and that people would be dismayed to see the signal strength drop when they held it there, even if it was and improvement over the previous model.
It's hard to know the meaning of this. Since the iPhone 4 is more sensitive, people are likely to try making calls in places where the signal strength was too low for previous models. It may have nothing at all to do with the antenna
I've got source code right here, produced by the CRU and only available because it was stolen, that says different.
Source code is not data. Data is measurments from experiments or observations (and Jones's lab did not do this). Computer code is analysis.
So they ADMIT that there was source code produced by the CRU that was open for FOI requests but make the EXCUSE that it was "easily written"
The method was published. Implementing it in any particular computer language is trivial, as the inquiry found. Harrassing productive investigators to use up their time hand-holding people who are too lazy to bother to do the minimal amount of work required does not serve the public interest.
..and if you looked at the source code, like I have, you would know that it has magic constants in it to make the figures come out as they do. The stolen code is still available. Why not go have a look.
I've seen the source code. But perhaps because I am a scientist, I don't perceive it in the way that you evidently do. This is the sort of code that scientists write when they are hacking around trying to understand how somebody else's code works, or test the sensitivity of an analysis routine to particular features of the data. It is common, for example to feed a routine "cooked" data, and see if the output looks as you expect. I've probably got similar stuff on my own hard disk, but it's not for publication--it's for my own understanding.
And if, as you imagine, there were "magic constants" to make the published figures come out as they did, then the Muir Russell replication of Jones's analysis would not have come out with the same conclusions that Jones's group published. The fact that it did proves that your understanding of the code is mistaken.
But it is perfectly understandable that you were confused, because this fragment of code was obviously not written as a clear description of a method, such as was provided in their publications. It is a scratch calculation intended only for lab members who already have a detailed understanding of the context and the intent behind it. Writing a clear explanation of a procedure that can be understood by outsiders is time consuming, and tends to be the last thing done before publication. The internal notes used by the scientists in a research group are often written in a kind of shorthand, or "lab jargon," that to an outsider would likely be incomprehensible or even misleading.
It seems to me that this provides further evidence that insisting on the public accessibility of every scratch calculation and offhand scientist-to-scientist email is fundamentally wrong-headed, and only promotes confusion and acrimony. It doesn't serve the public interest, it wastes the time of productive scientists, and it certainly doesn't promote the advancement of science.
It's curious what sort of science makes it to the national news.
There are some odd aspects to the reported data. The effect seems to go away at higher doses. This is not unheard-of, and could be real, but it does raise a red flag. In one experiment, they saw an trend toward an effect on phototaxis in week 3, but not weeks one and 2, and the variability was so high it wasn't significant. So they repeated the experiment. On the second try, they saw an effect in all 3 weeks and this time it was significant. There are similar anomalies with respect to geotaxis. Repeating an experiment until you get the result you want is a bit shaky statistically (although it is often done) and will tend to exaggerate statistical significance. Reporting the two experiments separately is a bit odd, also; most people would tend to average multiple experiments together rather than reporting them separately. I would never publish an experiment that was done only twice and produced significant results in only a single trial.
So the result might be right, but there are enough oddities that I won't take it very seriously until it has been repeated. If the effect is real, but only occurs in a very narrow dose range as the data appears to show, it may not be particularly meaningful even if it is real--how often will shrimp in the wild be exposed to that narrow concentration range that appears to cause a problem?
I recently had a "stuck accelerator" in a rented Kia. I don't know if the accerator was physically stuck, but it behaved as if it was still held down when I took my foot off it. Fortunately, I wasn't going very fast, although I came close to rolling into an intersection into the path of another car. I had to stomp the brake hard to bring the car to a halt. I could not reproduce the problem over a couple of days of driving afterwards. I inspected the floor mat, and it did not appear to be interfering with the pedal.
No, it was not. Jones's group does not produce any data at all. The only thing they do is analyze data belonging to other people, data that, as the Muir Russell Report verified, is readily available from the actual owners. In addition, the inquiry reproduced the analysis of Jones's group based upon Jones's published description of their method, and concluded, "The required computer code is straightforward and easily written by a competent researcher....A researcher can evidently produce a study which would test the CRUTEM analysis quite precisely, without requiring any information from CRU to do so."
I think its desirable that all people, including random cranks, have the legal power to request information produced with their public money.
Why is it desirable? I am all for public access regulations, such as the NIH regulation that requires research papers funded with NIH money to be placed in a publicly accessible repository within a year of publication, or the rules that require many types of data to be deposited in public repositories.
On the other hand, much of the information demanded from Dr. Jones was data that he did not produce, and it was reasonable for him to direct the inquires to those who did produce the data.
And it is difficult to see a public benefit to a requirement that a scientific group send every file or correspondence in their possession to anybody who demands it. Certainly it would greatly impede the progress of scientific research if every email, every scrap of computer code, had to include sufficient explanation to prevent critics from "spinning" it to create the impression that it was something nefarious.
Notably, there seems to have been no public benefit at all to the theft and disclosure of private emails from Dr. Jones's university--all it did was create a lot of expense, which will ultimately have to be borne by the public, to investigate accusations of data manipulation that have turned out to be groundless, while impeding the progress of research on a very important topic
It is clear that Jones started out cooperating with the group's requests for information, just as he would with another scientist, but they kept demanding more and more, and taking up more of his time. Then they asked him to give them the primary data. He explained to them that the data was not his, that it had been acquired by various meteorological services, and that scientific ethics (and in a few cases, contractual restrictions) dictated that primary data should be requested from the lab that acquired it. Rather than doing that (as the Muir Russell committee did), the group responded with literally dozens of FoA demands for documentation of his agreements with his collaborators.
It is clear that at this point Jones simply got pissed off. Moreover, he had become convinced that the group was not sincere in investigating the science, but rather was hoping to find fault, to identify some error--or something that could be misrepresented as an error--that they could use for political purposes to create doubt about his data and his integrity. In this belief, he was almost certainly correct--the group in question has a history of provoking media frenzies over insignificant errors and tiny corrections, and insinuating that they raised doubts about the integrety of the researchers and the quality of their research.
Nevertheless, it is clear that it was a mistake for him to stonewall, and likely played into the hands of his critics, allowing them to create the impression that he had something to hide. What probably should have happened is that his university's legal staff should have taken over at this point, writing the appropriate letters citing grounds for declining the FoI requests as abusive.
No -- he was incorrect. HIS data is all that matters for checking HIS results. The rest of the data is a checksum.
You don't understand. None of the data was ever his. CRU didn't acquire data and thus owned none of it; he analyzed other people's data. So anybody can check his conclusions by carrying out their own analysis of that data, acquired from the actual owners of the data. This has now been done by multiple independent groups, of which this commission is the most recent. So at this point, the correctness of Jones's results is not reasonably in dispute.
It doesn't just "limit the confidence" of the data, until the question is answered one way or another the data is currently completely unreliable.
This is a fallacy: if there are any doubts or reservations at all, then the data is completely unreliable. That way lies crankdom, because scientists constantly have to deal with data in which there are potential artifacts. There are always doubts, and it is always possible to come up with unanswered questions to rationalize an excuse for discarding inconvenient data. The solution therefore is not to "throw out the baby with the bathwater, " but rather to develop multiple methods that can be cross-checked. For example, the reliability of the tree ring measurements at a particular time can be cross-checked by examining whether the conclusions from trees in different forests around the world are consistent with one another
The lie goes "he doesnt have to provide data if it isnt needed to check his work." The legality however, is different and goes "he has to provide the data upon proper request"
Did you not see what they did there?
So you see it as a desirable thing that random cranks should have the legal power to impede the work of a scientific research group by making demands for irrelevant data (or data that actually belongs to somebody else, as was the case for much of what was demanded)?
It was found that Jones had obstructed FOIA requests and deleted emails associated with legitimate FOIA requests. While these inquiries might not consider that concealing data, I do
The study found explicitly that he had not concealed any data. In fact, they went so far as to independently obtain the data from the original sources (you may not be aware that Jones's group did analysis only; it did not acquire data). They even wrote their own computer code from Jones's published description, and reproduced his conclusions. The committee stated:
Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data. It is impossible for a third party to tamper improperly with the data unless they have also been able to corrupt the GHCN and NCAR sources. We do not consider this to be a credible possibility, and in any case this would be easily detectable by comparison to the original NMO records or other sources such as the Hadley Centre. The steps needed to create a global temperature series from the data are straightforward to implement. The required computer code is straightforward and easily written by a competent researcher. The shape of the temperature trends obtained in all cases is very similar: in other words following the same process with the same data obtained from different sources generates very similar results.
So Jones's only infraction was that he was not sufficiently responsive to demands for data, contending (correctly, as the committee found) that the data demanded was not needed to check his results. Nevertheless, it is clear that Jones's hostility toward demands that he perceived (most likely correctly, based upon the committee's findings) as sheer harassment played into the hands of his critics, enabling them to create a false impression that he had something to hide.
It's worth noting that the committee cleared CRU of charges that they improperly destroyed or manipulated the data, or withheld data or computer code needed to check their conclusions. In fact the committee went to the unusual extreme of actually independently requesting the data from public archives and national weather services, recreating CRU's analysis based upon the published description, and reproducing CRU's conclusions.
In the process, the committee proved that the accusations of certain bloggers that CRU was withholding critical data and code required to check their conclusions were false. From the report:
Any independent researcher may freely obtain the primary station data. It is impossible for a third party to withhold access to the data. It is impossible for a third party to tamper improperly with the data unless they have also been able to corrupt the GHCN and NCAR sources. We do not consider this to be a credible possibility, and in any case this would be easily detectable by comparison to the original NMO records or other sources such as the Hadley Centre. The steps needed to create a global temperature series from the data are straightforward to implement. The required computer code is straightforward and easily written by a competent researcher. The shape of the temperature trends obtained in all cases is very similar: in other words following the same process with the same data obtained from different sources generates very similar results.
In this respect, the report supports Jones's view that the repeated Freedom of Information demands were abusive and unnecessary for any legitimate scientific review of his work. However, the committee also found that "CRU was unhelpful and defensive and should have responded throughout to requests for this information in a more timely way." However justified Jones may have been in his sense of outrage, his decision to stonewall played into the hands of his critics, and helped them to create a false impression that CRU had something to hide.
Remember that we are talking about one cover picture. The committee's concern was that the cover figure did not include a detailed figure legend explaining how the data was plotted. A similar figure, published in the IPCC report, was better documented and the committee found that it was not potentially misleading.
So it seems less a case of scientists behaving unethically to further their own theories than one of scientists oversimplifying a complex figure for a report cover.
These weren't private conversations. They were conversations relevant to their publicly funded work and hence of public interest
However, it is worth noting that the disclosure of these stolen emails did not serve the public interest. Rather, it impeded the work of some of the premier climate research units in the world and was used for political purposes to create a false impression that climate scientists were concealing and manipulating data. After 3 separate inquiries at considerable expense, it was found that nothing of the sort occurred--it was simply that the public is not used to hearing how scientists speak informally in (what they thought to be) private. It seems certain that the progress of science would be impeded if researchers are no longer able to speak frankly to one another out of the fear that any email might be read by people unaware of the context.
The problem is that the tree rings accurately track temperatures until fairly recently, when some of the trees in some of the forests show "divergence," while others continue to correctly track temperature. So the trees do not merely diverge from the temperature record, but from one another.
Obviously, the fact that such divergence can occur limits confidence in the use of tree rings for climate reconstruction. On the other hand, it also shows that such divergence can be detected by comparing results from different forests. The fact that the historical tree ring data does not exhibit this kind of discrepancy between different sets of trees argues against divergence being a problem.
Here is a review that discusses the divergence problem and possible causes.
No, it's not about how you can't trust the bars, it is about how the bar scale is nonstandard and nonlinear with respect to the dB scale. But the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3gs use the same algorithm to calculate the bars, so comparison between the two is reasonably valid (although since the iPhone 4 is more sensitive, it will generally get better reception for the same number of bars).
Actually, almost everybody I know with an iPhone has it in a case, so that's pretty real-world.
But I tried a friend's iPhone 4 without a case yesterday. Holding the iPhone 4 naturally (in my left hand with the base of my thumb over the slot) caused by to lose a bar--which is about what I lose on my 3gs with any reasonable grip. Shifting my hand up by a bit less than a centimeter gave me a full set of bars.
Apple have created bad publicity for themselves by coming up with a BP-like response to the complaints, but this won't affect their sales because Apple buyers don't take any notice of negative publicity for Apple products.
And also because the people who have them are by and large pretty satisfied with the signal, and word of mouth from friends carries more weight than internet hysteria.
I tried a friend's iPhone 4 yesterday side by side with my 3gs in my office, where the signal is barely adequate. Picking up my 3gs caused about a 1 bar drop in signal. I couldn't find any way to hold it that avoided that, nor could I find any way to make it dramatically worse. On the iPhone 4, I could really kill the signal by jamming my thumb uncomfortably hard against the slot, but holding it naturally in my left hand (with the base of my thumb against the slot) gave me about the same signal as on my 3gs, and I could bring it back up to full scale by shifting my hand up about half a centimeter.
So it looks like pretty much a non-issue as far as I'm concerned, and I'm still planning to buy the iPhone4 as soon as I can get it without paying a penalty. Besides, I was planning on buying a case anyway (in fact, pretty much everybody I know with an iPhone has it in a case).
Slashdot Mirror
The nuclear waste problem is overblown. Absolute safety far into the future cannot be guaranteed, but that is an unreasonable standard. The ore wasn't safe before we dug it up, so a reasonable standard would be to make the waste as safe as the ore was when it was in the ground. This is not horribly difficult.
They are not that big a deal in terms of loss of life, but they are a very big deal in terms of economic cost and disruption. The problem is that radiation is detectable down to very low levels. And people are very afraid of radiation. Every bit will have to be cleaned up, because people won't believe your assurances that the levels are so low that they present negligible risk, even if it is true (and there is an unfortunate history of such assurances having been made when it was not true). The cost will be enormous, not to mention the cost of relocating everybody in the affected area until the cleanup is complete.
I've worked with Na-22. It definitely puts out plenty of gamma. I could easily read the radioactivity through a lead brick. But I agree that with a half-life of a couple of years, it's not much of a concern in terms of nuclear waste.
It depends upon what constitutes a problem, doesn't it? If having reception less than the best that can be achieved is a problem, then pretty much all modern cell phones have a problem, because the best reception clearly will be with a protruding antenna that won't ever be covered by the user's hand. On the other hand, if Apple's testing found the same thing that independent tests are showing --performance that in the worst case is still as good as their older phones--it is easy to see why they would not recognize that as a problem.
Perhaps, instead of hiring antenna engineers, Apple should have been hiring psychologists to tell them that providing a visual indicator of the worst place to grip the phone is a bad idea, because just as some people can't resist testing the truth of a "wet paint" sign, some people won't be able to resist squeezing the gap.
Steve Jobs said explicitly in his press conference that Apple's decision to use an external antenna was part of a design tradeoff to house the phone in a slim case while offering extended battery life. He even acknowledged that there are designs that would provide substantially improved reception, such as an antenna protruding from the case. So Apple tested the reception of the design, and found that no matter how you hold it, performance was similar or better to that of their previous phone, as independent testers have since found, and concluded that Apple's customers would be happy with the design. So far, the phone is selling quite well, and returns are lower than previous models in the line, suggesting that Apple's estimation of its customers' priorities is pretty accurate.
I'm not sure how that translates into not giving a shit.
There are lots of iPhone 3gs's being sold by new iPhone 4 owners for about the price, or less, than an iPhone 4 (and no contract, so you could buy an iPhone 5 when it comes out next year if its better). So if you don't think the 4 is an improvement, buy a 3gs.
According to Jobs, Apple has multiple testing chambers. More likely, they tried it out, and got results like this
http://www.antennasys.com/antennasys-blog/2010/7/14/iphone-4-meets-the-gripofdeathinator.html
And concluded that since, no matter how you hold it, the reception is as good or better than the previous model, it was just fine. What they didn't realize was that the "gap" in the case gave people a visual indicator for the "worst case" grip, and that people would be dismayed to see the signal strength drop when they held it there, even if it was and improvement over the previous model.
It's hard to know the meaning of this. Since the iPhone 4 is more sensitive, people are likely to try making calls in places where the signal strength was too low for previous models. It may have nothing at all to do with the antenna
Source code is not data. Data is measurments from experiments or observations (and Jones's lab did not do this). Computer code is analysis.
The method was published. Implementing it in any particular computer language is trivial, as the inquiry found. Harrassing productive investigators to use up their time hand-holding people who are too lazy to bother to do the minimal amount of work required does not serve the public interest.
I've seen the source code. But perhaps because I am a scientist, I don't perceive it in the way that you evidently do. This is the sort of code that scientists write when they are hacking around trying to understand how somebody else's code works, or test the sensitivity of an analysis routine to particular features of the data. It is common, for example to feed a routine "cooked" data, and see if the output looks as you expect. I've probably got similar stuff on my own hard disk, but it's not for publication--it's for my own understanding.
And if, as you imagine, there were "magic constants" to make the published figures come out as they did, then the Muir Russell replication of Jones's analysis would not have come out with the same conclusions that Jones's group published. The fact that it did proves that your understanding of the code is mistaken.
But it is perfectly understandable that you were confused, because this fragment of code was obviously not written as a clear description of a method, such as was provided in their publications. It is a scratch calculation intended only for lab members who already have a detailed understanding of the context and the intent behind it. Writing a clear explanation of a procedure that can be understood by outsiders is time consuming, and tends to be the last thing done before publication. The internal notes used by the scientists in a research group are often written in a kind of shorthand, or "lab jargon," that to an outsider would likely be incomprehensible or even misleading.
It seems to me that this provides further evidence that insisting on the public accessibility of every scratch calculation and offhand scientist-to-scientist email is fundamentally wrong-headed, and only promotes confusion and acrimony. It doesn't serve the public interest, it wastes the time of productive scientists, and it certainly doesn't promote the advancement of science.
It's curious what sort of science makes it to the national news.
There are some odd aspects to the reported data. The effect seems to go away at higher doses. This is not unheard-of, and could be real, but it does raise a red flag. In one experiment, they saw an trend toward an effect on phototaxis in week 3, but not weeks one and 2, and the variability was so high it wasn't significant. So they repeated the experiment. On the second try, they saw an effect in all 3 weeks and this time it was significant. There are similar anomalies with respect to geotaxis. Repeating an experiment until you get the result you want is a bit shaky statistically (although it is often done) and will tend to exaggerate statistical significance. Reporting the two experiments separately is a bit odd, also; most people would tend to average multiple experiments together rather than reporting them separately. I would never publish an experiment that was done only twice and produced significant results in only a single trial.
So the result might be right, but there are enough oddities that I won't take it very seriously until it has been repeated. If the effect is real, but only occurs in a very narrow dose range as the data appears to show, it may not be particularly meaningful even if it is real--how often will shrimp in the wild be exposed to that narrow concentration range that appears to cause a problem?
I recently had a "stuck accelerator" in a rented Kia. I don't know if the accerator was physically stuck, but it behaved as if it was still held down when I took my foot off it. Fortunately, I wasn't going very fast, although I came close to rolling into an intersection into the path of another car. I had to stomp the brake hard to bring the car to a halt. I could not reproduce the problem over a couple of days of driving afterwards. I inspected the floor mat, and it did not appear to be interfering with the pedal.
No, it was not. Jones's group does not produce any data at all. The only thing they do is analyze data belonging to other people, data that, as the Muir Russell Report verified, is readily available from the actual owners. In addition, the inquiry reproduced the analysis of Jones's group based upon Jones's published description of their method, and concluded, "The required computer code is straightforward and easily written by a competent researcher....A researcher can evidently produce a study which would test the CRUTEM analysis quite precisely, without requiring any information from CRU to do so."
As you say.
Why is it desirable? I am all for public access regulations, such as the NIH regulation that requires research papers funded with NIH money to be placed in a publicly accessible repository within a year of publication, or the rules that require many types of data to be deposited in public repositories.
On the other hand, much of the information demanded from Dr. Jones was data that he did not produce, and it was reasonable for him to direct the inquires to those who did produce the data.
And it is difficult to see a public benefit to a requirement that a scientific group send every file or correspondence in their possession to anybody who demands it. Certainly it would greatly impede the progress of scientific research if every email, every scrap of computer code, had to include sufficient explanation to prevent critics from "spinning" it to create the impression that it was something nefarious.
Notably, there seems to have been no public benefit at all to the theft and disclosure of private emails from Dr. Jones's university--all it did was create a lot of expense, which will ultimately have to be borne by the public, to investigate accusations of data manipulation that have turned out to be groundless, while impeding the progress of research on a very important topic
It is clear that Jones started out cooperating with the group's requests for information, just as he would with another scientist, but they kept demanding more and more, and taking up more of his time. Then they asked him to give them the primary data. He explained to them that the data was not his, that it had been acquired by various meteorological services, and that scientific ethics (and in a few cases, contractual restrictions) dictated that primary data should be requested from the lab that acquired it. Rather than doing that (as the Muir Russell committee did), the group responded with literally dozens of FoA demands for documentation of his agreements with his collaborators.
It is clear that at this point Jones simply got pissed off. Moreover, he had become convinced that the group was not sincere in investigating the science, but rather was hoping to find fault, to identify some error--or something that could be misrepresented as an error--that they could use for political purposes to create doubt about his data and his integrity. In this belief, he was almost certainly correct--the group in question has a history of provoking media frenzies over insignificant errors and tiny corrections, and insinuating that they raised doubts about the integrety of the researchers and the quality of their research.
Nevertheless, it is clear that it was a mistake for him to stonewall, and likely played into the hands of his critics, allowing them to create the impression that he had something to hide. What probably should have happened is that his university's legal staff should have taken over at this point, writing the appropriate letters citing grounds for declining the FoI requests as abusive.
You don't understand. None of the data was ever his. CRU didn't acquire data and thus owned none of it; he analyzed other people's data. So anybody can check his conclusions by carrying out their own analysis of that data, acquired from the actual owners of the data. This has now been done by multiple independent groups, of which this commission is the most recent. So at this point, the correctness of Jones's results is not reasonably in dispute.
This is a fallacy: if there are any doubts or reservations at all, then the data is completely unreliable. That way lies crankdom, because scientists constantly have to deal with data in which there are potential artifacts. There are always doubts, and it is always possible to come up with unanswered questions to rationalize an excuse for discarding inconvenient data. The solution therefore is not to "throw out the baby with the bathwater, " but rather to develop multiple methods that can be cross-checked. For example, the reliability of the tree ring measurements at a particular time can be cross-checked by examining whether the conclusions from trees in different forests around the world are consistent with one another
So you see it as a desirable thing that random cranks should have the legal power to impede the work of a scientific research group by making demands for irrelevant data (or data that actually belongs to somebody else, as was the case for much of what was demanded)?
The study found explicitly that he had not concealed any data. In fact, they went so far as to independently obtain the data from the original sources (you may not be aware that Jones's group did analysis only; it did not acquire data). They even wrote their own computer code from Jones's published description, and reproduced his conclusions. The committee stated:
So Jones's only infraction was that he was not sufficiently responsive to demands for data, contending (correctly, as the committee found) that the data demanded was not needed to check his results. Nevertheless, it is clear that Jones's hostility toward demands that he perceived (most likely correctly, based upon the committee's findings) as sheer harassment played into the hands of his critics, enabling them to create a false impression that he had something to hide.
It's worth noting that the committee cleared CRU of charges that they improperly destroyed or manipulated the data, or withheld data or computer code needed to check their conclusions. In fact the committee went to the unusual extreme of actually independently requesting the data from public archives and national weather services, recreating CRU's analysis based upon the published description, and reproducing CRU's conclusions.
In the process, the committee proved that the accusations of certain bloggers that CRU was withholding critical data and code required to check their conclusions were false. From the report:
In this respect, the report supports Jones's view that the repeated Freedom of Information demands were abusive and unnecessary for any legitimate scientific review of his work. However, the committee also found that "CRU was unhelpful and defensive and should have responded throughout to requests for this information in a more timely way." However justified Jones may have been in his sense of outrage, his decision to stonewall played into the hands of his critics, and helped them to create a false impression that CRU had something to hide.
Remember that we are talking about one cover picture. The committee's concern was that the cover figure did not include a detailed figure legend explaining how the data was plotted. A similar figure, published in the IPCC report, was better documented and the committee found that it was not potentially misleading.
So it seems less a case of scientists behaving unethically to further their own theories than one of scientists oversimplifying a complex figure for a report cover.
However, it is worth noting that the disclosure of these stolen emails did not serve the public interest. Rather, it impeded the work of some of the premier climate research units in the world and was used for political purposes to create a false impression that climate scientists were concealing and manipulating data. After 3 separate inquiries at considerable expense, it was found that nothing of the sort occurred--it was simply that the public is not used to hearing how scientists speak informally in (what they thought to be) private. It seems certain that the progress of science would be impeded if researchers are no longer able to speak frankly to one another out of the fear that any email might be read by people unaware of the context.
The problem is that the tree rings accurately track temperatures until fairly recently, when some of the trees in some of the forests show "divergence," while others continue to correctly track temperature. So the trees do not merely diverge from the temperature record, but from one another.
Obviously, the fact that such divergence can occur limits confidence in the use of tree rings for climate reconstruction. On the other hand, it also shows that such divergence can be detected by comparing results from different forests. The fact that the historical tree ring data does not exhibit this kind of discrepancy between different sets of trees argues against divergence being a problem.
Here is a review that discusses the divergence problem and possible causes.
No, it's not about how you can't trust the bars, it is about how the bar scale is nonstandard and nonlinear with respect to the dB scale. But the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3gs use the same algorithm to calculate the bars, so comparison between the two is reasonably valid (although since the iPhone 4 is more sensitive, it will generally get better reception for the same number of bars).
Actually, almost everybody I know with an iPhone has it in a case, so that's pretty real-world.
But I tried a friend's iPhone 4 without a case yesterday. Holding the iPhone 4 naturally (in my left hand with the base of my thumb over the slot) caused by to lose a bar--which is about what I lose on my 3gs with any reasonable grip. Shifting my hand up by a bit less than a centimeter gave me a full set of bars.
And also because the people who have them are by and large pretty satisfied with the signal, and word of mouth from friends carries more weight than internet hysteria.
I tried a friend's iPhone 4 yesterday side by side with my 3gs in my office, where the signal is barely adequate. Picking up my 3gs caused about a 1 bar drop in signal. I couldn't find any way to hold it that avoided that, nor could I find any way to make it dramatically worse. On the iPhone 4, I could really kill the signal by jamming my thumb uncomfortably hard against the slot, but holding it naturally in my left hand (with the base of my thumb against the slot) gave me about the same signal as on my 3gs, and I could bring it back up to full scale by shifting my hand up about half a centimeter.
So it looks like pretty much a non-issue as far as I'm concerned, and I'm still planning to buy the iPhone4 as soon as I can get it without paying a penalty. Besides, I was planning on buying a case anyway (in fact, pretty much everybody I know with an iPhone has it in a case).