Wegman

Wegman Heartland update

tlambert — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:59:27 +0000

Wegman Heartland update

John Mashey, in comments writes:

It has been a busy week or so, with more to come.

1) See Fakery, p.3 and p.12.
In ~2009, Heartland+SEPP+CSCDGC got ~$8M.
The other 9 on p.3 got ~$39M.The additional 36 501(c)(3) on p.12 added another $283M.

Now, only some of that is for climate disinformation, but some of it is for tobacco advocacy and other science disinformation, such as on environmental issues. In addition, these entities cross-support each other in various ways. One often finds them cross-quoting, cross-writing articles, signing petitions, together.

It is far cheaper to create confusion than to actually do science and improve understanding. Still, there's a $330M in 2009 for these folks.

2) Wegman.
In addition to the prime site where this all started over 2 years ago Deep Climate, where there have been recent updates, and USA Today, where story broke, but as gotten updates, there is:

Retraction Watch,

Chronicle of Higher Education

Rabett

Stoat.

I can assure you that this story ... is only starting again.
It only took 709 days to reach this conclusion, and people might ponder this passage from Strange Inquiries at GMU (SIGMU), p.21, from GMU's policy:

'In conducting the investigation, the committee -
(a) Uses diligent efforts to ensure that the investigation is thorough and sufficiently documented and includes examination of all research records and evidence relevant to reaching a decision on the merits of the allegations;

(b) Interviews each respondent, complainant, and any other available person who has been reasonably identified as having information regarding any relevant aspects of the investigation, including witnesses identified by the respondent; and

(c) Pursues diligently all significant issues and leads discovered that are determined relevant to the investigation, including any evidence of additional instances of possible research misconduct, and continues the investigation to completion.'

Now, inquiring minds might want to know:

1) Was there any other information that a diligent committee might have found? Like Strange Scholarship?
Wegman certainly knew about it. Maybe the diligent commiteee somehow didn't notice it?

2) Did the committee ever check Deep Climate to see if anything else came up? Guess not.

3) Did the committee ever get anything like this graph of the various alleged plagiarisms with Wegman and students?

4) Are Roger Stough (VP Research), Peter Stearns (provost) and Alan Merton (GMU PResident) involved?

Anyway, main conversation is at Deep Climate for the latest news, but others should know.

Here's a theme.

tlambert Sun, 02/26/2012 - 12:59

Tags

global warming

Wegman

It's all 'out of context' Tim. The context is that dangerous global warming - caused by anthropogenic CO2 is nonsense.
All that follows is therefore the same.

Yes... being sloppy about the referencing,it was such a crime !

Now you know how the skeptic side feels with regard to the "whitewashes" after the climategate emails.

Such a shame for John Mashey, all those hours of research and documentation, then Gleick confesses to his crimes and steals the limelight.

GMU contradictory decisions on Wegman: Plagiarism in CSDA, but not in 2006 congressional report

The short version:
According to GMU, this is plagiarism, but only when it occurs in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, not when it occurs in the Wegman Report.

Karen - he wasn't sloppy with references. He stole someone else's work.

Once again [XKCD has something to say](http://xkcd.com/1019/).

Tim, can we dump the trolls? They add nothing to the conversation.

Richard Simons,

"In a statement to GMU faculty, provost Peter Stearns said that one investigation committee unanimously found that "no misconduct was involved" in the 2006 Congressional report. "Extensive paraphrasing of another work did occur, in a background section, but the work was repeatedly referenced and the committee found that the paraphrasing did not constitute misconduct," he said, in the statement.

A second university committee found unanimously, "that plagiarism occurred in contextual sections of the (CSDA) article, as a result of poor judgment for which Professor Wegman, as team leader, must bear responsibility." Wegman will receive an "official letter of reprimand", Stearns said, as sanction for the plagiarism."

( http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/2/24/wegman-slapped-on-wrist.html )

Bernard J, stop your bloody whining !!

[The trollop](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2012/02/wegman_heartland_update.php#com…) proves [my point](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2012/02/wegman_heartland_update.php#com…).

To paraphrase, we have the three monkeys and Peter Stearns, hear no evil, see no evil, do no evil, evil. (tip of the ears to Bob Dole)

Karen = sunspot.

Karen = sunspot.

Come come, Jesus still wants her for a sunbeam, Bernard.

Karen = sunspot.

'Nuff said.

The perfect defense against plagiarism accusations:
"C'mon, prof, I didn't even copy that work word-for-word, I merely 'extensively paraphrased' it without attribution..."

To extensively paraphrase meself: BS.

There's an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that says: âThe true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.â

But then again he didn't live long enough to be aware of cognitive dissonance, Orwell's doublethink, or GMU investigations.

>Wrong again Bernard !

Sheesh you're stupid Foulspot.

In your very denial you leave one of your signatures as evidence. I pinged you on it once before - you have a habit of leaving a space before your exclamation marks - marks which often occur as pairs.

I tender as a very small sample the following:

An interested third party can easily expand upon that list by finding "space" + "!". They could do the same for "space" + "?", because you make the same mistake in questions...

Further, as in the first post on this thread, you sometimes forget that a comma is followed by a space:

Oh, and you demonstrate as 'Karen' the excessive use of points in an elipsis, just as you do as Sunspot on the eponymous thread.

Then there's the small fact that the first emergence of 'Karen' on Deltoid was to raise [Sunspot's vacuous issue from last year with my comment about global warming and the Queensland floods](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2012/02/february_2012_open_thread.php#c…).

On which point, I notice a twist on the theme:

>I repeat, you said that La nina [sic] cause's [sic] warming of the ocean, how could anything you say be trusted ? [sic]

Perhaps it's not clear to someone who doesn't understand science, as is obviously one of your disabilities. [I said](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/01/andrew_bolt_vs_percentages.php#…):

>This ongoing summer rain is mostly derived from the oceans warmed during the current La NiÃ±a event. To the extent that the oceans are warmer than in the past, the resulting additional consistency of rain events, driven by La NiÃ±a, will have exacerbated the flooding beyond what it might otherwise have been.

Permit me to break this down for you.

1) "...the oceans warmed during the current La NiÃ±a event" refers to the waters off eastern Australia that increase in temperature during the La NiÃ±a phase of ENSO.

2) "To the extent that the oceans are warmer than in the past..." refers to the fact that contemporary human-caused global warming is warming the oceans, and to the extent that such additional warming has occurred, it will exacerbate the effect of La NiÃ±a.

If you are trying to imput that I ascribe to La NiÃ±a the role as the actual source of the energy that warms the whole planet, and all its oceans, then you are playing Foulspot's usual mendacious game of misrepresenting facts.

You're as stupid here in a dress, as you were when you originally made a hash of the subject.

I'm not so sure. It's quite easy to think of spotty in a spotted dress teetering on a pair of [these](http://www.newyorkgirlstyle.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/outrage…).

Could explain the lurching from one insecure pozzie to another.

You're as stupid here in a dress, as you were when you originally made a hash of the subject.

"sunspot" isn't a gendered name, so there's no particular reason to think that the troll donned a dress by switching to "Karen". And I really don't think it's a good idea to use gender insults, even if they're commonly used as generic insults in your part of the English-speaking world -- the source of their pejorative connotation is rooted in misogynist attitudes.

Ianam.

Sunspot's history on Deltoid reflects a male personality. In addition he has been referred to as "he" countless times and has never denied it, and quite frankly it would be unusualy to encounter a female who would parade personal stupidity as willingly as many males are wont to do, and as sunspot does.

The reference to sunspot wearing a dress has nothing to do with mysogyny, and simply refers to his clumsy attempt to disguise himself as something that he is not. Parse my sentence carefully and you will note that I am not saying that he is stupid because he is 'wearing a dress'... The implication was simply that however he attempts to disguise himself, sunspot's stupidity remains ingrained and evident.

As someone with sisters and daughters for every day of the week, I am not ignorant matters of gender equity and I am careful to respect such matters. However there comes a point in adhering to political correctness when one can stretch things a little too fine...

...unsusual...

Shouldn't play games!

...unusual...

Women wear trousers. Men wear skirts.

Where is the stigma? Only in the minds of those whose sexuality is jealously guarded, therefore insecure.

Women wear trousers. Men wear skirts.

Where is the stigma? Only in the minds of those whose sexuality is jealously guarded, therefore insecure.

Balderdash! Ain't that right Colonel Duff?

Good catch Bernard. Time to put sock puppets back into their drawers.

I just sent this off to the student newspaper at GMU:

Hello,

I have been following the Wegman scandal since it first broke about two years ago. Considering that Dr. Wegman has been found guilty of committing extensive plagiarism in an article published in a peer reviewed journal and received nothing more than a reprimand and instructions to withdraw an article already withdrawn by the journal itself. I was wondering why the student newspaper has been covering this story with such a light touch?

I would have thought the double standard of how the Professor was treated as compared to what would have been the result if a undergraduate or graduated student had been found guilty of the same behavior would have induced indignation from a student newspaper.

Further the University in violation of its own stated policy of dealing with complaints of academic misconduct. I encourage you to consider why the investigation, findings and verdict that should have been completed in 90 days, has taken 708 days instead.

We also have the contradictory findings that the taxpayer funded report that Professor Wegman submitted to Congress and contained much of the same plagiarized materials was found to be in compliance.

What is also worrying is the other examples of misconduct that the inquiry never touched upon. If you had read John Mashey's "Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report" you would have discovered that Dr. Wegman may have manipulated data to come to a predetermined conclusions and demonstratively ignored other peer reviewed articles in the scientific literature that reconfirmed Dr. Mann's findings.

Sunspot's history on Deltoid reflects a male personality.

This reminds me of when Robert Silverberg wrote in his foreword to a collection of stories by the mysterious and reclusive James Tiptree Jr. that those who had speculated that Tiptree might be a woman were foolish because the writing was "ineluctably male". But Silverberg turned out to be the fool.

quite frankly it would be unusualy to encounter a female who would parade personal stupidity as willingly as many males are wont to do

Yet it does happen and sunspot/Karen is just one person, so rarity isn't much of an argument.

The reference to sunspot wearing a dress has nothing to do with mysogyny

You're being a bit thick here. By "gender insults" I meant words like "trollop" and any other word that is disparaging of "loose" women, as well as words I've seen here that are references to female anatomy used to apply to unpleasant people ... Brits and Aussies often defend such language by noting how common they are, but common usage doesn't change the misogynist basis of the connotation.

However there comes a point in adhering to political correctness when one can stretch things a little too fine...

This is such a very common dodge of legitimate criticism of bigoted language and concepts ... methinks thou doth protest too much.

Ah, I found this citation for the Silverberg/Tiptree incident. It's a good read, and a caution for those who imagine that they know the bounds of women's personalities.

You're being a bit thick here.

Sorry, I take that back. Rereading my `#15`, I did not make it at all clear what I was talking about, and your inference was perfectly reasonable.

Ianam.

My use of 'trollop' is a hat tip to the use of the term for the evil female troll in Henson production - for children - of "The True Bride".

Perhaps it's a bit lateral for some, but the context should give a clue to its intended meaning.

Now, can we please stay on topic and keep attention on Wegman, and on CMU's kid-gloving thereof.

It's easy to stay on topic: just write something on topic. You can hardly blame anyone else for your own excursion into the fine details of stylistic analysis of Karen/sunspot's posts.

P.S. I'm not familiar with "The True Bride" and so of course did not recognize your use of that word as being a reference, context or no ... and what context? When I google "The trollop proves my point", the only hit I get is your own post here. Maybe the Henson troll's name is Karen, or sunspot, or that troll is a global warming denier? Just being evil doesn't seem quite enough of a "clue". Being American, I'm more inclined to associate the word with the balding John McCain (who is also an evil troll, but is not a denier -- rare in his party).

Oh dear ...

Was there any other information that a diligent committee might of {have} found?

Tidiness and all that,Tim.

*[OK, fixed]*

Oddly enough, there was a poster of female name at a skeptic blog, and I couldn't believe that it really was female. Sure enough, they eventually outed themselves as male.

Sure enough

Anecdotes aren't proof, and it wasn't sure, as Tiptree/Sheldon demonstrates (among many other women who have successfully passed as men over the ages, with men swearing up and down that they're sure they must be men).

Perhaps I'm a lurker, but not a troll. I keep trying to find out whether this Wegman plagiarism business bears on the theory and facts of global climate change. I mean, if Wegman was actually guilty of plagiarism, or entirely acquitted of it, would that change the findings, conclusions, etc., of the works involved, whether or not plagiarized?

Dave, plagiarism of an introduction/background is often a result of people being insufficiently proficient in the field to come with a description of their own. The fact that Wegman et al had to copy so much from textbooks (with minor changes, sometimes resulting in outright errors) shows they do not really know what they are doing.

It does not change the validity of the plagiarised work, but should make one extra skeptical about the work that contains the plagiarised text. Do a little bit of digging, and you indeed find the whole Wegman report to be a shoddy business, including the supposed critical evaluation of MBH98/99. What this shows is that the self-styled "skeptics" who point to the Wegman report as evidence of bad science by Mann, in reality are putting their support on a report that is itself bad science. They are not "skeptical" in the scientific science, but in the ideological sense.

re: 32
Very little of the Wegman Report was even correct, much less useful. If you think otherwise, read the PDF herehere and learn how bad it was. I'll happily listen to informed arguments or real errors.

In a year and half, none of Wegman, Scott, Said, Reeves, or Rigsby has refuted any of this, much less Deep Climate's discoveries on Replication and due diligence, Wegman-style.

All Wegman has been able to do was found in this and this, but make sure to read my comments on the latter.

In preparation for forthcoming evens, people might want to review:

Strange Inquiries at GMU

Strange Tales and Emails

and, perhaps, to get some hint of misrepresentation/falsification atop plagiarism.

Strange Falsifications in teh Wegman Report.

[John Mashey](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2012/02/wegman_heartland_update.php#com…).

I'm very pleased to see that you've focussed scrutiny on the factual errors and misrepresentations in Wegman's et al material. It always bothered me that these hadn't been addressed, especially so as they form a part of an argument orchestrated to sway the US Congress away from acceptance of the fact of human-caused global warming, and of the urgency to act on the same.

It seems to me that the George Mason University adminstration made a tactical blunder in the kid-glove treatment meted to Wegman in their investigation of his plagiarism. The bureaucrats have shown themselves to be far more interested in institutional commerce than intellectual truth: any credible scrutiny of Wegman would not only have come down much more vigorously on his plagiarism, but it would have detected the poor factual scholarship therein.

Hindsight will not be kind to GMU. There will come a time when questions are asked about why the industrial nations of the world were so slow to act, and who was complicit in organised delay.

Kochroaches will be scuttling to all corners in order to avoid the light...

Dave @ 32

If you have not as yet read a copy of Mike Mann's The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines then find a copy and read Mann's easily understandable outline of Wegman's outrageous conduct, conduct exposed by his own ignorance.

My paper copy arrived only two days ago and I am now on my second read, this time taking in Notes and following up on URLs. Mann has produced an excellent primer for those confused by the manufactured, with utter dishonesty, hockey stick furore.

PS Bernard J 'Kochroaches' - love it, even more than Kochheads.

Thanks Marco, John, and Lionel. You've given me a lot of references to wade through. I will hope to do so and get back to you. Doubt that this conversation will have ended even by then.

See See No Evil At George Mason University, now finally out. Appendices A.4 and A.5 show interesting mesh of funders, lawyers and thinktanks (including Heartland).

Also, keep an eye on Deep Climate for something even more amazing tomorrow.

"I keep trying to find out whether this Wegman plagiarism business bears on the theory and facts of global climate change"

Nothing.

Neither does Wegman's work even if it were scholarly.

This, however, doesn't stop the denialist trolls from trumpeting it from the parapet as yet another "final nail".

Therefore the craptitude of the work done and the contortions to retain it (especially compared to the witchhunts against Mann) is absolutely necessary to show to everyone who isn't partisan that the work is complete garbage and the fact that this is so highly touted displays the paucity of the denialist arguments.

You are very likely to be a denialist, Dave. You're at least partisan if you can post what you did and not just "Wegman's work was crap, why are the DENIALISTS using it?"

Wegman & Said wrote 2 massively-plagiarized and error-filled articles for the Wiley journal they edit.
We reported it to Wiley. The response was to quietly revise the articles.
See Deep Climate just this AM.

Hello i am Darren Butt

I enjoy reading your articles

I am looking forward to read more..

> He stole someone else's work.

Actually not even that, Richard. He tried to steal, with limited success, the impression of having done his homework on decades-old textbook science.

I keep trying to find out whether this Wegman plagiarism business bears on the theory and facts of global climate change. I mean, if Wegman was actually guilty of plagiarism, or entirely acquitted of it, would that change the findings, conclusions, etc., of the works involved, whether or not plagiarized?

These are fundamentally wrongheaded questions. The existence of the entire denialsphere has no bearing on the theory and facts of global climate change, but that certainly doesn't mean it is irrelevant. One might just as well ask what bearing Galileo's trial had on the theory and facts of heliocentrism.

P.S. There's a confusion between your first sentence, which refers to the theory and facts of global climate change, and your second sentence, which refers to "the works involved", which were not about the theory and facts of global climate change.

Wegman one of The Scientist's top five science scandals

tlambert — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:46:22 +0000

Wegman one of The Scientist's top five science scandals

The Wegman scandal has made The Scientist's list of the top 5 science scandals of 2011:

A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each otherâs work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8 times, in May.

tlambert Wed, 12/21/2011 - 21:46

Tags

Wegman

Obviously faked but since Deltoid simoply censor anybody niot "on message" no statement by you can ever be taken seriously.

I was wondering how Phil Jones and the team and the lancet fraud missed out on a guernseys?

Eight times? It was cited just eight times? I could write a paper on dishwashing liquid that could get more cites.

A life style blog ranks scandals in science? Indeed funny. :-)

In case I go into Christmas mode I would like to wish all you sheila na gigs of climate scare a Merry Christmas!

No psychological problems there, then...

Gotta say that that article drew in quite the interesting list of cranks: an evolution denier, a HIV/AIDS denier, and of course several AGW deniers.

Reading the list it's hardly been a vintage year for science scandals. A couple one the list look like honest but very sloppy work rather than evil naughtiness.

Olaus can't tell the difference between life sciences and life style.

Merry Christmas to you too Tim! :-)

I agree with localhost@5 that items 3 and 4 on the list appear to be cases of honest error rather than fraud. But good on The Scientist for noticing that something's up with Wegman. That case should be getting some attention, as much for GMU's inaction as for anything Wegman has done. However, it's hard to argue against putting Stapel and Mikovits in the top two slots.

plum @1: Citation practices vary widely from one field to another, and even between subfields within a field. Eight citations in three years is quite respectable in some fields (I don't know whether statistics is one of those fields). A report I saw in the mid 1990s of publications in all fields from Ivy League universities in the US reported a median citation count five years after publication of zero. I haven't seen anything more recent, but I would not be surprised if this is still true (i.e., a few papers are highly cited while most remain obscure).

*Olaus can't tell the difference between life sciences and life style*

That's not the only thing he can't tell the difference between. Just as alarming is the fact that he can't separate sound science from the shoddy variety.

Don't worry Jeffie, from a neutral point of view you are The sheila na gig of deltoid - always ready to flash your sectarian mind and megalomaniac personality.

Regardless, Merry Christmas Jeffie!

*Don't worry Jeffie, from a neutral point of view you are The sheila na gig of deltoid - always ready to flash your sectarian mind and megalomaniac personality*

If you say so, Olaus. Whatever. If it makes such a sad sack as yourself happy. Go with it.

It seems a bit rich, though, this coming from someone who ostensibly worships a super-troll on another thread. The same troll who obfuscates, lies, distorts, boasts of their great wisdom, and yet has no pedigree at all in any relevant field in which they superficially dabble. And this same troll seems to think that their view trumps 95% of the experts in the field. Yes, this is the troll whose ego Olaus attempts to inflate at every opportunity. Go figure.

BTW, a great article, Tim. Rounds out my year nicely.

FFS Jeff, let's keep it on the Jonas thread eh?

Good will to all!!

Wegman has earned a place in this stern report:

http://tinypic.com/r/25q5h8h/5

re: 12

As they say on Fark (or should say), "False equivalence is false."

Note how Olaus, incapable of staying on topic, throws in a weak attempt at an insult instead.

No surprise, of course, when the topic is about the exposure of a denialist touchstone as dishonest trash.

Just looking at that list of five scandals, I'm wondering why the Sebastiani paper on longevity was judged to be a scandal at all.

The results couldn't be replicated, scientists figured out why (just an error in a sequencing chip, not a fraud), different results were published, science moved on.

Isn't that how science is supposed to work? Since when is making a mistake a scandal?

Similarly, with the paper about supposedly arsenic-based life, maybe the original analysis was less than first-rate, but subsequent worked showed the conslusions were not supported and explained why.

Again, how science is supposed to work. How is that a scandal?

It has been a long, strange trip since Deep Climate started this, just 2 years ago. Way to go, DC!!

GMU: 21+ MONTHS AND STILL COUNTING since Ray Bradley's first complaint in March 2010.

Wegman and his lawyer Milton Johns, who turns out to have been Ken Cuccinelli's law partner, still say Wegman And Said have never plagiarized.

See a graph of alleged plagiarisms involving Wegman and/or students.
As it happens, Walid K. Sharabati is no longer active in the statistics department @ Purdue. (He was 4th author on retracted paper.)

WILEY WIREs:CS is edited by Ed Wegman, Yasmin Said, and David Scott.

1) Wegman & Said (2011) was plagiarized from various sources, discovered and exhaustively documented by Canadian blogger "Deep Climate." Of course, near-verbatim plagiarism is easily demonstrable, and he has done a detailed analysis, posted publicly at:
http://deepclimate.org/2011/03/26/wegman-and-said-2011-dubious-scholars…
It includes a 22-page side-by-side analysis of the paper with the antecedent texts:
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/wegman-said-color-theory…

More detail appeared in:
http://deepclimate.org/2011/05/15/wegman-and-said-2011-part-2/

This plagiarism chain started in 2002, with material used in lectures, an Army ACAS course, and finally in Wegman and Said (2011).

2) Said & Wegman (2009) was almost entirely plagiarized from various Wikipedia pages, although with many errors.
This has been discussed starting in April, but a thorough analysis is in:
http://deepclimate.org/2011/10/04/said-and-wegman-2009-suboptimal-schol…
http://andrewgelman.com/2011/09/wiley-wegman-chutzpah-update

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/10/more-w… USA Today

3) From its inception, WIREs:CS masthead has listed:
"Yasmin H. Said, Professor, Oklahoma State University, Ruth L. Kirschstein National Fellow, George Mason University Professor, Oklahoma State University.

She is actually a Research Assistant Professor at George Mason University, has never had the rank of Professor and never worked at Oklahoma State University. This finally got fixed in September 2011, changed first to Professor and then to Assistant Professor at George Mason.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%291939-0068/home…

Now this is fairly peculiar: exactly what peer review is going on when 2 of the 3 editors publish such papers in the journal they edit. Did Scott ever see any of this? The optimization paper was obviously bad to anyone with even the slightest background. Andrew Gelman whacked away multiple times.

A new issue of WIREs:CS just appeared, making it the 3rd or 4th since complaints were filed.

From first complaints, WILEY is now 8+ MONTHS AND STILL COUNTING.

21 months!!?!

Intrade should start offering odds on just how long they can drag this out.

Olaus Petri:

Merry Christmas to you too Tim! :-)

What does Christmas have to do with your ignorance and arrogance?

I foresee that this thread may need a reminder:
Firefox + Greasemonkey + KILLFILE works here.

re: 16: yes, errors are not really scandals.

It was a pity about the the plagiarism, the thrust of the Wegman paper holds regardless,
climate science has destroyed the reputation of science as a whole. This was revealed in the Wegman paper, the plagiarism does not remove this truth, only the paper, he should rewrite the paper, quote his source's and resubmit the paper.

Is plagiarising the truth worse than perpetuating the CO2 lie ?

( http://www.climategate.com/german-physicists-trash-global-warming-theory )

[*Trolling deleted. Take it to the Jonas thread. Tim*]

Wally: the 'respected' physicist referred to in your link is basically saying that if I wear a sweater under my parka on a cold day, I am violating the second law of thermodynamics by causing a net flow of energy from a colder place (my parka) to a warmer place (me). He's a bit of a chump really, isn't he?

*Dear Chris, you missed the important part, ergo that the CAGW is a creation of non-science (blogs, journalists, politicians, GONGOS, ecologist, computer-techs, etc)*

Olaus, you are getting more ridiculous with every post. Since when is ecology a non-science? Next thing you'll be repeating the vacuous musings of the Duffer by claiming that biology isn't a science.

Let me guess... you've never been near a university science lab in your entire life...

Wally,

I assume this is the Gerlich that you are referring to:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gerhard_Gerlich

Isn't it amazing how climate change deniers are routinely referred to with complete and utter deference on denialist blogs? In the article Wally links, Gerlich is referred to as a 'respected' scientist. You'll never hear those words used to describe much more published and cited scientists like Michael Mann or James Hansen, who are routinely smeared.

[*Trolling deleted. Take it to the Jonas thread. Tim*]

21:
I am afraid Wally has a serious D-K problem, but that is curable if someone is willing to learn.

1) The thrust of the paper was wrong, it seriously mis-used social network analysis techniques and was bogus ... and that's not me saying it, but 3 serious SNA researchers, of whom 2 were identified and quoted, and the 3rd quoted. I traded emails with all of them. Even without the plagiarism, none of them though it would survive peer review in a serious SNA journal.

2) It was only accepted because the Editor Stanley Azen was an old friend of Wegman's ... i.e., did exactly what Wegman accused the climate scientists of.

3) All this is well-documented in detail, including Wegman's pathetic letter trying to blame a grad student, in Strange Tales and Emails.
Note that Elsevier didn't buy all this and thus forced retraction.

(Thanks Tim - those nongs really are best kept in their enclosure!)

'Wally' is eponymous, don't you think?

I'll give Olaus credit for one minor thing - he's introduced me to the phrase 'sheela na gig'. A very fascinating petroglyphic phenomenon.

Of course, the fact that he seems bent on using it as an insult doesn't say anything complimentary about his attitude toward female genitalia.

29 Mithrandir,

Also a great early song by PJ Harvey. I've got in on vinyl and heard it live a couple of times.

[Mithrandir](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/12/wegman_one_of_the_scientists_t…).

Most people I know who have a fascination with mediÃ¦val (and earlier) history and/or archictecture (and I know many such folk!) would find Olaus Petri's repeated and vacuously unsubtle use of Sheela-na-gigs in an insult to be peculiar at best. In fact, they'd probably almost to a person suggest that Petri's behaviour is more likely to be pathological.

It's certainly a strong hint of the prepubescent purility that inhabits that troll's mind.

I'm sure that you are aware of some of the good archÃ¦ological resources on the subject. I won't link to any, in case the troll is overly excited by a subject so obviously dear to his heart...

Doh - I think that I just said "Ni"!

I knew sheela na gig, but I have to admit, I didn't know "hunkypunk", which would have been the name of my teenage garage band if I had. Even worse, my phone spell-check prompted me for "hunky punk".

@Gaz (#16)
The aresenic-based life case is a good example of "science by press conference." Had the authors simply made a mistake that was discovered and corrected by subsequent work- no harm, no foul. That wasn't what happened though. There were several major errors in the paper that completely undermined the conclusion and were apparently so obvious that they were spotted by multiple people literally within hours of publication. These sorts of obvious errors and unsupported conclusions are exactly the kinds of things that the peer review process is supposed to catch. The fact that they weren't caught prior to publication raised a lot of questions about the quality of the review the paper faced. To add further fuel to the fire, the results were announced via a nationally televised press conference, which very few people felt was appropriate given the preliminary nature of the work, even if it had stood up to post-publication scrutiny.

Back to the original topic?

Actually, while the Said, Wegman+students paper in CSDA was a scandal, I'd suggest it was far exceeded by others:

1)
a)CSDA Editor Stanley Azen accepted it in less than a week, bypassing peer review, for a paper on a topic outside his expertise (SNA).

b)When asked about by USA Today, he claimed he must have done peer review, but had lost the records in an office move (the "dog ate my reviews" defense), in contradiction to the clear evidence of published dates and emails.

c) A simple apology and promise not to do it again might have been sufficient, but he wouldn't do that, and even the retraction notice was done by Elsevier, not him. His preference was to let Wegman fix the article by inserting a few citations.

d) But Azen is still EiC of CSDA, and remains Assistant Dean for Research Integrity at USC.

2) Of course, GMU is 21+ Months and still counting.

Personally I was rather impressed that he had heard of Sheela-na-gigs at all, they are a somewhat obscure subject, much beloved of some dippy hippy types.

>But Azen is still EiC of CSDA, and remains Assistant Dean for Research Integrity at USC.

And IMHO thus remains a blight on both institutions, as well as a stain on scientific procedure in general.

Yet more Wegman plagiarism

tlambert — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:32:28 +0000

Yet more Wegman plagiarism

Said and Wegman 2009 does contain original and accurate material. Alas, the original material is not accurate and the accurate material is plagiarised, mostly from Wikipedia. Deep Climate has the details:

This paper is the fifth major work that I have analyzed from Wegman and Said. From the 2006 Wegman report to Congress, up to this year's "Colour Theory and Design", so much of Wegman and Said's recent work demonstrates extreme reliance on unattributed antecedents, as well as numerous errors and incompetent analysis.

Wegman did not reply to USA Today's Dan Vergano request for a comment.

Andrew Gelman piles on:

It's almost as if English is not Wegman's first language, or as if he doesn't know what he's talking about and trying very very carefully not to make any mistakes. Or as if he didn't write it at all . . . but that can't be! His name is on the article (he's the second author, behind the less-celebrated Yasmin Said), so I can only assume he has fully read the article and takes responsibility for its content.

John Mashey:

a) My modest formal O.R. background was long ago, and the article was obviously a weird mishmash on first read, even it me.

b) I showed it to someone whose PhD was in optimization decades ago, whose first reaction was "some poor rehash of Hillier&Lieberman?"

c) I sent it to a real O.R. expert at a leading university, who found so many problems in the first few pages that he stopped there.

tlambert Thu, 10/06/2011 - 13:32

Tags

Wegman

Edward Wegman

oriiginal? replay?

You drunk, Tim? ;-)

"extreme reliance on unattributed antecedents, as well as numerous errors and incompetent analysis."

They sure went to great length to avoid using the B word!

LOL

Sigh.

Seems like those bastions of scientific rigour and probity, "The Auditors" have no problem when it comes to Wegman's laxity and venality.

Isn't it odd how threads about denialist scientists being caught out faking science gets very little attention from denialists.

It looks like they can't even be bothered to defend themselves...

Dan Vergano wrote

Dan Walsch, did answer by email about the university's policy on students plagiarizing from Wikipedia in their schoolwork

Uh, no, he didn't:

Mason does not have a university wide policy regarding the use of Wikipedia by students. While it is a general-use resource, generally, it is something we leave to the individual professors to teach students the difference between it and a more traditional, scientific reference source.

That has nothing to do with plagiarism.

> a university wide policy regarding the use of Wikipedia

They probably don't have a university wide policy regarding using little people's work without payment or attribution to benefit the rich -- unless they're on the record as being in favor of it.

Oh, wait ...

"George Mason University is a Virginia-based public university near Washington, D.C. A "magnet for right-wing money" [1] and heavily Koch-funded[1], it is notable for hosting over 40 libertarian research centers and affiliates including the Institute for Humane Studies and the Mercatus Center."
-- Sourcewatch

________________________________________
"Hey, there's no law against it -- yet!"

Walsch was asked about something and he gave an answer, just not to the question asked :-)

This skill is well known in some quarters.

Grilling a spokesman is misplaced - all you'll get is spokesmanlike answers. Spokespeople are like manzanita bark, easily shed w/o damage to the underlying structure.

Better to ask the folk(s) in charge directly.
(though I myself have not done so)

@7 @8

I understand that. I was more concerned with Dan Verdano's erroneous claim. He should have pointed out that the response had nothing to do with the question asked, rather than saying that it was about it.

People may not understand the editorial processes at USA Today or Science, or savvy journalists like Dan VERGANO or Eli Kintisch, respectively.

Here are some of Dan's articles. I leave it as an exercise for the readers to explain the usage of various quotes.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/10/wegman…

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-21-climat…

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-22-plagia…

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/11/wegman…

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2011-05-15-climat…

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/05/retrac…

That has the wondrous:
""Neither Dr. Wegman nor Dr. Said has ever engaged in plagiarism," says their attorney, Milton Johns, by e-mail. In a March 16 e-mail to the journal, Wegman blamed a student who "had basically copied and pasted" from others' work into the 2006 congressional report, and said the text was lifted without acknowledgment and used in the journal study. "We would never knowingly publish plagiarized material" wrote Wegman, a former CSDA journal editor."

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/10/more-w…

Then there's Eli in Science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6035/1250.summary
Paywalled, so a few examples are:

"Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses âtotalitarian tacticsââpublishing damaging documents online, without peer reviewâto carry out personal vendettas. Whereas Mann lauds Mashey for âexploring the underbelly of climate denial,â Happer says Masheyâs tactics are âcontrary to open inquiry.â

"Wegman and his lawyer declined several requests for comment from Science, but the latter told USA Today that neither Wegman nor the first author of the CSDA paper, an assistant professor at George Mason, âhas ever engaged in plagiarism.â

Some people were upset at the quotes in some of these articles. I was delighted. I leave it as an exercise why.

People may not understand

Go sit on it.

I leave it as an exercise for the readers to explain the usage of various quotes.

I'm not talking about a quote, I'm talking about Verdano's own assertion, in his own voice. Just because he's savvy doesn't mean that he never screws up.

And to be concrete, what Verdano should have written, to be "savvy", is

However spokesman Dan Walsch, did answer respond by email to an inquiry about the university's policy on students plagiarizing from Wikipedia in their schoolwork:

With the changes it's factual; without them it's not. Now go blow about what "[p]eople may not understand".

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://gazette.gmu.edu/images/yasmi…

"She also earned distinction in her orals and maintained a 4.0 GPA in her classes."

I do wonder if she got that 4.0 GPA in the same manner; fraud.. Someone willing and able to take a critical look into her dissertation?

ianam, the English language is a bit imprecise in that way... reasonable people will read Vergano's version as meaning yours. What really happened is very very obvious from the quote itself, as reasonable people will also see.

Letting a quote speak for itself in deadpan fashion is a journalistic technique too... and then, John's #10 remarks become pertinent ;-)

Re 13:
Said's dissertation: it was rather lightweight, with several pages of plagiarized material, including howlers like changing death to impairment.
See DC's dissertation review.

This was item j in Plagiarism chains involving Wegman and/or students. SSWR also mentioned it.

May I ask, why the extended foray into the iniquities of Wegman and Said? Isn't the point fulsomely made already? Does Wegman's reputation not yet lie in ruins, or otherwise what's the point of scouring more material for more fraud? Just that it begins to look more like a vendetta than rational enquiry.

In short, what is the objective now, John Mashey?

Well, no. If you want closure speak to GMU.

See William Tecumseh Sherman...

Barry.

Michael Mann suffered numerous reviews of alleged fraudulence in his work - reviews heavily based on Wegman's fairystories in addition to many other, unevidenced denialist claims - and Mann was completely exonerated every time.

Wegman's group was (and still is) hailed by denialists as a major discrediting of Mann. Given the scrutiny forced upon Mann, there is no reason not to apply the same scrutiny to Wegman et al, especially considering that their 'refutations' of Mann, as well as most of their other work, is being obviously demonstrated by Mashey and DC as nothing more than a flim-flam confection of the amalgamated work of others.

That GMU is moving to address the scandal at a glacial pace, when the unnecessary investigations of Mann were completed in reasonable time, only adds further to the justification for forensic deconstruction of Wegman et al

Bernard J,

Mashey's forensic analysis has moved beyond the Wegman (et al) reports and papers dealing with Michael Mann to other work from Wegman (et al) that has nothing to do with climate change or Michael Mann.

The focus has shifted from exonerating Michael Mann by exposing the academic bankruptcy of specific criticism of his work, to discrediting Wegman in general in order to prompt quicker action by GMU against him.

It seems to me that an academic flensing of specific material has evolved into a partisan agenda born of impatience.

@barry : if Mr Wegman had done his work properly, he wouldn't have offered such a perfect target to Mr Mashey.
Either he plagiarized, or he didn't. Willing to hide that under the carpet "because it has nothing to do with climate change" is quite strange, to say the least.

Another point : apparently Mr Mashey is doing the reviewer's job. Maybe you should consider why Mr Wegman's articles get through so easily ...

Barry: You are correct that this is about more than Michael Mann. You are not correct to claim that this is "a partisan agenda born of impatience."

GMU received a formal complaint about plagiarism by Wegman's group in March 2010. We know this because the complainant went public several months later. There has been plenty of time (about 19 months) for GMU to complete a full formal investigation of the complaint (as several committees on both sides of the pond have done re: Mann and Hadley/CRU). Instead, AFAIK, GMU has not even completed a preliminary investigation. A reasonable observer might interpret this as stonewalling. I won't speak for Mashey about what motivates him, but his continued investigation of plagiarism in Wegman's group is a rational response to that stonewalling. That Wegman and his colleagues have been shown to exhibit a pattern of plagiarism is something that should, if GMU were at all concerned about its academic reputation, push the university into actually completing its investigation.

There is also a parallel with the Virginia AG's still-active investigation of Mann for fraud, allegations which were based largely on the work of Wegman et al. GMU, like UVA, is a public university nominally supported by Virginia taxpayers.

Barry.

I'm sure that if Mann had cheated on his tax return, there'd be chapters on it bouncing around the Denialati traps, being paraded as Exhibit 2 in a line of 'proof' attempting to discredit him.

The simple fact is that any and all of Wegman's academic misbehaviour is salient to the rebuttal of his claimed bona fides to discredit Mann. If Wegman's anti-Mann house is built of spit and toilet paper, that needs to be pointed out, and if the general academic foundations are just as tenuous - well, that's fair game too.

Barry, you're not sweating simply because Wegman is looking like a complete, um, fraud, are you?

re: 17
As Eli knows well, *real* closure is well beyond GMU, more like SACSCOC, ARL, NSWR, ORI, and finally DoJ.

[DoJ: There is even more evidence for the 18USC1001, 18USC371, 18USC4 issue than there was in 2010 when I wrote CCC. See p.1, 184.
Of course, others have been added since, such as potential obstruction of justice, certainly by Wegman+Said (disappearing files, editing out of mention Said's 2007 talk from seminar record), disappearance of files from Sharabati's website, etc.]

re: 19
Actually, this long ago got beyond any issue around Mann, who didn't need any help on this anyway.

Unlike Climategate, which was much ado about nothing, do people recall how the original -gate worked?

See Watergate

The parallels are:
1) A minor incident, i.e., a burglary.
2) Several years of very hard work chasing threads, and finding one unexpected connection after another, and many more people involved than the burglars. Two years ago, GMU wasn't even on my radar screen.
3)As is often the case, coverup causes more trouble than the original problem.

Of course, in terms of coverup, this has to rate as one of the dumbest attempts at coverup, ever, given the prima facie evidence of obvious plagiarism:

'"Neither Dr. Wegman nor Dr. Said has ever engaged in plagiarism," says their attorney, Milton Johns, by e-mail. In a March 16 e-mail to the journal, Wegman blamed a student who "had basically copied and pasted" from others' work into the 2006 congressional report, and said the text was lifted without acknowledgment and used in the journal study. "We would never knowingly publish plagiarized material" wrote Wegman, a former CSDA journal editor.'

Further to barry's posts 16,20

"it begins to look more like a vendetta than rational enquiry"

A couple of things,

1. What is the point in this relentless pursuit of an academic that, if truth be told, nobody really gives a damn about? It's comming across as the personal obsession of an individual teetering on the edge of lunacy.

2. One cannot in one breath, deplore this sort of character/professional assination when targeted at Michael Mann, then in the next, triumphantly pursue another academic in the same manner. It's hypocrisy to say the least!

> What is the point in this relentless pursuit of an academic

You're talking about the witchunts of Michael Mann, are you?

> One cannot in one breath, deplore this sort of character/professional assination when targeted at Michael Mann, then in the next, triumphantly pursue another academic in the same manner

Well, you can.

If, for example, Michael Mann has been investigated and found innocent, and Wegman hasn't been investigated at all, then there's a big huge difference between the two.

But you've never deplored the witch-hunt against Mann. Why are you so concerned about it only when Wegman has been found out?

re: 24 more
As for some of the yet-to-be-resolved issues, see this at DC.
Wegman&Said have been spending Federal tax money in multiple ways.

People might also look up Roger Clemens and they might talk to Washington-savvy lawyers, as I do, about 18USC1001.

GSW said: "What is the point in this relentless pursuit of an academic that, if truth be told, nobody really gives a damn about"?

Ah yes, the old 'Huh? What's a Wegman Report'? ploy.

See history being airbrushed before your very eyes!

Stand by for another outbreak of 'teh Team' pyrotechnic splenetics from McI. and his pooch Montford!

@#14

Regardless, I made a valid point in #5, and got a pathetically patronizing response that misread me.

One cannot in one breath, deplore this sort of character/professional assination when targeted at Michael Mann, then in the next, triumphantly pursue another academic in the same manner.

Yeah, like one cannot deplore Hitler's invasion of Poland and at the same time wage war against Germany. (If only Godwin's Law worked the way the mythology around it says.)

It's hypocrisy to say the least!

An apt description of your and the entire "skeptical" community's output.

Here's another:

One cannot in one breath, deplore Joseph McCarthy's character assassination of Americans with a different political opinion, and then in the next, triumphantly pursue terrorists who bomb buildings ...

... because treating guilt and innocence differently is hypocrisy!

@ianam

What you are saying is, if you believe an academic has behaved inappropriately in the preparation of his published work, then you are perfectly justified in hounding, harassing or otherwise destroying the professional reputation of that individual.

Cuccinelli and ATI, I am sure, feel equally justified in their pursuit of Michael Mann. You either recognize that this type of back street brawling is inappropriate or you do not, but you can't have it both ways.

Like I say, to fail to acknowledge this is Hypocrisy!

GSW said: "Like I say, to fail to acknowledge this is Hypocrisy"!

Uh huh. Care to provide links to all your protestations in favour of Mike Mann similar to your Wegman defence here?

Thought not. There's that 'h' word again.

@chek

Can you provide any references I have made in support of "Wegman"? The only reference to him specifically that I can find is

"if truth be told, nobody really gives a damn about [him]?"

My criticism here has been the 'fair game' treatment of academics venturing forth into the 'political' arena, nothing more.

Try re-reading your comment@ #25 in context GSW, not the pared down revisiting of it you quote in #34.

Which Canadian and English (though living in Scotland) cranks might your sentence: "It's comming (sic) across as the personal obsession of an individual teetering on the edge of lunacy". apply to? Then show where you've defended using the same criteria you felt was appropriate to voice your support for poor old persecuted, hard-done-by Wegman.

@chek

"It's comming (sic) across as the personal obsession of an individual teetering on the edge of lunacy apply to?"

It applies to John Mashey, thank you for asking for the clarification.

"Then show where you've defended using the same criteria you felt was appropriate to voice your support for poor old persecuted, hard-done-by Wegman."

I've no idea what that means chek, but then what you say seldom does.

;)

Re. my comment @ #35.
'Cranks' is entirely the wrong word.

'Operatives' is far more accurate.

No GSW, John Mashey does not match the criteria.

Whereas in one of the instances I alluded to above, an English accountant living in Scotland reduced to quoting a [dog astrology 'journal'](http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/) in pursuit of his misdirected mania most certainly does. That really shows - as you so succinctly put it - "an individual teetering on the edge of lunacy". Precisely.

Perhaps now you've arrived at that realisation, you'll now go do the right thing, hypocrisy being the anathema to you that you claim. Or at least once you've stopped [fondling your trolls](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/09/jonas_thread.php#comment-5480436).

@chek

Sorry chek, still haven't got a clue about what you are on about.

Chewbacca defense?

;)

Well, as one of Montford's boys, nobody expects you to be too bright GSW.

@chek

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clKi92j6eLE&feature=related

I think this summarizes your argument quite well chek. It only makes sense if you are 'special' like you.

lol!

So your 'defence' of Wegman and Montford amounts to a bit of insubstantial whining and 'look over there - cartoons'!

Duly noted, GSW.

> I think this summarizes your argument quite well chek. It only makes sense if you are 'special' like you.

> lol!

touchÃ©. you big smelly poopoohead.

@ligne

;)

Not sure of what point you're making GSW.

It's pretty standard to identify and pursue fraudulent behaviour in science and scientific publishing (have a look at the web site "RetractionWatch" for example; consider also the Office of Research Integrity in the US...and so on...).

Wegman and Said have engaged in objectively fradulent behaviour (one of their papers has already been retracted). Wegman has participated in fraudulent misrepresentation of science in a major government hearing.

These frauds should certainly be highlighted until they are properly investigated and the wrongs "righted". Note that there is no doubt about the nature of the frauds; given that there seems to be little enthusiasm on the part of those that have the responsibility to address these frauds (other than the Editor and Publisher of one journal so far)
it's certainly appropriate to keep applying the pressure of objective disclosure.

I'm sure you don't need to be reminded of the contrast with the bullying of Dr. Mann! In that case a group of misguided individuals (Dr. Wegman is one of these sadly) have found enormous enthusiasm to engage in pretty shabby attempts to discredit a scientist and his science. Numerous seperate enquiries have found no cause to question the integrity of Dr. Mann's work, which has been largely vindicated by a decades-worth of subsequent research.

I guess you'd agree that the moral and ethical issue are pretty clear. It's pretty important to get stuff as right as possible in science, and scientists and those that interact with scientists should act in good faith. That's normally the case. In the case of Drs. Wegman (and Said), and those involved in the so-called Wegman enquiry, something has gone very wrong. Don't see any reason not to make these issues crystal-clear....As a scientist I applaud the clarity of John Mashey's presentation of the evidence that informs us on these issues. Of course I can understand why some people may not like it...but facts is facts! ;-)

re: 45 Chris
Thanks for the kind words.

As for some people not liking it ...

a) it was most fascinating to watch
the fanciful claims of non-plagiarism,
or Judith Curry's multiple claims of "reprehensible" behavior by Deep Climate
or that it didn't count
or the nonsensical claims that Bradley copied Fritts
or Wegman's attempt to somehow blame it all on grad student Denise Reeves.
or Wegman and Milton Johns' claims of no plagiarism, ever.

b) Said&Wegman(2009) and Wegman&Said(2011) have no grad students to blame.

c) But by now, many people seem to be into "look! a squirrel!" mode whenever each new thing comes out.

One nit:
"little enthusiasm on the part of those that have the responsibility to address these frauds (other than the Editor and Publisher of one journal so far)"

Elsevier (the publisher of CS&DA) acted well.
As for the Editor, the issue of possible, serious breach of peer review is as yet unresolved. See Strange tales and Emails to assess the enthusiasm level.

What you are saying is ...

No, what I am saying, GSW, is that you are a dishonest sack of shit.

"who cares ?" (GSW) Let me see :
- Rep. Joe Barton, bringing up the report written by Wegman, which appears to be seriously flawed (and not only for plagiarism)
- the Congress, in front of which mr Wegman took oath and still produced less than stellar science
- the plagiarized scientists, who are not correctly rewarded for their work (and citation is the essence of recognition in this job)
- possible partners of GMU, who discover that this institution allows his scientists to freely plunder other scientists without any sanction, and thus are less than enthusiastic to share work with this university
- people reading Wegman's work for their research, who discover that this work is not correct and yet passed through "peer" review. They lost time, and they are now aware that some people apparently have facilities to publish muddy articles without much effort.

It seems it makes a quite large population, to my standards.

And pulease, GSW, trying to look smart by using meme is too mainstream. Go lurk moar.

"Then show where you've defended using the same criteria you felt was appropriate to voice your support for poor old persecuted, hard-done-by Wegman."

I've no idea what that means chek

... and stupid ...

but then what you say seldom does.

... and incoherent.

You either recognize that this type of back street brawling is inappropriate or you do not, but you can't have it both ways.

And I don't, asshole ... I do not recognize what you mischaracterize as "back street brawling" to be inappropriate. Rather, I recognize the totally dishonest attacks on Mann to be inappropriate and the totally honest criticisms of Wegman and Said to be appropriate. And every honest person does the same.

While ianam's politics might resemble mine I prefer clarity to spite viz. 'And I don't, asshole ...'

I think it is well and good that Wegman et al's appallingly shoddy work (The Wegman Report, Said et al) that sought to discredit Michael Mann's papers on millennial reconstructions has been exposed. It is a shame that GMU has been slow to deal with clear examples of academic misconduct by Wegman (et al).

Had GMU responded quickly, Deep Climate and Mashey would not have turned their attention to Wegman's output beyond that connected to Michael Mann.

Is is specious to pitch this ongoing take-down of Wegman as the championing of academic virtue. Or can someone advise me if Mashey and DC are going to look at anyone else's work, or extend their expedition beyond climate science critics?

This is not about championing the cause of academic integrity, or redeeming GMU by holding it to account, or pursuing justice on any level.

This has become about taking down Wegman and co because 'denialists' still refer to his work, and because GMU has not done the right thing in a timely manner (compared to MM!). It is now a partisan drive in the climate debate to demolish a hero of the skeptics, instead of coolly rebutting that material that specifically relates to the topic of interest - in short, playing the man instead of the ball.

Most woeful of all is to read comments justifying the expanded scope of this 'investigation' on the scurrilousness of Mann's detractors, as if their vileness should be a barometer for other behaviour. Mann was cruelled, so now its Wegman's turn. Really?

I think there is hardly a 'skeptic' out there who doesn't sully the term by identifying with it, that most of what passes for criticism of the mainstream understanding of climate change is poorly-disguised, bone-headed politicking, and that very few of these critics remotely understand the scientific method or even how to think rationally. But there are times when people who argue for, or defend, the mainstream view go beyond the pale. Bernard J believes that I am squirming because of the heat on Wegman. This kind of tribalism is odious. We should be very careful about playing a game of sides. That is what Wegman-gate has evolved into.

I don't fully agree with you barry, 'though we could perhaps agree to differ.

I think there are two issues:

ONE: Fraudulent behaviour in science, however small a part of the total scientific endeavour, is widely prosecuted by scientists. This is apparent from a number of cases of identification and pursuing of fraud in published work. It's very important to do this since fradulent behaviour has very significant real world consequences. In many cases (have a look at the website "Retraction watch" for example), dealing responsibly with fraud has only followed very persistent efforts in the face of some general recalcitrance on the part of scientific journals and organizations. I see nothing wrong with continuing to highlight bad faith on the part of a particular small group of scientists. Without highlighting this stuff it would effectively be allowed to "disappear" and the negative consequences likely to multiply. A large part of this is about "academic integrity" and the consequences of abusing this.

TWO: There's no question that this particular case is highly politicized. In fact from the point of view of science, Wegman and Said's problematic stuff is way out there on the fringes where science drifts into "unnecessary non-contributory CV puffing papers". However I don't agree that the highlighting of Wegman's and Said's wrongdoings amounts to "playing the man" and not "the ball". If these issues had been properly resolved then piling-on would indeed by inappropriate. However they haven't been, and John Mashey et al are playing the "ball" (the "ball" being the unresolved wrong-doings).

It would be entirely appropriate if (a) GMU would deal with the clearcut plagiarism issues properly and (b) there was some public statement that the Wegman enquiry and its findings were severely scientifically flawed. Those are facts and I don't see why they shouldn't be made clearly articulated and publicised. Otherwise one is left with an apparent reality that it's perfectly O.K. to engage in extreme bad faith involving attempted persecution of scientists and misrepresentation to government, so long as (a) these actions fit in with a particular sociopolitical agenda and (b) any criticisms can be ignored to the point that they (the criticisms of fraud and bullying) go away.

So in my opinion it's proper that these criticisms don't "go away", until they're properly addressed.

I do agree with some of your comments about other posters responses - it really helps to take a level-headed view of these issues and not get drawn into counter-productive factionalising.

> Is is specious to pitch this ongoing take-down of Wegman as the championing of academic virtue

Why? Because you say so? This

> Or can someone advise me if Mashey and DC are going to look at anyone else's work, or extend their expedition beyond climate science critics?

Is certainly not it. The "Himalayagate" was found by the scientists themselves. The errors in MBH98 were inconsequential but were corrected in later works anyway.

But Wegman isn't correcting his mistakes. He's multiplying them. And none of your "Auditor" mates are doing anything on the subject.

So therefore people like John have to continue to do what Wegman, McIntyre and Montford REFUSE to do, until they start going and doing it themselves.

> ...instead of coolly rebutting that material that specifically relates to the topic of interest...

It's a little odd for someone to claim Mashey's investigations are **instead** of the veritable **shitload** of cool rebuttals that have been provided over the last decade or two.

And odder still to (perhaps) imply that those deep and extensive rebuttals will have any effect on "skeptics" - who, for example, still cite *both* Wegman and his Report as authoritative.

Barry, DC and John found that the Wegman report was riddles with plagiarism, questionable statistic and weird social science. As honest brokers they readily and quickly accepted Rice's investigation and clearing of Scott, but this pattern intensified their interest in Wegman, Said and their students other work, which they discovered was an anthill of busy copy and paste, as well as weird social science.

Of course, what they should have done is investigate Mike Mann. Please place your red herrings in the umbrella stand on your way out.

re: 55 Eli

"As honest brokers" eek! I must decline that particular label, given the connotations in recent years.

But again:
1) I've written a few things, listed here or more complete here.
Wegman is just one part of the machinery.

2) As noted before SSWR by page count is ~25% on plagiarism, much more is about the errors, biases, distortions, bad science, bad statistics, repetitions of wrong memes that emerge when one looks very carefully at the Wegman Report. Some of that only became obvious when subtracting out the cyan+yellow plagiarism, which showed the changes. SFWR took that further into Falsification/Fabrication. (But I sure wish MS Word had a better choice of colors!)

3) There are still many loose ends related to all this: see SSWR pp.33-35. Of these:

PAGE 34:

1,2: Rapp is no longer employed by USC, despite Kunc keeping him on website.
Springer still hasn't acted on the book, to my knowledge.

14: [SHA2008] has been retracted.

16: Purdue: Sharabati

20: Outside SNA experts to review [SHA2008]: been done: Robins, Carley and a third expert panned it. See STaE, p.7, item 2.

PAGE 35:

18: Said Professor @ Oklahoma State: that got fixed September 2011, Wiley having been told about it by April.
Of course, when SSWR was written, none of us at looked very hard at WIREs:CS (there was only so much time).

Of course, at the time, it was still thought the GMU might act responsibly, although doubts were certainly swirling about. For those in software, consider pp.34-35 as a bug list or TODO list to be worked through over time.

NEW TOPIC, RELATED:
Finally, especially for those with computer networking expertise, take a look at Rezazad(2011), currently free.
Don't worry particularly about plagiarism, I'm more interested in:

a) Technical opinions on the techniques.

b) How this works as a *review* article.

(long post may have gone to spam), but:
please, not an "honest broker," a phrase that has gotten top be akin to "sound science." :-)

I prefer clarity

My comments are quite clear.

to spite

That far better describes your own useless comment that notably ignored/snipped all of the substance of my own.

This has become about taking down Wegman and co because 'denialists' still refer to his work

It is perfectly reasonable for defenders of science to demonstrate the lack of credibility of those whose work the enemies of science hold up as their "proof" that scientists are a biased clique of hoaxers. Your comment about playing the man vs. the ball not only indicates that you don't even know what game is being played, but it is utterly hypocritical, as you are not making any attempt to rebut the work of DC and Mashey but are rather only attacking their motivation.

[Was that clear enough, Strang?]

It's a little odd

That's a very polite and generous description of such intellectual dishonesty.

Barry's position appears to be that, when it was discovered that Wegman and Said had engaged in a whole pattern of plagiarism, everyone should have remained silent about it because it's not directly about climate science; that to not stick strictly to the latter displays "tribalism". What a tortured, ludicrous argument.

it really helps to take a level-headed view of these issues and not get drawn into counter-productive factionalising

You mean like what barry just did?

Me: "It is specious to pitch this ongoing take-down of Wegman as the championing of academic virtue"

Wow: "Why? Because you say so?"

No, some have justified DC and Mashey's sleuthing beyond the material connected to Mann et al as a general good in the name of academic integrity, and distinct from the original intent. While the sentiment is fine, it is a post-hoc rationalisation and quite disingenuous. Wegman et al are not the recipients of DC and Mashey's attention because of some drive to clean up academia. They are targets because of their criticism of Mann.

When the focus shifted to material unrelated to Mann et al, the game changed. What was a scholarly rebuttal (deconstruction, rather) of the criticism of millennial temperature reconstructions and social network analysis of Mann and colleagues, has become a campaign to generally discredit Wegman et al, because the original, straightforward attempt had been frustrated by GMU 'stonewalling'.

I've just then described the situation in the way commenters here have justified it. Why do people not see this evolution as being more political than scholarly? In fact, I think most people here do - certainly the implication is very clear in many posts above - but can't quite bring themselves to say so outright. ianam comes closest;

"Your comment about playing the man vs. the ball not only indicates that you don't even know what game is being played..."

(ianam, I am sure that Mashey's and DC's work is solid. I used to read it fairly attentively up until they shifted focus)

I should not have said, "disingenuous" above. That was wrong. Something more like "misguided". I don't doubt that intentions are good here, including DC and Mashey's. I just think the campaign has taken a wrong turn, even though there's plenty of ripe pickings on this avenue.

barry,

not sure what your attempted link within the word "justified" refers to since it's a non-functioning link. However it might be a reference to "ONE" in my post above (it seems like it could be!). The issue is about "academic integrity"; at least it's about "integrity". To highlight this is not to attempt post-hoc rationalisation.

In my opinion, one of the reasons that pseudoskepticism and denialism have gained such traction is that reasonable people have rather assumed that other people will act reasonably. In the face of rather incontrovertible evidence that Wegman (and Said) have engaged in serial plagiarism and misrepresented the science in presentations to a government committee (Wegman), reasonable people might assume that these matters would be quickly addressed and resolved. They haven't. In fact some individuals clearly consider that "academic integrity" (or at least "integrity"!) is a boring trifle when oh-so-important political agendas are to be pursued, and thus fraudulent and immoral behaviour involving bullying scientists, plagiarising, false representation and so on, are considered entirely acceptable.

In this case the academic and the political are linked together to the extent of being inseperable. A requisite for the attempted institutional trashing of Mann was the recruitment of someone deficient in "academic integrity" (or "integrity" if you prefer); someone with the character that is comfortable acting as a false "expert". We can recognise such a character in the "academic" dealings of Wegman. In highlighting the deficient "academic integrity" of Wegman, the deficiency of integrity that drives much of the agenda-led anti-science movement is highlighted.

So I don't think one can justify creating "bounds" within which particular critiques must be confined. This is about the attempted bullying of Dr. Mann by misrepresentation. But it's also about the generalised misrepresentation of science on climate in pursuit of an agenda (not to mention other species of science misrepresentation). The underlying theme is a deficiency of "integrity". Since these are issues of science the particular species of "integrity" is "academic integrity". Look more closely and you're likely to find that the very few scientists that engage in misrepresentation in pursuit of their tedious political agendas are likely also to be demonstrating deficiencies in "academic integrity" on a smaller scale (e.g. crappy plagiarised papers in low ranking journals). There are several other examples we could name.

How does this read with a few little edits, I wonder?

#52:

Is is specious to pitch this ongoing take-down of [Jones/Mann/etc] as the championing of academic virtue. Or can someone advise me if [WUWT/Climate Audit/etc] are going to look at anyone else's work, or extend their expedition beyond climate [scientists]?

This is not about championing the cause of academic integrity, or redeeming [CRU/Virginia/etc] by holding it to account, or pursuing justice on any level.

This has become about taking down [Jones/Mann/etc] because [scientists] still refer to his work, and because [CRU/etc] has not done the right thing in a timely manner (compared to [GMU]!). It is now a partisan drive in the climate debate to demolish a hero of the [realists], instead of coolly rebutting that material that specifically relates to the topic of interest - in short, playing the man instead of the ball.

Most woeful of all is to read comments justifying the expanded scope of this 'investigation' on the scurrilousness of [Wegman]'s detractors, as if their vileness should be a barometer for other behaviour. [Wegman] was cruelled, so now its [Mann]'s turn. Really?

[snip]

This kind of tribalism is odious. We should be very careful about playing a game of sides. That is what [Climate]-gate has evolved into.

(end quotes)

(shrugs)

re 58,
Clearly 'clarity' was wrong - substitute 'quality' or 'civility'

Why do people not see this evolution as being more political than scholarly?

Who said they don't? You're blathering against a strawman. Integrity is in fact a "political" issue, and this is a political blog, and the work being done by DC and Mashey is political ... as well it should be. That doesn't make it "tribalism".

Clearly 'clarity' was wrong - substitute 'quality' or 'civility'

Clarity and quality are matters of substance and mine are fine. You wrote

I prefer clarity to spite

As I noted, my comment was clear while yours was spiteful. As long as we are talking about our personal preferences, mine is accuracy over intellectual dishonesty.

In my opinion, one of the reasons that pseudoskepticism and denialism have gained such traction is that reasonable people have rather assumed that other people will act reasonably.

QFT. As I noted, people like barry seem not to even know what game is being played. Does he mistake Deltoid for a refereed science journal? What then, does he think of the post about Andrew Bolt being found guilty of offense to light skinned aborigines?

As I said in another thread,

... this is what you "rational" folks with autistic tendencies need to understand. Without lying they would have no case at all, GW denial would vanish, even the most gullible citizens would be well informed and would accept the findings of science ... but you folks soldier on here, trying to get these trolls to admit the truth ... but they have no respect for it and would be demolished if they were to do so, so it's completely against their perceived/short-term interests.
The "rational" community needs to get past the idea that "the truth will out" -- it won't, not without a whole lot of help in the social arena.

Academic integrity and climate change are, quite obviously, different subjects, so no amount of exposition of the facts of climate change will, by itself, have any impact on academic integrity. Academic integrity is about human behavior and its effect on the scientific enterprise. If we want the findings of science to determine real world policy, we have to be "political".

I should not have said, "disingenuous" above. That was wrong.

Indeed you should not have and indeed it was. OTOH,

Something more like "misguided".

That is your judgment, but there is every reason to think it applies more to yourself.

I just think the campaign has taken a wrong turn

Your opinion lacks a supporting argument; all you have offered is a string of escalating judgmental characterizations, like "tribalism", not any evidence of harm.

You asked in #16

May I ask, why the extended foray into the iniquities of Wegman and Said?

And you have received answers. Much of what you wrote there in #16 and subsequently has been, as you charged of Bernard J, "beyond the pale". And your statement about him was

Bernard J believes that I am squirming because of the heat on Wegman

But he didn't say that; in #23 he asked you ... because y'know, it wasn't possible to tell that you weren't a member of the denialati trying to defend Wegman, when you certainly sounded like it (in fact your #16 sounds just like the stuff we get from GSW). And in #23 , Bernard J answered your question of #16, in a way that has been repeated since by others. But you have an idee fixe, it seems.

in fact your #16 sounds just like the stuff we get from GSW

And sure enough, GSW took barry's lead in #25.

Like the denialati (it's an analogy, not an equation), barry's charges and complaints have been repeatedly been answered, but he acts as if they had not been.

Hi ianam, the gist of my comment was directed at vulgar language not the integrity of your thinking or your heart. No spite intended to you.

While the sentiment is fine, it is a post-hoc rationalisation and quite disingenuous.

You now say that "disingenuous" should be replaced with "misguided", but the latter doesn't make sense either in that context.

Wegman et al are not the recipients of DC and Mashey's attention because of some drive to clean up academia. They are targets because of their criticism of Mann.

They became targets because of that, but they remain targets for all the reasons that Mashey has noted in #24, #27, #46, and #57. What possible reason is there for him to stop looking into this? The reasons that you have offered ... that it's no longer climate science, that the point has been fulsomely made already, that Wegman's reputation lies in ruins, that it looks more like a vendetta than rational enquiry ... all strike me as "post-hoc rationalisation", at best; none is a valid reason to oppose finding things out.

@Strang

That's a lovely reconstruction but it doesn't stand up to an honest analysis of your original statement.

As for vulgar language, fuck it.

Barry @63:

No, some have justified DC and Mashey's sleuthing beyond the material connected to Mann et al as a general good in the name of academic integrity, and distinct from the original intent. While the sentiment is fine, it is a post-hoc rationalisation and quite disingenuous. Wegman et al are not the recipients of DC and Mashey's attention because of some drive to clean up academia. They are targets because of their criticism of Mann.

It seems to me that this is all just a normal part of the process of peer review of sub-standard or fraudulent work in science. When someone is found to have acted dishonestly, it is normal to scrutinize all their other work and to throw out anything that is doubtful (e.g. journal retractions). The culprit typically fades from view, presumably becoming unemployable. So far, Wegman and crew have got off lightly.

chris,

I obviously broke the link. It was to your comment at 45.

Good, we're all (mostly) agreed that the extended critique of Wegman et al is political in nature (while scholarly in form).

Critics mix politics with science, and they have rightly and consistently been condemned for this. The defense of the mainstream understanding of climate change has almost unwaveringly been based on and defended as intellectual rigour. By taking up political tactics, the mainstreamers lose the moral high ground. They are now playing with the pigs in the trough. I think it's a losing strategy, not just for conceding the nature of the game to critics, not just for ratifying the mixing of politics (in the sense of public debate, not gov policy) with science, and not just for providing an example to future critics as to how they may proceed in the general debate, but because it will be ineffective - if I understand what the final objective is.

But before I try to make my case further, in case I misunderstand the point, can anyone state what they believe the ideal end-game is to this extended critiquing of Wegman et al? In the best of all possible worlds, what happens when GMU finally does the right thing? What's the outcome that is hoped for - the 'win', as it were?

Hi Richard,

"It seems to me that this is all just a normal part of the process of peer review of sub-standard or fraudulent work in science. When someone is found to have acted dishonestly, it is normal to scrutinize all their other work and to throw out anything that is doubtful..."

Really? Who 'normally' does this auditing? I don't know myself, being unfamiliar with normal procedure in this regard. Purely out of curiosity, can anyone confirm or otherwise?

However, the wider critique of Wegman's work does not stem purely from academic concern as you describe it. I think that your rendering gilds the narrative somewhat - Mashey might agree, if his comment at 58 is an indication.

barry:

But before I try to make my case further, in case I misunderstand the point, can anyone state what they believe the ideal end-game is to this extended critiquing of Wegman et al? In the best of all possible worlds, what happens when GMU finally does the right thing? What's the outcome that is hoped for - the 'win', as it were?

This IMO is an interesting question which opens up a few dimensions to the political debate that orbits the science.

Ideally, swift, incisive action by GMU would have negated the need for any Mashey/ DC demolition work, but in the absence of that the next best outcome is that GMU and other unis [waves to Murdoch Uni, WA] take it on notice that attempting to sweep malodorous offcuts like Wegman and Said's work under the university's corporate suite carpet won't work any more.

You point out the political aspect of all this, yet my reading of the output from John Mashey and DC is that they go to some effort to acknowledge the political aspects and ramifications of Wegman and Said's work - were it not that their work had been used to (if not designed for) political ends then W&S et al would have been a minor footnote written by members of an obscure faculty. To object to John Mashey and DC following their quarry as they have on the grounds they are mixing politics with science is to ignore the fact that - intentionally or not - this is what has already happened. And if GMU cannot or will not act on charges of plagiarism and dodgy sholarship when their own rules specifically proscribe it (for students that is - how much more so for its lecturers), then it's left to those who can and will.

Or would you rather none of this had been pursued and revealed, simply because of some perceived universal law that states science and politics cannot be mixed?

barry (again):

Critics mix politics with science, and they have rightly and consistently been condemned for this.

No, sorry, you can't IMO generalise so.

There are many cases where someone with a vested (whether proclaimed or not) interest mixes science and politics (or, more likely, misrepresents science in an attempt to make a political point), and in that case they're fair game.

To then extrapolate that specific point to a general principle is where I think you run the risk of being hoist by your own petard.

Barry said: "In the best of all possible worlds, what happens when GMU finally does the right thing? What's the outcome that is hoped for - the 'win', as it were"?

It seems to me that the Wegman case is an apt adjunct to the BAU corporate corruption of government. Just the sort of thing the current '99% protests' in the USA are interested in.

@SteveC

A reasonable response. I don't think it addresses barry's main point however.

"What's the outcome that is hoped for - the 'win', as it were?"

I think your post acknowledges at least some politics are involved in this pursuit of Wegman, but to what end?

I don't think it will assist Mann in his current difficulties. Even if all of Wegman's papers were retracted because of 'wikipedia' or other reference issues, other existing statistical criticisms still remain.

So barry's clarity here, what do you expect to achieve with this? It may be all you actually succeed in doing is legitimize the 'no holds barred' targeting of academics.

@SteveC

Sorry Steve my #80 post was directed at your #77 response. Your #78 post,

"(or, more likely, misrepresents science in an attempt to make a political point), and in that case they're fair game."

Does seem to endorse the 'no holds barred' viewpoint. I'm sure Mann, for one, would not agree with you entirely..

@ GSW (both posts) - it seems to me Mann and others (witness the recent attacks on CSIRO scientists, amongst others, receiving threats against their persons) are already subject to "no holds barred" treatment. Whether Mann would - in your hypothetical - agree with me or not is neither here nor there as most "debate" around climate science is politically driven. Ergo why should Mashey, DC, Tim Lambert or anyone else be held back from engaging in the debate purely on barry's supposition that politics and science should not mix? It's not as if you yourself don't do exactly that.

that's strange, i seem to remember Mann being investigated -- repeatedly! -- over much less serious and clear-cut charges of academic misconduct than this.

>Bernard J believes that I am squirming because of the heat on Wegman. This kind of tribalism is odious.

Barry, I am curious to know why you perceive my defence of Mashey as "tribalism". It's a puzzling claim given that my interest in the matter is far from political, and very much academically focussed.

Frankly, I don't read Mashey and DC because they contradict the denialists of climate warming; I read them because I am interested in academic misbehaviour. I myself have blown the whistle on a fabricator of data (against some notable institutional management resistance to address it, I might add...), and I've pinged a number of undergraduates for plagiarism, so Wegman's et al disgraceful behaviour is personal for me.

And because I understand exactly how slippery those guilty of serious academic impropiety can be, I know full-well that Mashey's and DC's foresic investigations are not witch-hunts. If GMU and responsible funding and publishing bodies won't grasp the nettles, then Mashey and DC are absolutely doing the very thing that needs to be done.

[You say](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/10/yet_more_wegman_plagiarism.php#…):

>Good, we're all (mostly) agreed that the extended critique of Wegman et al is political in nature (while scholarly in form).

I'm not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that most commenters here agree that Mashey and DC are being political in their documentation of Wegman's et al academic malfeasance. I'm not sure, actually, how you have decided that the politcial outweighs the academic in this matter - you've done nothing more than claims so, rather than to provide evidenced analysis...

Given that the fatuous, ear-licking nudger GSW has bumbled in to barrack for you, you are now in the position of appearing to be a concern troll. Perhaps you would consider providing a supported argument, with reference to precedent of what constitutes "adequate investigation, and no more", so that your case is actually supported.

When I think about this (instead of jumping in) the notion that it's unacceptable to mix politics and science seems more and more something of a red herring. The focus of Said and Wegman and company (at least in the context that DC and John Mashey describe) is on a variety of analysis and networking techniques which, while they may fall under a general classification of being science-related, isn't actual climate science.

The second aspect is that even if their work was focussed on climate science, the issue being uncovered is one of slipshod research methods, inadequate attribution and obvious plagiarism, all of which are matters of no mean significance and standards for all of which should be applied across the board, irrespective of who the authors are.

In that sense then my view is that the political implications are merely a side-show and a distraction. The juicy bits at issue are whether any party who possesses any kind of authority to pronounce on a subject has acted properly and appropriately.

Yes O.K. brry, we'll have to agree to differ. I certainly don't think the efforts of John Mashey et al amount to "playing with the pigs in the trough". Persuing that analogy I would say that Mashey et al are the farmers attempting to get the pigs to behave! The key point is that Mashey et al's presentations are logical, properly researched and truthful. The "pigs" (as you describe them!) are making presentations that are dishonest, untruthful and lacking in integrity. They're simply not equatable.

But you asked about best outcomes. Two things would be ideal in my opinion. GMU prosecutes the plagiarism in the standard manner according to rather standard rules. There should be a clear recognition of unacceptable behaviour with an appropriate penalty. If the fradulent behaviour involved grant bodies, the penalty might be a barring from receiving federal funds for 3 or 5 or longer depending on severity. In this particular case a penality might be barring from supervising students for 3 or 5 years, since that seems to be the point at which lack of integrity has real world academic impacts (i.e. encouraging dodgy behaviour in one's students). Then you draw a line under it and everyone moves on.

The second ideal outcome would be a clear statement that the efforts and evidence of the Wegman committee were fundamentally flawed. Then you draw a line under it and everyone moves on. The first outcome (GMU plagiarism enquiry) should happen (it would be surprising if it didn't and a clear sign of a lack of integrity on the part of GMU). The second (some sort of statement about the flawed Wegman enquiry) almost certainly won't happen. However that's no reason not to keep highlighting the problem...

GSW, re:

"I don't think it will assist Mann in his current difficulties."

Which particular "difficulties" are those GSW? Dr. Mann seems to be engaged in extraordinarily successful and productive scientific work. In just the last 3 years he's published around 30 papers many of which have already had extraordinary impact. In just this 3 year period 5 of these papers have been cited 129, 90, 75, 69 and 21 times already - that's pretty outstanding and indicative of high quality and impact.

One might compare with Dr. Wegman. In the same period he's published 10 papers. The top 5 of these have been cited zero, zero, zero, zero and zero times.

What do you think GSW? Which of these do you consider has "current difficulties", scientifically speaking?

But of course we all have difficulties! Doing science is hard work; it's difficult to maintain funding levels and keeping one's students content and productive; having to spend long out of work time writing grants, refereeing papers and grants; doing admin, preparing lectures, organizing courses and so on and on...It's worth it 'though and very satisfying especially if one has a decent sense of integrity and a desire to do make a contribution.

We're not all blessed with your easy life GSW that allows you so much time to spread insinuations on blogs! :-)

The Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, has pursued Dr Mann relentlessly. He has filed CIDs which, if granted in the original instance, would have allowed him unfettered access to virtually all emails, accounts, rough notes, voicemails, etc for any grant or contract at state universit(y|ies) in the state of Virginia, that Mann has been mentioned on at any point, or where Mann was the grant applicant. That is one Hell of a fishing expedition: in Australia we call attempts like this as trying to build a "dirt file" on someone. If a politician in Australia tried this on a climate scientist..."beneath contempt" is the expression I'd use for such a tactic.

Compare that thuggish bully-boy b*llsh*t with the looking into Wegman's research articles by Mashey; all of the evidence Mashey has amassed has been from publicly available and (supposedly) peer-reviewed research articles. No CIDs or FOIAs necessary. If GMU finds against Wegman, then Wegman will have been Hoist with his own petar.

@chris

We all know what 'difficulties' are being referred to chris, see Donalds #88.

"in Australia we call attempts like this as trying to build a "dirt file" on someone"

Mashey's 'review' of past Wegman papers, although admittedly less intrusive (legally), could nevertheless be interpreted as being exactly this.

GSW, you clearly linked Mann's "difficulties" to his science when you said:

"I don't think it will assist Mann in his current difficulties. Even if all of Wegman's papers were retracted because of 'wikipedia' or other reference issues, other existing statistical criticisms still remain."

Which is what I addressed in my post. Now you're changing your tune to the difficulties Dr. Mann is facing as a result of bullying and dishonesty [which I get the impression that you condone, 'though it's difficult to be certain since you seem reluctant to call a shovel a shovel! ;-) ]. Yes it's unfortunate for Dr. Mann, but in the world that most of want to live in, the individuals with integrity win out, and Dr. Mann seems to managing rather well despite the despicable attacks.

As for "dirt files" you miss the point yet again (wilfully I suspect). A "dirt file" as Donald illustrates is a "file" of innuendo, insinuation, false accusations and so on. John Mashey et al's analyses are clear, straighforward and truthful presentations of facts.

Do you see the difference GSW? Wegman, Cucchinelli et al's attempts at bullying are "dirt". Mashey et al's presentations might be said to be highlighting "dirt". It takes a rather herioc effort at reality avoidance not to see that these are entirely different!

The point that GSW is evading is that the academic misconduct by the Wegman clique was an academic means to a political end for a specific constituency profiting by ownership. Any attempt to tar Mann (or any reputable climate scientist) with the same brush or speciously claim equivalence can only point to benefitting the common good which by definition is non-partisan and all-inclusive.

That subsequent inquiry has shown Wegman's recent shoddy work to be an ongoing academic problem with serious repercussions for GMU's academic reputation, for most the important aspect is his facilitating fr@wd on Congress for the continuing benefit of fossil fuel polluter industries.

That's what the denier machine will now be attempting to bury and obfuscate.

@chris

To answer your points specifically;

You can't credibly unlink Mann's current difficulties and his science as you suggest. I don't wish to repeat the Cuccenelli allegations and the circumstances of the ATI FOIA here, but they are linked to his science/conduct.

When is a 'dirt file' not a 'dirt file'?

Well, a 'dirt file' is a 'dirt file', no matter how 'righteous' you believe yourself to be in it's creation.

> You can't credibly unlink Mann's current difficulties and his science as you suggest.

Indeed not. There is a huge political witchhunt against Mann because his science is sound, so they pound on the scientist.

> but they are linked to his science/conduct.

Only in the same way as the breakfast he ate this morning is "linked to" his science/conduct. If he didn't eat any breakfast, he'd starve and wouldn't be able to do any science.

> Well, a 'dirt file' is a 'dirt file', no matter how 'righteous' you believe yourself to be in it's creation.

Yes, tortoise alert. A dirt file is a dirt file. And a non-dirt file is a non-dirt file.

No matter how much you wish the science to be wrong.

*Mann's current difficulties*

What 'difficulties'? Oh, you mean the witch-hunt....

Any idea whether you can pinpoint the originator of this sweeping-under-the-rug in the administration? Presumably it originated with SOMEBODY!

I don't think it was, or at least I hope it wasn't, President Merten. Some... underling perhaps.

Doing a little investigation - of my own university, damn it, why is this happening HERE? - I find University Policy 4007, which states that the responsible parties are the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, the Deans and Institute Directors, the Provost, and the President.

We know who the president is.

The Statistics department falls under the College of Science here. The list of administrative personnel can be found here: http://cos.gmu.edu/about/administration

In particular, the dean is Vikas Chandhoke, the associate dean of research and computing is Gregory Foster, and the associate dean of administration is Martha Westcoat-Andes.

The Vice President for Research and Economic Development is Roger Stough.

The Provost is Peter Stearns.

You can find a list of staff under them fairly easily.

Bernard J,

"Barry, I am curious to know why you perceive my defence of Mashey as "tribalism". It's a puzzling claim given that my interest in the matter is far from political, and very much academically focussed."

It's about tone as much as content. It's not worth deconstructing the whole, but this remark you made captures what I mean quite well.

"Barry, you're not sweating simply because Wegman is looking like a complete, um, fraud, are you?"

This kind of snark is usually directed towards me by contrarians at WUWT and the like. But occasionally also by people who identify with the mainstream view (Christ, how I hate talking about 'sides' - it's asinine). My tone is always the same, and I am usually polite and receptive. This kind of remark is always a knee-jerk reaction, and it is a result of a partisan view. I am seen as a hostile simply because I disagree. I'm not the only one to get hit with friendly fire. Because I associate the mainstream view and the people who argue for it with sound reasoning, good science, intellectual rigour and integrity etc, it is disappointing to observe this milieu taking on some of the poor form of the idiots that frustrate them. It always seems to me like a win for the skeptics. They make otherwise reasonable people play at their mucky level.

And that is basically the issue I have with the extended critique of Wegman et al. It's pretty sad (to me) to see many people advising that the nature of the discourse has been set by the opposition, and that it is 'naive' not to jump on board with that.

But I may be way too idealistic, and what I see as cynicism here is actually just pragmatism. But I don't believe the argument can be 'won' effectively with political tactics. More on that later. I want to consider chris's end-game scenario (tomorrow, it's getting late).

"I'm not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that most commenters here agree that Mashey and DC are being political in their documentation of Wegman's et al academic malfeasance"

Are you reading the other comments?

chris: "In this case the academic and the political are linked together to the extent of being inseperable."

ianam: "Integrity is in fact a "political" issue, and this is a political blog, and the work being done by DC and Mashey is political ... as well it should be."

SteveC: "most "debate" around climate science is politically driven. Ergo why should Mashey, DC, Tim Lambert or anyone else be held back from engaging in the debate purely on barry's supposition that politics and science should not mix?"

But I get the feeling that people are trying to say it's ok for the scholarly analysis to have a political thrust, while at the same time saying it's not really political.

SteveC:

"In that sense then my view is that the political implications are merely a side-show and a distraction. The juicy bits at issue are whether any party who possesses any kind of authority to pronounce on a subject has acted properly and appropriately."

The 'juicy bits' ARE political!

I think it matters how the discourse is conducted. If strategies must be implemented, don't let your opponent set the terms. I'll try to expand on this tomorrow.

Mann's current difficulties - zilch.

Other than having enough time to continue his copius production of high quality research.

Wegman, OTOH, - "difficulties" is serious understatement.

All respondents must keep in mind that our visitors from 'Bishop Dill' spent the entire 'Mashey' thread being critical of those who expose plagiarism and defending/excusing the perpetrators of plagiarism.

'Nuff said.

Barry @75

Good, we're all (mostly) agreed that the extended critique of Wegman et al is political in nature (while scholarly in form).

I think you and GSW (who doesn't count) are the only ones here who are trying to turn this into political action, although perhaps you could also include Wegman, who made it a political issue in the first place by presenting a flawed report to the House Committee.

@76

Who 'normally' does this auditing?

Anyone who is interested. Any decent scientist, when reading a paper, will automatically conduct their own audit, checking the information given against their own experience and expectations and for internal consistency. That is how I noticed, for example, that a paper had switched the effects of phosphorus and potassium.

In the past, people would publish take-down papers, letters, notes, etc in scientific journals or give papers at conferences (which can get very vociferous). These days, the internet is often used instead.

As for the 'best' outcome, I basically agree with Chris.

A former colleague who moved to Canada from Wales said he and three others, one from the West Indies, one from India and the third from China, were in a small-town cafe in Georgia. A customer joined his friends at the next table and said "Who are they?" indicating my colleagues. "I don't know", said another, "but they must be Canadian."

Sorry - that comment was intended for a completely different site. I've no idea how it got here. I'd visited about 6 other sites in the interim.

re: 95 Katharine

I'm sorry, but...

See SIGMU.

Read all p.17 (which has the same names, plus a few more, as Wegman has had several departmental affiliations and therefore several Deans). With possible exception of one Dean/DH pair, everybody there has to be involved, including the GMU Asst Attorney General Mancure.

p.24: The original complaint went to President Merten, so either he just passed it along and then ignored it, or he knows all about it.

As for possible reasons for this:

a) read p.16.

b) Finally, SPECULATION, NO DATA.

There is one really weird possibility. p.33 has Wegman's Facebook lament in August 2010. IF they blocked him from mentoring grad students without following due process, he might well have grounds for a lawsuit against GMU. Maybe the academics who read this can comment.

Critics mix politics with science, and they have rightly and consistently been condemned for this.

Wrong and fundamentally stupid and intellectually dishonest.

But before I try to make my case further

Talk about "fulsome".

Do you see the difference GSW? Wegman, Cucchinelli et al's attempts at bullying are "dirt". Mashey et al's presentations might be said to be highlighting "dirt". It takes a rather herioc effort at reality avoidance not to see that these are entirely different!

As I have noted, lying is the only strategy that denialati like GSW have, so fabricating, and ignoring inconvenient truths, is really quite easy for them; it is only for those committed to truth that it is difficult.

"politics: the complex or aggregate of relationships of people in society, esp those relationships involving authority or power"

I agree "As I have noted, lying is the only strategy that denialati like GSW have, so fabricating, and ignoring inconvenient truths, is really quite easy for them; it is only for those committed to truth that it is difficult."

re: 98
[Firefox+Greasemonkey+KILLFILE work here, as I've often, so in some threads I only see some of the comments.]

This is not about politics, it is about defending science and scientists from political attacks, of which the Barton/Whitfield/Wegman attack was just one part of a long campaign that I've studied. See items 1) 2) and especially 3) here. The WR issues were a small fraction (the "newshook") in item 3), which tracked 20+ years of political attacks on climate science.
(At some point, I'll return to this, but meanwhile, look up Roger Clemens, 18USC1011 and related felonies. There are far worse potential penalties for some people than article retraction and funding disabarment.)

Of course, the defense of academe's "brand" against dishonesty and politics is more than enough reason for people to get involved, including quite a few with zero connection with climate science. We've gotten a *lot* of help from such people behind the scenes.

Good academics *hate* FFP. When I was teaching Operating Systems (PSU CMPSC 411) 40 years ago, I told students Day One that this class would be a lot of work, but if they did it, they'd learn a lot. (The class was normally rated #1 in the "too much work" category ... but in post-graduation surveys, it normally rated #1 for most useful course, maintaining my faith that honest students were OK.)
I also told them that every term, a few students tried to cheat and copy term projects, and if they did, I'd give them an F, which I did. Sometimes they'd try to argue, at which point I'd produce the detailed documentation, and that was that.

Honest students used to tell me afterwards how glad they were that I did this, because they'd worked really hard for their grades, they knew who wasn't working very hard (because, this was card-deck era, and students knew who was in the computer center day and night, and who wasn't.)

That was 40 years ago. Computer folks might be familiar with SPEC, of which I was one of the cofounders. Different arena, same principle ... an almost everyone reading this online is using a computer designed iin aprt with SPEC benchmarks geared to lessen cheating.

Richard,

"I think you and GSW (who doesn't count) are the only ones here who are trying to turn this into political action"

I think there is a consensus on that notion here;

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/10/yet_more_wegman_plagiarism.php#…

"although perhaps you could also include Wegman, who made it a political issue in the first place by presenting a flawed report to the House Committee."

Certainly. I thought it went without saying. Steve McIntyre, Joe Barton and Ed Whitfiled (to name a few) made it a political issue, and Wegman et al abetted that with shoddy work.

Different arena, same principle

But don't expect Mr. idee fixe to apologize for his scurrilous charges against you (e.g., "it begins to look more like a vendetta than rational enquiry") for upholding this principle.

Going back to this:

It seems to me that an academic flensing of specific material has evolved into a partisan agenda born of impatience.

This is really such a stupid comment and consists purely of projection. barry has made it clear that he cares about only one thing -- e.g., "specific material" and "I am sure that Mashey's and DC's work is solid. I used to read it fairly attentively up until they shifted focus". That is "a partisan agenda" ... when Mashey pursues academic malfeasance beyond climate science, barry loses interest other than to come up with the most incredibly idiotic objections (no wonder GSW shares them).

I think it matters how the discourse is conducted.

Yeah, how's your method (accusing John Mashey of vendettas, partisanship, and tribalism here) working out for you, bar?

shoddy work

Is that how you characterize FFP, barry? Merely of low quality?

Sorry All O/T, but ianam's last post reminded me.

"It seems to me that an academic flensing of specific material has evolved into a partisan agenda born of impatience."

I wasn't too clear about barry's use of the word 'flensing' so I googled it - The urban dictionary gave two possible definitions;

Flensing: Throwing your shoulders back in an effort to hide your man-boobs during sex.

Flensing: The act of Jiggling a woman's breasts without her consent. Especially if her shirt has been ripped off or soaked in water.

Obviously, trying to relate this to subject at hand was a problem, academic or not, there is no place for this sort of stuff on the internet.

The urban dictionary

GSW's primary source of information, apparently.

>I wasn't too clear about barry's use of the word 'flensing' so I googled it - The urban dictionary gave two possible definitions...

It seems that GSW's capacity for vocabulary research is of the same pitifully inadequate level as is his capacity for understanding scientific research.

Barry, at what point is it exactly that you claim that Mashey and DC became "political" rather than "academic" in their investigations? By way of contrast, when in the process were the denialists "academic", and when were they "political"?

@ianam,Bernard

Sorry chaps, just made me laugh that's all. Not as amusing as watching you guys argue your case/justify your hypocrisy admittedly, but some entertainment nevertheless.

;)

GSW, for more information on flensing, read "Moby Dick". You might learn something -- besides it's a rollicking good read!

GSW:
hypocrisy

Well done, did you look that one up in a dictionary too? Can you remember what the word meant?

Tim's original post was about academic misconduct of the most bizarre kind, which astonishes my academic friends.
None of that post or this has anything to do with Mann, Barton, etc ... Debunking the WR was defending science from political attack, this one is just defending academic publishing's brand from {ego? greed? craziness? beats me.)

How odd that some people want to talk about anything except this topic. ("Look! a squirrel!" or Al Gore (I'm surprised he hasn't been dragged in :-), even more extraneously than usual.)

Two Editors-in-Chief (Wegman & Said) wrote two articles for their own journal, which they proclaim is peer-reviewed. Serious folks might read author's guide, p.12:
"Our editorial process starts with the review of your manuscript by qualified experts in the field and by the WIREs: Computational Statistics editors. We will pass reviewersâ comments on to you and request that you make any necessary changes. In addition, we will discuss with you any editorial changes that may be necessary.
In some cases the reviewers will have no comments, and the manuscript will be processed for composition. In other cases, reviewersâ and our own editorial comments will give rise to further correspondence. The Editors reserve the right to cut, to request more information from the author, to revise, and in some cases, to add publicly available material. If the Editorsâ changes are extensive, you will have an opportunity to review the changes before the manuscript is sent for production."

Yet another example of Wegman plagiarism

tlambert — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:17:30 +0000

Yet another example of Wegman plagiarism

Andrew Gelman details yet another case of apparent plagiarism by Edward Wegman. This one is a copy and paste from Wikipedia that manages to introduce an obvious error, claiming that a d-dimensional cube has only 2d vertices instead of 2^d. Gelman gets all sarcastic:

[Note to Drs. Wegman and Said: You can replace "2^n" by "2n" only if n=1 or 2. I checked by following the principles of statistical computation and making a graph in R: curve (2^x-2x, from=-2, to=5). I know it's a pain to do superscripts in Word, but next time you should really put in the effort to do it right.]

Hat tip: John Mashey.

Update Ouch

tlambert Wed, 09/21/2011 - 07:17

Tags

Wegman

"...claiming that a d-dimensional cube has only 2d instead of 2^d."
Read: "... 2^d vertices." An obvious error .... OK, a blog isn't a scholarly article. I hereby authorise you to make the correction without attribution or grovel. *[Oops. Fixed]*

Nice.

There are many more problems in that article (detailed writeup soon at DC's place).

But while people are awaiting that, here's a related topic to discuss. Somehow, some people started with Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, and claim that the WR was unscathed, except for some possible minor copying of text, easily fixable by a few quotes.

This was fairly bizarre, given that 20-25% of the pages of SSWR showed plagiarism, but even there, much of the analysis was of the biases and errors introduced, often in support of Memes and Themes.

As I wrote, p.3:
"Obvious plagiarism needs so little explanation that fabrications are not generally enumerated, especially as some errors might be attributed to incompetence. Either issue is taken seriously in academe."

For the sake of simplicity in academic misconduct committees (although GMU has now just passed the 18-month mark and still counting, without an inquiry report to anyone), Ray had just focused on the plagiarism, not the falsification/fabrication.

For that, I later wrote the 12-page Strange Falsifications in the Wegman Report. When someone is not just plagiarizing but falsifying, those cases are much easier to find and display amidst the plagiarized text.

Thanks for this!

A long time ago, GMU were investigating plagiarism, I wonder what happened?

Just like a nasty stain on the carpet, they covered it with a rug and hoped it would go away. Except this stain is spreading and it won't go away.

I suppose the obvious analogy is once you start lifting stones and then following what scuttles out from under them, who knows where it ends.

Anyone with a degree from GMU should be suspect at this point given GMU's obvious cover up of this academic fraud. They have lost their intregrity.

> Ed Wegman, the only statistician in the bunch, is the
> most interesting case to me. I see several different
> motivations for his plagiarism: ....
> Wegman may have done it out of a sense of
> obligation to his country .... The above
> imputed motivations are all just guesses. -- Gelman

Gelman seems to me to make a fair assessment there, worth reading and thinking about.

I too thought Gelman was being exceedingly generous to Wegman in the piece.

Having said that, I'm slightly discomfited at the same time by the careful avoidance of the billion-dollar-a-day elephant occupying most of the room, as if common academic decency forbids perception of it. The Barton-Inhofe crew are hardly paragons of virtuous, selfless statecraft.

BTW, I'll post it here also. This is a chronology of the various known plagiarism chains.

Mark Schaffer

Anyone with a degree from GMU should be suspect at this point given GMU's obvious cover up of this academic fraud. They have lost their intregrity.

Considering the neighbours of STATS - Statistical Assessment Services (GMU), which I suppose is a part of George Mason University as seen on John Mashey's map should we be surprised.

The STATS marker is the red one above a route 29 marker at the left of the main group, using + to magnify three times.

John.

Once again I commend you (and DC) for your tireless and forensic dissection of the Wegman saga.

In any institution in which I have worked, such a blatant, pervasive and profoundly pernicious story of academic misbehaviour would be taken far more seriously than GMU seems to be taking it. It staggers me that they are so recalcitrantly dragging their heels on this - aside from the obvious Koch influence, is there any other explanation why the administration is so slow in demonstrating a serious response?

re: 10 Thanks.

Well, we certainly don't know.

1) A committee does actually exist, but we of course do not know who is on it. It is quite possible that one or more of the committee members is foot-dragging. For example, suppose Walter Williams was on it (check old home page carefully.)

2) Wegman&Said have a lawyer, and as recounted in SIGMU, there is some evidence that GMU didn't follow their own policies.

See p.33 for the Facebook post. This is pure speculation, but maybe GMU has opened itself to legal action against it by Wegman and if so, that probably wouldn't help this mess.

3) Of course, in the middle of all this is something that is probably unrelated:
GMU President is retiring.

Dear John mashey

I looked at your 12-page synoptic 'report'.

What a mess. It looks as thuogh a kid took a bunch of color crayons to the pages, bleeding highlights, colorful arrows.

More than anything, it betrays how obsessively you and deopclimate must have pored over the text of the Wegman report.

Keep up with the remedial classes shubbie, and in a year or several, if you have it in you, understanding may come within your grasp.

Interesting timing re. Merten.
I wonder how much independence GMU will show when the Koch bros. nominated replacement's name comes up?

(Vacuous point I know, but at least it helps prevent the Jonas thread burying this one awhile longer. But with that I'm off out for the night. Have a good'n y'all.)

Hopefully the ever-dense shubbie will come back with some tediously turgid riposte and up the visibility again after Jonas' trolls have done their work for the night.

Or should it be titled : "How to get banned from deltoid blog" - by Billy Bob Hall. :-)
Where's you sense of humor Tim ? :-)

>More than anything, it betrays how obsessively forensically you and deopclimate [sic] must have pored over the text of the Wegman report.

Fixed it for you ol' goat.

And please, can you explain why you are yourself obsessed with Mashey's and DC's meticulous scrutiny, rather than with the huge and profoundly serious body of evidence for worrying academic misbehaviour, that their investigation has revealed?

It would seem to me that complaining about style allows shub to show willing to the likeminded, yet avoid having to deal with the shocking substance. It's a win-win all round.

Sure, his publicly apparent IQ takes a massive hit, but such considerations are of relatively little importance in those circles.

Isn't the reality that not much has happened to Wegman or to his reputation amongst those opposed to CO2 having a significant role in the world's climate? Aren't the powers-that-be more intent on leaving the drowned polar bear guy out on a distant melting iceberg to swim his way back for providing emotive pictures that Al Gore could use than sorting out Wegman for all the false testimony he provided; after all Wegman's testimony provided the 'right' kind of testimony whilst Dr Monnett's was the 'wrong' kind?

Whilst some of this may be relevant to the post-mortem that will one day look into our combined failures on climate I suggest Wegman and co are relatively minor players; surely more of interest is the chain of influence that can result in Wegman left free to carry on whilst Monnett remains effectively muzzled.

Ken yes, but his reputation among the statistical community has taken a very serious hit. Among other reasons this is why Roger Pielke Sr. hides behind Anthony Watts

Ken is right ... but ...

Go back and look at CCC carefully, which is mostly about the social network of climate anti-science.
Just read p.1, especially "This report suggests..." and p.184, on legal issues.

How much was Wegman Report? pp.23-28, 32, 167-177, about 10% of the 185 pages.

Put another way, from Day One, the underlying interest was in the network and machinery of which the WR was a part.
If you want an analogy, consider the way the FBI works when trying to dismantle a mob, for example thuis one.
"It all started with the 2008 arrest of a relatively low-level soldier, Joseph "Joey Caves" Competiello, who was busted for his role in a mob hit.

He soon flipped and provided information that sparked a four-year domino effect of Colombo arrests -- many resulting in other wiseguys' becoming FBI rats themselves."
====

SSWR got written almost by accident, given the loose ends leftover from CCC ...
at that point, I thought Wegman&Said were just somewhat-naive statisticians who'd gotten a "statisticians can straighten this out" plea and had gotten fed the right set of papers. See comment at end of p.177, I was sorry for Said.

BUT, as it happens:
1) Wegman was clearly attempting to create a "statisticians-vs-climate scientists" fight. That wasn't really working, but it's now dead, or actually worse, especially when fellow statisticians like Gelman start whacking away publicly.

2) Two years ago, I was barely aware of George Mason University's existence. CC only devoted half of p.67 to GMU, and GMU grads Ken Cuccinelli & Wesley Russell were not yet on the radar screen.

As a result of GMU's mishandling of the original (relatively simple) mess and then all the later academic misconduct complaints, a bunch of people (including more than one Washington journalist) have gotten very interested in GMU.

We're now at 18 months and counting, but you can imagine how GMU science faculty might feel about the Nature editorial: Copy and paste.

Anyway, "GMU in the spotlight" turns out to be an unexpected outcome, that would not have occurred if they'd dealt with this like any normal university, but ">they didn't and still aren't.

Finally, while the anti-science blogosphere doesn't matter much, all this has had the delightful side-effect of getting a bunch of people on record defending Wegman, showing they were totally clueless on this topic.

I laughed a lot when reading the amazing theories espoused about what wasn't plagiarism, the simplest of the FFP unholy trinity to prove.
{Needless to say, before I'd written much, I'd consulted various experts, both academic and those who've consulted on copyright court cases ... which is why I knew the "striking similarities" phrase.]

We'll see if GMU manages to deal with this before President Merten retires next June. :-) But GMU, with an even closer relationship to the Kochs than I'd originally realized, turns out to be a bigger part of that social network than I'd thought.

Eli @18,

Re Pielke hiding behind Watts. Care to elaborate please?

As for the apologists for Wegman et al.,they are clearly not only in denial about AGW.

>Finally, while the anti-science blogosphere doesn't matter much, all this has had the delightful side-effect of getting a bunch of people on record defending Wegman, showing they were totally clueless on this topic.

Wegman - intellectual and moral flypaper for reflexive denialist supporters...

I certainly hope that exposing the lack of academic ethics by Wegman and others bears positive fruit and will be much more than a footnote to a general failure to face the climate problem rationally and head on. Such efforts are, of course, absolutely essential. Apologies for my pessimism.

No apologies needed . There has always been much more going on behind the scenes than was obvious, going far beyond plagiarism. For instance, very early in the game I talked to a very Washington-savvy lawyer, who told me not to expect an 18USC1001 effort to be quick or easy, but it certainly wasn't fantasy. After all, Roger Clemens got indicted, for something of rather less import.

> (Vacuous point I know, but at least it helps prevent the Jonas thread burying this one awhile longer.

Which may have been the point of Jonas' continued display of idiocy. It certainly can't be to convince anyone he knows what he's on about...

Go look at the genealogy of the Surface Sites stuff. Tony is Roger Srs. stuffed bunny.

More than anything, it betrays how obsessively you and deopclimate must have pored over the text of the Wegman report.

Yes, it's laziness, sloppiness, and inattention to detail that are virtues in your world.

Yes. The cheek of that Mashey fellow!

Auditing the deniers! It's just not cricket!

Well, in keeping with the Murdoch massacre of climate science, the latest scandal is happening at HarperCollins book publishers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/science/earth/25atlas.html

It seems pretty quiet in both the media and on WTF about all these scientists making stuff up, doesn't it.

No senators demanding a congressional committee to investigate accusations of Fraud, not referrals to the DoJ. No State AG's demanding reams of information from GMU. Nothing.

Just thought this needed a bump to get Jonas and pals posting vigorously on the Jonas thread to bury it again...

It's a bit ironic, isn't it, Wow? Jonas N came in because of his handwaving away the case against Wegman, and now he and his accolytes are burying a thread with yet another example of Wegman (and co)'s questionable scientific ethics.

**Update**: [Ouch](http://andrewgelman.com/2011/09/wiley-wegman-chutzpah-update/).

Thanks John Mashey and DC for taking it to the line with Wegman. The reason it's important is that Wegman is the contemporary face of corporate-friendly science and its values.

Could any of us even begin to imagine where we might be 100 years from now if that type of self-serving intellectual cancer had been left to fester in the dark unopposed?

Thanks, but this is Gelman himself going at it :-)

And actually, I wouldn't call this corporate-friendly science, and in fact, I consider that phrase not very useful for reasons I will explain.

As best as I can tell, Wegman has generally gotten his money from government grants and I have not found any clear trace of corporate money flow. [Note careful wording, I am not asserting non-existence, but that I have not found visible evidence.] I actually think this is more in the ideological / ego areas in my reasons catalog. it is a peculiar case.

But here is why I I think the phrase corporate-friendly science is not a good one, actually counter-productive.
Companies are distributed as are people and range from really, really good (to work for, who produce valuable goods and services that wouldn't exist) to the atrocious.

I spent decades working for corporations, one of which was Bell Labs. Would the phrase "corporate-friendly science" apply? (Should we take back transistors, solar cells, lasers, fibre optics, communications satellites, UNIX, etc?) Likewise, SGI enabled a great range of science applications. Same question.

Now, take a look at Organization categories.

The key issue is the comment at top:
companies that "privatize the benefits and socialize the costs" (or risks, if I'd had more room).
Those companies tend not to like inconvenient science.

The tobacco companies are the top. Fossil fuel companies at least produce energy, although we're realizing there is a high global socialized cost. I grew up near Pittsburgh, PA, i.e., coal & steel. In the 1950s, businessmen took an extra white shirt to work to change at lunch. and the sun was not often seen downtown. But that was relatively local effect, and many people were proud to be part of the steel business. I.e., there is a pollution-tradeoff that was primarily a local choice.

But houses still collapse from old coal mines dug many decades ago and as far as I know, nobody put money in big trust funds to pay for that. The companies are long gone. [I used to work summers/vacations programming for the US Bureau of Mines, which a) did research to make coal mining better/safer and b) tried to enforce rules (not fun, look up Don Blankenship sometimes). Weirdly, my first published technical report (40 years ago) was about analysis of coal.

These days, the issue there is Marcellus shale and fracking, where the long-term effects are yet to be sorted out. In some places, there is already methane in the water without any drilling at all. It would certainly be nice to know what's in the chemicals. IF one can safely get the methane out AND IF not lose too much to the atmosphere AND IF it helps get rid of coal, then good.

Unfunded liabilities of any sort are problemmatical. Just as Pittsburgh long-accepted polluted skies, some town might well accept the risk of water pollution to get a better economy ... but if I lived there, I'd sure want a big escrow account built up to cover the costs that might occur.
This may well be an opportunity for insurance companies, who in fact tend to demand good science and listen to it, since they are paid to price risk.

But, anyway, the phrase corporate-friendly science is probably not so useful. Real science seeks truth.
The problem is the corporate or ideologically-funded anti-science that tries to obscure it.

JM@34:

I used to work summers/vacations programming for the US Bureau of Mines

That would have been the facility in the South Hills, wouldn't it? Currently named NETL? In an interesting bit or irony, I seem to recall the main road that led there suffered an underground mine-related collapse back in the late 80's - early 90's.

re:35
No, it was the old USBM Pittsburgh Mining Research Center on Forbes Ave, now part of the Carnegie-Mellon Campus.

For me, it was Wegman's 'colour theory' article that was the most bizarre. It's not that there was anything hugely wrong with it (apart from the cutting and pasting) - but what on earth did it have to do with stats??

Clearly Wegman knew nothing about the topic, it was just the epitome of the very worst of academic writing - we have to publish something so let's cobble togther any old guff and pretend it's worthwhile.

Yep, it's a royal pain to do a superscript in Word.

Cntl+=

owowowowow.... hand cramp.

re: 37
Well, some statisticians (like Gelman or William Cleveland) have a lot of interest in graphical display techniques, and color can be relevant.... and Wegman did do a bunch of work on SGI gear in the 1990s ... but it certainly was a stretch, even without the plagiarism and errors.

Put another way, a high-quality review article byu an ex[pert on "what statisticians should know about color" might actually be OK.

John @ #34

John, I realise now that in the case of Prof. Gelman's article my earlier comment made little sense, but I'd suggest that many see Wiley's CS RFO article as a bit further along a story arc that began with the Wegman Report. After all, when you appear to successfully get away with something once why disturb a working formula?

Perhaps 'corporate-friendly' science is a broad brush in danger of tarring everybody, but nevertheless there are few other entities with the resources and finances (and amorality) that are required to ensure that academics and politicians can be orchestrated in concert to produce desirable results for them.

As you say, Wegman is unlikely to have to have been the immediate direct recipient of corporate financing, but as we are well aware in the UK, a surprising number of public servants find post retirement made much more comfortable by acquiring posts in industry - particularly those industries they helped privatise and/or de-regulate. I'm sure Wegman's crucial assistance with Barton's committee and its preferred findings would not have gone unnoticed.

In that context the corporate corruption of science, in the case of discrediting as thoroughly as possible Mike Mann's hockey stick reconstruction using the media of apparent scholarship (M&M) and a Congressionally sponsored report, makes sense. At the oft-quoted rate of billion-dollar-a-day profits for the global fossil fuel industries, since 2006 they're ahead of the game as it might otherwise have played out had honesty been a major factor by a ballpark figure of c. $2T.

Given the time passing in the investigation of Wegman, I'd suggest it's indicative of a serious amount of tearing out of hair over how to best to present and manage the inevitable fallout, rather than simply judging the facts of the case. With a minor academic being the obvious weakest link in a very powerful chain, I'd hope he has taken comprehensive steps to ensure his good health continues.

They do?

How?

re: #40
See pp.93-95 of CCC and examples of thinktank funding, as on p.55, 65 or 69.

In this turf, some money is directly corporate (EM), some is from family foundations (of whom some, of course, have clear interests like the Kochs), and a big chunk of money is unknown. That report doesn't do the campaign analysis of candidates, but of course, just to pick 2 of my random bookbooks: Inhoife and Barton have interesting corporate contributors.

So, one has to be careful. I doubt there are many people who have studied the money flows in this exact turf more than I have, but I haven't seen any evidence of fossil corporate flows to Wegman.

Remember Wegman's expertise nowadays is in "data mining" -- I wonder if data mining software regularly strips out cites and sources to provide chunks of condensed information.

If he used his own software tools and got this bad result
http://www.dmining-technology.com/bios.htm
there might be a problem worth checking into generally.

His expertise a decade or two ago was in "Star Wars" anti-missile defense systems, but that idea got shot down.

Re #34 and longterm effects of fracking, there is that question of earthquakes...:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/09/28/bc-frac…

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/earthquakes/blackpoolMay2011.html

Though some argue that it only causes teeny ones:

http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/09/15/does-fracking-cause-earthquakes/

Though some argue that it only causes teeny ones

Where "some" is just about anyone who knows anything. From your first article: "It is well-established that fluid injection can induce small earthquakes. Typically, these are too small to be felt." So I don't know why you presented this as if the articles disagreed with each other and as if "only causes teeny ones" is a minority opinion.

@39 As they said in the abstract:

In this article, we discuss color theory and design with emphasis on use in statistical, scientific, and data visualization. Color theory is inextricably linked to the physiology of the human visual system, and color design is similarly inextricably linked to human perception. We discuss color perception in the human visual system. We then quantify color perception in terms of the Munsell System and the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) color space. We continue to discuss color design with a perspective on individuals with defective color perception and finally conclude with a discussion of color design for the use of color in presentations. WIREs Comp Stat 2011 3 104â118 DOI: 10.1002/wics.146

Earthquakes are to some extent relative. We live 5 minutes jog from the San Andreas fault and building codes are tough, so earthquakes ignored as teeny here might not be ignored in places unused to them.

re: 45: color: yes, and one might revisit DC. A well-done article on this would have been fine.

The "stretch" to me wasn't the general topic, it was the strange mixture of discussion levels & details, hashed together, certainly in a style similar to the Optimization piece. It spent much text on topics irrelevant to:

"In this article, we discuss color theory and design with emphasis on use in statistical, scientific, and data visualization" '

I don't think that article *does* that, and wouldn't help people very much, either in print graphics design or on displays or for Web (for a 2011 article!) I'm no graphics designer myself, but I used to work at Silicon Graphics, where such issues were considered now and then.

Re Wegman bio, this link works better -
http://dmining-technology.com/bios.html

The Star Wars connection is interesting, given Oreskes' talk.

Perhaps GMU are waiting for Wegman to retire, and then they'll conclude their investigation. [Joking]

#44 Marcel, I thought the third link more clearly debunked fears about fracking causing earthquakes while the others seemed to leave the question open. They are not necessarily opposed, but have a different emphasis. And the media would probably have more fun with a connection than without one.

I liked the careful language by the seismologist at the first link who said a connection to fracking would be interesting but did not reveal his opinion on wheather there is such a connection.

#47
Wegman & Star Wars

The potential Star Wars connection Anna alludes to is Wegman:GMI(Jastrow, Seitz, Nierenberg), but I looked *very* hard for that when writing SSWR.

But I never found evidence of a 1980s Wegman:GMI connection and there was circumstantial evidence of non-connection in mid-2005. In SSWR p.31 I wrote:

"Although Wegman had some old history with Star Wars (hence possible GMI connection), one might have expected a faster recruitment if he was still well-known to GMI or CEI."

My best guess is that in the 1980s, Wegman was interested in High Performance Computing and there was Star Wars money.
People I respect highly have praised his efforts at ONR in the 1970s/1980s.

This does illustrate a general problem: numerous connections might be possible:

a) Some turn out to be real.

b) Some turn out to be coincidences.

c) And some are still unclear until more evidence is found.

["Dr. Wegman was the original program director of the basic research program in Ultra High Speed Computing at the Strategic Defense Initiative\'s Innovative Science and Technology Office (Star Wars Program). As the SDI program officer, Dr. Wegman was responsible for programs in software development tools, highly parallel architectures and optical computing ..."](http://www.arnetminer.org/viewperson.do?naid=564204&keyword=Edward%20J…)
(Arnetminer: search and mining of academic social networks)

Science (1985):
["Star Wars" Program "Only partly in jest" is the way R. Jeffrey Smith describesthe statement by Edward Wegman of the Office of Naval Research about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or "Star Wars" program that "we don't want to have a few lines of bad code mistakenly set off a nuclear weapon ..."](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/228/4703/1040.5.full.pdf)

I am, in fact, a GMU student. Purely because the place is commutable. I have no real regard for the place whatsoever and will be glad to wash my hands of it in all but the fact that it is the place from which I'll be getting my undergraduate degree in biology.

This is the place, mind, where the economics department has its own little shrine to Hayek.

Anyway.

The Koch brothers have nominated a replacement for President Merten? Tell me, are they going to divert funding from Mason's science programs, which are the best ones at the university? Is our esteemed attorney general alumnus who hates women and can't bear the sight of a breast going to meddle in the issue?

Thankfully I'll be out of there in two years.

re: 52 Katharine
Good luck, the students are the ones likely to get hurt in this mess, especially if GMU continues as is, it will have a clear reputation for not dealing with academic misconduct.

For those who have not dug around as much as I have:
CCC pp.94-95 (underlined organizations)

The Kochs (C. Koch, C. Lambe, D. Koch) plus R.M.Scaife and some others are generous to GMU and some of its centers, like Institute for Humane Studies and Mercatus Center.
Some of these seem to exist either to eliminate the Federal government or at least radically downsize it.

It is unclear where the money tagged GMU goes, but I would speculate that it is far more likely that it goes to {Econ, PoliSci, Public Policy or Law} than to science.

As far as I can tell, GMU science is funded as elsewhere, including Federal grants, which of course will go away if the Kochs succeed in downsizing the Federal government enough, although maybe an exception will be made for GMU.

Katharine's reference to attorney general
is to Ken Cuccinelli, ably assisted by another GMU JD, Wesley Russell (who actually signs the complaints against U VA and Mann, although inquiring minds would really like to know who feeds him the research).

Her comment about females is about Cuccinelli and the VA state seal.

Cuccinelli is, as you all know, the idiot who attacks UVA climate scientists. He actually worked for a time next to the guy who provides medical care for my family.

Now GMU is not without dollars for science. However, I understand more of it goes into biomedical science than climate funding. I benefit from the biomed dollars, I admit.

The Broadside, GMU's newspaper, fails to mention Wegman. At all. I am tempted to flood them with letters to the editor.

Re the Institute for 'Humane' Studies and the Mercatus Center, I think George Mason is apparently Libertarian Land.

I think, in my (precious little) spare time, I may poke around campus a bit to find out what's going on.

Surreptitiously, as I don't want to incur consequences.

Anyone have ideas for what I might do?

In retrospect it is probably a poor idea for a current student to poke around campus, but I'll keep my eyes and ears open.

1) Recall Nature editorial, which I mentioned earlier. It not only urges GMU to move faster, but mentions accreditation group. You might talk with sympathetic faculty and ask them if this is anything you should worry about.

2) Broadside: they have been sent letters, but given the circumstances, I think it would take very gutsy editors to write articles or publish anything about this. But in any case, if I were you, I don't think I'd want my name on one... given the strong points of view sometimes espoused in letters that have been published.

3) There was an interesting comment at Andrew Gelman's.

so earthquakes ignored as teeny here might not be ignored in places unused to them

They would if they are "too small to be felt".

> hates women and can't bear the sight of a breast

That'd suggest some antipathy to California's Climatic Wealth (link)...

FYI, according to GMU spokesman Dan Walsch (via email today), the "proceeding" _is_ in the "investigation" stage.
(i.e. no longer in the preliminary "inquiry" stage)

Actually, he said that a year ago:
see SIGMU, see p.10, under 10/08/10, and p.42.

There is actually no doubt about the existence of an investigation (and at some time in the future, more details will likely appear as to GMU's process for such) but at least, as of a few weeks ago, Ray Bradley had yet to get an inquiry report.

Of course GMU policy, says:

"(f) A recommendation as to whether the complainant should be notified of the results of the inquiry and, if so, which parts of the report, if any, should be included in the notification and whether the notification should require that the information be maintained confidentially; ..."

So they can claim they didn't have to tell Ray anything...

I hadn't noticed their timeline before, but it can be compared with SIGMU p.6.

As of today, we are now 568 days into this. If I ever update SIGMU, I'll have to redraw the scales :-)

More ouch.

http://deepclimate.org/2011/10/04/said-and-wegman-2009-suboptimal-schol…

Suboptimal Scholarship

Today I present an analysis of a 2009 article by Yasmin Said and Edward Wegman of George Mason University. âRoadmap for Optimizationâ was published in the inaugural edition of WIREs Comp Stats, one of a new family of Wiley publications conceived as a âserial encyclopediaâ. ...

As the title implies, the article was meant to provide a broad overview of the mathematical optimization and set the stage for subsequent articles detailing various optimization techniques. However my analysis, entitled Suboptimal Scholarship: Antecedents of Said and Wegman 2009, demonstrates the highly problematic scholarship of the âRoadmapâ article.

* No fewer than 15 likely online antecedent sources, all unattributed, have been identified, including 13 articles from Wikipedia and two others from Prof. Tom Ferguson and Wolfram MathWorld.

* Numerous errors have been identified, apparently arising from mistranscription, faulty rewording, or omission of key information.

* The scanty list of references appears to have been âcarried alongâ from the unattributed antecedents; thus, these references may well constitute false citations.

Thank you Deep C.

John M. -
> "Actually, he said that [proceeding" is in the "investigation" stage] a year ago"

Yes, but then he un-said it last May, according to an update to Dan Vergano's Oct 2010 story (link).
("[Update: GMU spokesman Dan Walsch clarified in the May 26, 2011, Nature journal that the year-old investigation is still in its preliminary "inquiry" stage, rather than a full investigation. "In terms of my comments this past fall, my understanding of the internal procedure was not as clear then as it is now," Walsch says, by email. ")

See More Wikipedia copying from climate critics.

Walsch has not been a reliable source of information in this whole process, and his newest quote is amusing.

It's funny how those fabulous auditors of the science (tm)(pat pending) seem not to have spotted all this copying from Wikipedia, isn't it?

See new Gelman comment Wâman - Wâpedia, again.

Wegman's defence makes him look worse

tlambert — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:24:56 +0000

Wegman's defence makes him look worse

John Mashey analyses emails from Wegman and Azen and yes, Wegman's defence against plagiarism charges is to say that he and his students plagiarized from Denise Reeves. Multiple times.

Andrew Gelman says it best:

The major conclusions [of the plagiarised paper] are that there are different styles of research collaboration; the methodological flaws are that the entire data analysis is based on four snippets of the collaboration network. There's no evidence or even argument that you can generalize from these four graphs to the general population, nor is there any evidence or justification of their normative recommendations. The trouble is that the authors didn't seem to know what they are doing; one piece of evidence of this is that they plagiarized part of the their paper. It's not that the plagiarism automatically discredits the social network analysis; rather, the plagiarism is consistent with the general hypothesis that Said, Wegman, et al. didn't know what they were doing. It's fine for them to present graphs of four collaboration networks, but I don't see these graphs as really adding any support to the authors' normative claims.

Via Richard Littlemore.

tlambert Tue, 05/24/2011 - 16:24

Tags

On p4 is there a typo? Should the bolded text read "Reeves"?

> Reevesâ previously-unclear role in creating 5 pages of
text incorporated into the WR, but leaves 30 more remaining to be attributed to specific other people. Reese had nothing to do with them

And another on p12:

> ... and apologize for publishing a low-quality, baseless attack on another disciplineâs quality of peer review. Azen is That would have been painful

And p13:

> ...as best they could, even labeling Rees the most
SNA-knowledgeable.

And p16:

> Background Material Povided by Peter Spencer...

p17:

> The FOIA materials resolved questions about the WRâs a vague, never-cited, but extremely important reference,...

thanks, close reading!
yes, typos all, except "Povided", which is marked (sic, directory) at end of line. I'll make that clearer.

I'm accumulating typos and a quote I'd left out, will update when the dust settles.
I've been fighting the worst headcold in years, so I suspect a few more will turn up.

I do warn folks: put your coffee down before you go into Wegman's email explanation.

> ...which is marked (sic, directory) at end of line...

Ah, right, IIRC I thought that "sic" only referred to an instance of "Spence" instead of "Spencer".

Hi Tim,

Not to split hairs but when you write, "...and yes, Wegman's defence against plagiarism charges is to say that he and his students plagiarized from Denise Reeves. Multiple times" the emails from Wegman don't say that at all. He says he had one student who did this without his knowledge.

Alex Harvey

>He says he had one student who did this without his knowledge.

No, he says he gave it to Sharabati who put it in his thesis and in the paper. Obviously he was aware of what was in the paper he was corresponding author for.

Hi Tim,

No, he says he gave it to Sharabati who put it in his thesis and in the paper. Obviously he was aware of what was in the paper he was corresponding author for.

I don't follow you here.

Wegman's email explicitly denies that he knew he had published plagiarised material:

I am most happy to explain what had happened. Let me say at the outset that we would never knowingly publish plagierized (sic) material.

Later:

At the time [of the Wegman Report], I had two Ph.D. students working with me, Denise Reeves and later Walid Sharabati. Denise worked (and still works) for the Mitre Corporation. Denise worked (and still works) for Mitre Corporation. Her company sent her to take a short course on social network analysis from Kathleen Carley, a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Carley is an internationally recognized expert on social network analysis. When Denise returned from her short course at Carnegie-Mellon, I took her to be the most knowledgeable among us on social network analysis, and I asked her to write up a short description we could include in our summary. She provided that within a few days, which I of course took to be her original work. Neither Yasmin, Walid Sharabati, John Rigsby nor I did know that she had basically copied and pasted this into her MS Word file. We included her boilerplate in our Congressional testimony and acknowledged Denise's contribution in that testimony.

Meanwhile, Steve McI thinks Wegman's hypothesis and Said et al 2008 are corroborated, since...

the Climategate documents provided conclusive evidence of the hypothesis originally advanced in the Wegman Report about paleoclimate peer review â that members of the Mann âcliqueâ had been âreviewing other members of the same cliqueâ

Hardly surprising, given that when Wegman goes down, he takes the Great (self appointed) Auditor and his fiddled "results" with him.

Alex,

Thanks for that piece of evidence that Wegman was undertaking a hatchet report.

The social network analysis was central to the Wegman report's charge that the Hockey stick came about through a bunch of like minded guys and gals who knowingly or unknowingly formed a network that excluded, according to Wegman's sponsors, data and analysis that would influence their work i.e. hockey sticks shapes (or La Crosse if you want a bit of a change).

That Wegman seems to be saying that he did not engage in this piece of work central to the report but that the grunt work was based on someone attending a short course on social network analysis is to me, shonky, very shonky.

However, it does seem that Wegman is seeking to distance himself from any fall out be cause, hey, it was all a political exercise anyway and once this is out in the open and various institutions have to react to this then its just not worth his job. I bet Wegman is not one of these fanatical deniers we see in this whole issue whole would gladly see civilisation destroyed than their worldview and ego checked. So he is not going to joyfully commit hari kari.

> ...the Climategate documents provided conclusive evidence of the hypothesis originally advanced in the Wegman Report about paleoclimate peer review â that members of the Mann âcliqueâ had been âreviewing other members of the same cliqueâ...

Except that wasn't the hypothesis, IIRC. It was that such an occurrence inevitably *corrupted* peer review, and furthermore that Wegman's own collaborative style - working primarily with his current and former students - was better/less likely to lead to corruption.

But (presumably) McI can't say *that* because this fiasco rather seems to undermine it...

Does any one want to take bets as to when the denialsphere will stop defending Wegman and start to react by saying that his report was never significant in the whole scheme of things, "he was a bit player", "never really noticed his work anyway", etc, etc, etc, etc.

Jeremy, it probably won't come as a surprise to you that I do not much agree with anything you have written. But if we restrict ourselves to issues that are black and white I am still waiting to hear why Tim Lambert is claiming that Wegman admits to doing plagiarism himself and all the time.

Andrew Gelman's words seem to me to be particularly damming. Wegman's reputation will take a long time to recover, if ever. His grad students' careers may be over before they begin. How will "Post-doc to Professor E. Wegman" or "Thesis Adviser: Professor E. Wegman" look on a resume?

A plagiarised report could still have "good" science. Apparently, it was crap science anyway, so the whole thing is a nasty, smelly crock.

Alex, the admitted plagiarism is in the fact that Wegman knew it was REEVES who wrote the section, and he let his PhD student put the same stuff in his thesis and in the article anyway. Wegman's defense that he didn't know Reeves had plagiarised isn't a defence of his own failure to acknowledge Reeves' contribution to the article. Copying that section without attribution was already plagiarism. The fact that Reeves plagiarised it also merely adds to the problem, rather than provide an excuse.

Marco, without seeing what Reeves wrote and how the material written was attributed (she may have had a line to the effect of "Sources: Wikipedia; last week's course"), or not, we can't say that Reeves plagiarised, surely.

On the more general points raised elsewhere...

The incorporation of accidental plagiarised material is not a defence against plagiarism. The authors have a duty; they sign off on the paper. Accidental or not, if plagiarism is proved then the authors of the paper are individually and collectively culpable. Publishers take a very dim view on plagiarism, especially as there might be copyright issues that result.

Professors in particular have a duty to educate their pre- and post-grad students in what is acceptable and what is not in this regard, and GMU has very clear guidelines on this, guidelines that Professor Wegman seemingly gives scant regard to given the prima facie examples uncovered by DC in this retracted paper, the WR itself and at least one other paper (along with instances in students' work IIRC).

The impression one is left with is that Wegman has short-changed his students and that "institutionalised" plagiarism abounds in his department, despite GMU's probable best efforts as presented in their code of ethics on this matter.

The great stupidity in all this is it is wholly acceptable in academia to make use of appropriate source material when properly referenced -- even if the reference is to Wikipedia IMHO, which by and large is a decent reference on many topics (after all, it gives references to primary sources which can be consulted and checked!).

Whether Wikipedia would have been a suitable reference in this instance I don't know (probably not), but the editorial/review process could have formed a considered opinion on the matter (or not, as it appears in this instance of rapid transit through to publication) if the source had been cited.

> we can't say that Reeves plagiarised, surely.

However, it doesn't matter.

a) Wegman plagiarised.

b) Wegman says Reeves took it.

If b is true, then Wegman knew it was plagiarised TWICE. Not good. If b is false, then Wegman plagiarised from Reeves but lied about Reeves, casting nasturtiums on his good name.

> The incorporation of accidental plagiarised material is not a defence against plagiarism.

Indeed, mere copyright infringement (less bad because plagiarism includes copyright infringement ALONG with fraud) has in the USA a statutory damages of up to $150,000 per incident (recently taken to mean "one for each copy made", quite a few copies of Wegman's report have been made...), and, IF DELIBERATE AND KNOWING, triple damages apply.

Since breaking-and-entering or criminal negligence leading to death can have a much lower penalty, this hardly seems like plagiarism, even if innocent of malice, is no crime.

John Mashey.

I've said it previously, but I'll say it again - your efforts and DC's in this have been extraordinary. The two of you have demonstrated a remarkable patience and tenacity in finding and piecing together the mess of academic misbehaviour that is this whole tawdry affair.

Of course, given the blatant incompetence, ignorance and misbehaviour that the Wegman team obviously display, it is more remarkable that they ever thought that they would get away with the nonsense in the first place. I have no sympathy for them, because it is patently clear that the whole enterprise was based upon ideological witch-hunting rather than upon any objective analysis. Those folk who persist in supporting them had better seriously reconsider their allegiances, because any further support will automatically taint their own reputations, and quite likely their work.

There is one person for whom I still have sympathy and concern, and that is Reeves. The work that she collated hasn't been proven to be plagiarism in and of itself, has it? How do we know that she didn't simply copy it verbatim under Wegman's instructions in order to summarise the material, rather than to pass it off to Wegman as her own?

And quite frankly, as so many people have already pointed out, even if she had presented it to Wegman as her original work, it shows that:

Wegman himself is grievously ignorant of the field and its literature, if he can neither summarise the field himself, nor check his student's work for both accuracy and originality
Wegman as leader of his group is, despite his failings as detailed in the previous point, prepared to pass other people's work off as his own, whether it be his students' or that of other workers in the field, through lack of appropriate cross-checking and referencing
Wegman is happy to shuck off to an unknown student his responsibility as leader, once it all went pear-shaped, when previously he was happy to maintain the misapprehension of the world that it was his own work and that he was expert in the field.

This is quite apart from all of the other dissembling that has occurred in the process of trying to tease out the truth once the scam was exposed.

Another thing that deserves to be emphasised is that if he so thoroughly fooled the Republicans who accepted his report, and if he so completely fooled the many other deniers of the hockey stick that instigated the whole affair, and if he did so when the scholarship is so patently bad, how then can those very same deniers of the science underpinning contemporary global warming claim that they are qualified to analyse and dismiss any other science? Seriously? They bought Wegman's snake-oil hook, line and sinker, but they still know better than the real professionals?

"I was fooled by a pseudoscientific liar, but I still know better than the actual experts. Trust me."

What a crock.

I see that P. Lewis made the same point about Reeves that I did, only better.

One final observation: Wegman's own social network will need to be a strong and partisan one (Azen's actions would seem to hint that it might be), because I doubt that he will move forward professionally under any professional credibility of his own after this affair. GMU may bravely keep him on into the future, but any impartial academic institution would have to have rocks in its head to take Wegman on after this, if he and GMU part company.

0) Bernard J: thanks for the kind words.

1) Reeves was coded orange or green in SSWR, unlike the red of the others. That ambiguity still seems accurate.

2) Wegman threw Reeves under the bus, but she refused to stay there. Too bad she's stopped talking.

3) It wasn't that Wegman fooled Barton & co, this was the report BARTON WANTED, both key memes.

4) For everybody: Strange tales and Emails is dense, but a close reading may be useful, including carefully looking at Appendix B.1. This wasn't just some one-off accident.
Of course, one must be amused at Wegman's complain that people were scrutinizing the work :-)

...the Climategate documents provided conclusive evidence of the hypothesis originally advanced in the Wegman Report about paleoclimate peer review â that members of the Mann âcliqueâ had been âreviewing other members of the same cliqueâ...

Except that wasn't the hypothesis, IIRC.

No, it wasn't, and no need to "IIRC" either, read Wegman's defense, in which he quite bluntly states that their work shows significant manipulation of the peer-review process within what he calls the "pro-anthropogenic climate change community"...

And that climategate showed them to be correct ...

Followed by a steady stream of the boilerplate denialist drivel seen so frequently elsewhere.

Read closely ... the ideological framework within which Wegman works is fairly openly put forward. Someone this smart doesn't parrot such stupidity about a field with which he's totally unfamiliar and unqualified to judge unless blinders are intentionally donned and evidence viewed through a very narrow, ideologically-driven world view.

As to McI this misstatement of the "hypothesis" is just more evidence that he is pathologically unable to tell the truth about the simplest of matters regarding climate science. His misstatement is obvious to anyone who reads the original document ...

Nature editorializes...

Does any one want to take bets as to when the denialsphere will stop defending Wegman and start to react by saying that his report was never significant in the whole scheme of things, "he was a bit player", "never really noticed his work anyway", etc, etc, etc, etc.

In fact, Wegman himself has already had a go at it. Take a look at his email to Elsevier, where he states that the Wegman report "...was all but forgotten until the so-called Climategate emails were made public...", which is, of course, unadulterated bollocks.

An illustration:
[one](http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3913) [two](http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3914)

I'm truly heartened that Nature has editorialised on this (though it's a shame they didn't acknowledge John Mashey's work). When the most prestigious journal in the world says that your university and research have problems, I think it will ratchet the pressure on GMU and Wegman up fivefold.

McIntyre's contribution is laughable as always. Smear, innuendo, climate change isn't happening because people who are coauthors emailed one another!!!.

Dagnabbit, markdown hoists me on the underscores again.

These work:
http://sinfest.net/comikaze/comics/2011-05-24.gif
http://sinfest.net/comikaze/comics/2011-05-25.gif

On Wikipedia;

Yes, in theory, one can reference Wikipedia.

But there are good reasons not to.
1. It displays a certain laziness, which is not really in keeping with academic standards.
2. It's not a primary source. Yes, much of the material is properly referenced....so why not just go to the source.
3. It's anonymous. The idea of referencing is that you know the source - it's explicitly identified, eg(Reeves 2007), you know where to find it etc.

Using Wikipedia is poor practice.

'Academics' who choose to use it need to accept that this will lead others to make judgements on the quality of their work and their capacity.

John Mashey:

3) It wasn't that Wegman fooled Barton & co, this was the report BARTON WANTED, both key memes.

Yes, you're right to emphasise the nature of the Barton and his cronies in this, which indeed is different to the more passive of the players.

Of course, the non-objective attitude of Barton et al then begs the question of their culpability in terms of acceptable and expected behaviour, and whether such partisan culpability is in any way actionable...

As I say in SSWR, "Wikipedia is helpful for quick topic introductions, but is never considered authoritative."

I often use it for subsidiary topics, where it's the handiest quick introduction for somebody, often where I've looked at dozens of relevant references besides those in the article, and where they are very useful for ameliorating the citation explosion that happens. SSWR had something like 40.
Sometimes they are used to show that something is common knowledge.
As an exercise, search SSWR for wikipedia.org and see which ones seem sensible or not.

re: 25
"I'm truly heartened that Nature has editorialised on this (though it's a shame they didn't acknowledge John Mashey's work)."

Thanks for the kind words, but don't worry, it is *just fine*.
I'd much rather they wrote what they did than spend words thanking more people, and if there was just one, it had to be DC.

It seems to me that McIntyre has already thrown Wegman under the bus. Until now, McI was vigorously rejecting the plagiarism charges. But CA went silent for a week after the news of the retraction, then he came out with what reads as a "fake but accurate" line - without defending Wegman's work, he says the hypothesis was right. Judith Curry is similarly silent, leaving it up to Watts to mount a very confused defence.

McI calling it Wegman's hypothesis is amusing.

I speculate as follows:
Read Strange Tales and Emails carefully, specifically pp.16-17.

See direct PDF of the PPT Wegman was sent.

See pp.32-36, which lead directly to WR page 46, Figure 5.8, whose contents seem exceeding unlikely for Wegman to have generated by themselves.
MM were already talking about peer view issues, Wegman and co knew enough SNA to get the the idea to generate some graphs ... which precede p.46.

Hopefully, at some point, certain people will be asked under oath where that material came from, and if the answer is McIntyre, it may get interesting.

See also Strange tales, p.6 on
"Because of our suspicions about manipulation of peer review"

That didn't arise from SNA or any other research, it was one of the two main goals from the beginning, as MM, Inhofe & co, and the thinktanks had been discussing and pushing this meme since ~2003.

It will be very interesting to watch the response of GMU to the Nature editorial. In my own institution, such a critical editorial in such a venerable journal would cause very major consternation, almost certainly resulting in a discussion at the level of the governing council as to why there had been such a long delay. We have always held the view that all institutions will occasionally have such incidents; the real reputational damage comes when the university is perceived as mishandling the case.

There can be few excuses for allowing this to drag on. It is unfair to all concerned, including Wegman and his students.

AFAICT, GMU still hasn't issued a press release on the CSDA retraction.

I can't imagine that's because they only issue press releases that shed positive light on GMU. Perhaps it's because the "physical retraction" is yet to take place?

Agree with GWB's nemesis; all people, institutions and systems are fallible, the mark of an enduring system is its capacity to auto-correct. I also feel sorry for the presumably innocent other students at GMU (not so much for the faculty who chose to work there) who've just seen their degrees devalued.

Re @ 31 and @ 32.

Everyone pay up now! (see @ 12)

Damn, should have put my coffee down first...

If Nature have you in the editorial, but not in a good way, then as an institution the reaction should be to go into "circle the wagons" mode---NOT. GMU must finish this committee inquiry (or whatever it's called) ASAP, or their own scientists are going to start pressuring upper ranks at GMU to take action. However, my admittedly low expectations now are that a letter to the editor will be sent by GMU officials, saying everything is hunky-dory and at hand, etc. In the finest tradition of University PR Department function.

PS: Thank you, John Mashey, for the patience and persistence to pursue this to the end. If not for you it doesn't seem likely that the alleged plagiarism would have a) been uncovered; and b) GMU wouldn't have initiated an inquiry into the serious issues behind the Wegman et al paper(s) and report. Given the incredible level of minute forensic examination of climate scientists whose research corroborates AGW (ie Anthropogenic Global Warming) as an actual event in progress, it is about time the quite transparent flaws in the methods of those criticising these scientists is subject to a similar examination. The asymmetric nature of the political debate has been a frustrating factor up to now. Good on you, John, for bringing symmetry to the equation.

USA Today's Vergano wasn't mentioned either, and should perhaps have been... investigative journalism like we haven't seen for a while. But I agree with John: if only one name should stand out, let it be Deep Climate.

because I doubt that he will move forward professionally under any professional credibility of his own after this affair. GMU may bravely keep him on into the future, but any impartial academic institution would have to have rocks in its head to take Wegman on after this, if he and GMU part company.

The sad thing is, should Wegman and GMU part company, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, the AEI, etc. will be falling all overthemselves to offer Wegman a highly-paid/no-work position as a wingnut "statistics expert".

That being said, the incompetence surrounding the entire McIntyre/Wegman/Barton attack on Mann is just breathtaking. Any analyst with half a brain could look at the "red-noise" eigenvalues vs. Mann's "hockey-stick" eigenvalues and tell them apart in about two seconds. There's no way that anyone with any reasonable level of competence could confuse a noise eigenvalue spectrum with an eigenvalue spectrum produced from valid paleoclimate data.

Whip up a matlab/scilab script that generates "hockey sticks" via short-centered PCA from red noise and compare the eigenvalues with Mann's tree-ring eigenvalues and see for yourselves -- there's no way that any competent individual would confuse the two cases.

Unless, that is, there's a difference between "conservative" eigenvalues and "liberal" eigenvalues.

Come to think of it, there just might be: I suspect that conservative eigenvalues would tend to be purely imaginary.

re: #37 Donald
"If not for you it doesn't seem likely that the alleged plagiarism would have a) been uncovered; and b) GMU wouldn't have initiated an inquiry into the serious issues behind the Wegman et al paper(s) and report."

Thanks for the kind words, but you give me too much credit.
a) DC found the 10 pages of the WR, and the CSDA paper, and the Wiley color stuff all by himself. I found the other 25 pages in the WR (but they were easy to find, as Summaries, the main work was finding the specific text antecedents.)
Some other people found other things, like the Said(2005) dissertation. There are actually a few helpers whose names I don't even know.

b) GMU was (slowly) doing whatever it was doing without me, Strange Inquiries @ GMU.

c) But it might be true that I helped this come to light with Dan Vergano. Mainstream media has a hard time doing much with anonymous bloggers or even citing blog-based sources.

Dan checks everything carefully and calls people. When he called me (I think to see if I might be credible enough to spend time on this), it probably helped that I started going down a list of very credible people that knew me and that he might know, and after the first 3 I mentioned were all people he talked to, we stopped.

It also helped that he'd followed the Wegman hearings while they were going on, so he wasn't totally new to this.

I wanted to post this at Nature but they are having problems with their comments system.

Speaking as a former journal Editor, my reaction to the appallingly slovenly investigation by GMU would be to start rejected any further submissions to my journal from their institution and to encourage other Editors to do likewise. Given that there is a blatant breach of publishing ethics in the WR, vis a vis outright plagiarism, I simply could not trust the output of anyone working at the institution any longer as the university clearly does not take this seriously. It is a case that should have been resolved in months, if not weeks, and most definitely does not warrant over a year of heel-dragging. If this is their attitude to such obvious plagiarism by their staff, then they can't be trusted to ensure that all their other researchers are behaving correctly either.

Harsh on the other researchers at GMU who are not plagiarists I know, but they too should not be accepting of their institutions disgraceful approach to this. Either publicly voice your disapproval or get out.

re #39: "That being said, the incompetence surrounding the entire McIntyre/Wegman/Barton attack on Mann is just breathtaking. Any analyst with half a brain could look at the "red-noise" eigenvalues vs. Mann's "hockey-stick" eigenvalues and tell them apart in about two seconds."

And yet Richard 'I Stick to the Science' Muller says (in June 2011 Scientific American): 'A few years later, McIntyre came out and. indeed, showed that the hockey-stick chart was, in fact, incorrect.'

I guess 'sticking to the science' does not help when you are way outside your area of expertise. Muller still has not learned that, I guess. Likewise for McI and Watts.

> I suspect that conservative eigenvalues would tend to be purely imaginary.

caerbannog FTW!

To repeat what Eli often says on this, there is a difference between formally correct statistics and useful statistics. Formally correct methods can stand up to any pathological data set, useful statistics not, but you don't meet a whole lot of pathological data sets on the street, and certainly the data sets Mann used were not pathological

What McIntyre and McKitrick did in their analysis was use different data, they included, for example some very dodgy data in the Central England Temperature record from before 1730 which was well known to be dodgy, but they waved their hands like crazy. Mann, Bradley and Hughes cut the series off in 1730 to be safe. You could make a good argument that it would have been better to cut it off in 1760 or so, but what the heck. What you could not do is argue that it was justified and honest to extend the record back before 1730 for an instrumental data set, if for no other reasons that a) it was not instrumental back then for most of the time and b) when it was instrumental it was not for data in Central England.

> What you could not do is argue that it was justified and honest to extend the record back before 1730 for an instrumental data set, if for no other reasons that a) it was not instrumental back then for most of the time and b) when it was instrumental it was not for data in Central England.

Aren't at least some of those folks ALSO arguing that "hide the decline" demonstrates deceptive and corrupt science because it's never valid to eliminate known-dodgy data and splice in known-good data instead when you're preparing an illustration - even for a non-journal document aimed at summarising the state of play for laypeople?

Sheesh, it must be a lot easier to "argue" for your position when you have exactly zero commitment to intellectual integrity (and the same commitment to factual accuracy).

For anyone interested in communication, the GMU âstatement on plagiarismâ linked to comment 16 is a shocker.

This isnât a guideline Â¬ itâs 1,000 words of pompous waffle. It has the strong smell of something composed by a keen type sadly ignorant of his/her lack of communication skills, then rubber stamped by a similarly handicapped committee.

The idea that this inept 20 year old âstatementâ is a current policy document of a major institution (which is the implication of its presence on their website) is gobsmacking.

Oh sorry â just noticed that the statement does not actually purport to be a guideline â it exhorts professors to âwork to ensure that their universities and professional societies adopt clear guidelinesâ on plagiarism. Classic bureaucracy â after wasting ten minutes reading the head document all you learn is that if you want useful detail you have to look elsewhere. Perhaps someone more patient than me can find a link to the implied additional âclear guidelinesâ.

What you could not do is argue that it was justified and honest to extend the record back before 1730 for an instrumental data set, if for no other reasons that a) it was not instrumental back then for most of the time and b) when it was instrumental it was not for data in Central England.

These are also the same folk who say that the "easiest" thing to do is to not use certain high-altitude, western North American tree-ring proxies because, well, the easiest thing to do is just throw out data that they don't like.

So, Chris, when you agree that QA is being applied, it's "the easiest thing to do is just throw out data that they don't like.". When you say that QA isn't applied, it's "GIGO".

Two faces. Both being sat on.

Denialists insist that the "pink noise" "hockey stick" analysis that McI and Wegman did should throw away any "pink noise" analysis that didn't show a "hockey stick" and that when they've done this throwing away of *99%* of the data is done, this "proves" that pink noise always produces a hockey stick.

They'll argue ANYTHING as long as they can keep themselves deluded.

Hereâs is another tidbit, related to SIGMU.

p.10 quotes Dan Verganoâs first story in Oct 2010, of which I wrote:

âHis story included a later comment that has confused some people:
âWalsch clarified on Sunday that Bradleyâs complaint is under a formal investigation by the university, and has moved past a preliminary âinquiryâ to a committee effort."

GMU policies say: preliminary assessment, inquiry committee and investigation committee, A.1. Stough had many times specified inquiry not investigation. Perhaps he and Walsch were not communicating.â

Then the Nature editorial this week had:
âDaniel Walsch, spokesperson for George Mason University, says that an internal review of the matter began in the autumn. He cannot estimate when that review will be complete, and, until it is, he says, the university regards it as a âpersonnel matterâ and will not comment further. He adds that the review is still in the âinquiryâ phase to ascertain whether a full investigation should be held. âWhether it is fast or slow is not as important as it being thorough and fair,â says Walsch.â

Vergano checks things, and updated his story:
âUpdate: GMU spokesman Dan Walsch clarified in the May 26, 2011, Nature journal that the year-old investigation is still in its preliminary âinquiryâ stage, rather than a full investigation.

âIn terms of my comments this past fall, my understanding of the internal procedure was not as clear then as it is now,â Walsch says, by email.]â

Stough had claimed (p.31) that the inquiry committee was formed April 2010, but in email (p.32) first meeting didnât happen until August. At least Walschâs current comments are consistent with that.

He adds that the review is still in the âinquiryâ phase to ascertain whether a full investigation should be held.

If it takes this long to have an "inquiry", how long will it take to have a full investigation? This would be a great process if delay was their objective.

re: #15
See SIGMU p.6 on this.
The nominal timeline is within 88 elapsed days (3 months, as nature says), followed by up to 294 days for investigation, appeals, etc. So, modulo loopholes, they should have been done 04/1/11. So, one create several models:

1) Suppose inquiry were done tomorrow, that would be +294 days, 9-10 months.

2) Suppose it were done tomorrow, but the investigation expanded by a similar factor: 3 months becomes 14, so we could add another 45 months.

3) But it isn't done and they don't seem to know when it will be.

The oddity is that between Wegman's Facebook lament (p.33), and his late Email to Elsevier, he's been blocked from mentoring grad students and they have had computers seized.

I can imagine that after a quick inquiry report that recommended investigation, but before? Odd.

They may be worried about pissing off the Republican powers that be. Perhaps the hope was that Wegman would solve their problem by resigning.

Hmm, could it be so that there has been an interim report by the inquiry on part of the charges, e.g., on Wegman's work as a grad student teacher, but that the inquiry continues on the other charges, with the aim of exhaustiveness? We outsiders wouldn't necessarily be told about this. But yes, it's a bit odd.

Do we know whether is it GMU foot-dragging on investigating Wegman or whether it is that the initial inquiry found multiple possible problems requiring further analysis of third parties (other than Reeves) before proceeding with GMU's Wegman investigation phase?

A second publication retraction would make the pressure on GMU unbearable I would think. So, are other Wegman et al publications being actively looked at by journal publishers does anyone know?

Ah! Between composing and going away to make my morning tea and toast and then reviewing before posting, I see Martin has a similar point.

I wonder how Elsevier is feeling about Stanley Azen.

All an inquiry is supposed to do is look at the complaint and decide if it is worth investigating, not actually do an investigation and assign responsibility.
People might review SIGMU which annotated the GMU policies and derives the nominal intervals.

And there is another new one, start at andrewt's comment (way to go!) and go from there.

At first glance, this looks like
(famous article from Science) to
(2007 presentation @ JSM (likely) to
Sharabati (2008) dissertation to
Said, Wegman, Sharabati (2010), mosto f hwich looks derived from the dissertation.

And there's more:
andrewt )(another unsung hero) came though with another find, start at this post.

I am afraid that Appendix B.1 will need another spot, making 4 that are known but not yet documented. I'd left room only for k, l, and r.
It never ends.

I wonder how Elsevier is feeling about Stanley Azen.

Probably very much the way that GMU is feeling about Wegman - similar to the feeling that one has after stepping in canine fÃ¦ces.

Yeah, I was going to say - they would have that sinking feeling you get when at a meeting somebody in your team makes a promise you know they can't deliver themselves....

Editorial supervision for CSDA is not so much by Elsevier (only the publisher) as it is by the International Association for Statistical Computing, the scholarly society sponsoring the journal. And yes, IASC are likely having questions about CSDA's editor-in-chief.

For a bit of hilarity, check out this. I especially like the doubling == 1.2C, but hey, you ignore negative feedbacks! Brilliant.

You know, if you ignore positive feedbacks your are more likely to be wrong, at least in this case.

And now the Aussie climate denialists are stomping their feet and waving their hands over an advertisement starring Cate Blanchett: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/carbon-cate-is-just-fodder-for-c…

further to the above - I trust we've all seen this?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/30/3231077.htm

"Most of you in the media are either too stupid to realise it or you don't care about children," he said.

Dick Smith, quite rightly giving the Murdochracy and its media allies a serve.

I'm a bit reluctant to go too far from the topic of this thread, but as the Cate Blanchett storm in a teacup has already been mentioned here, I'll direct people to [last night's episode of Q and A](http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3224649.htm).

It worth watching to see how:

George Brandis is completely unable to acknowledge that the underlying problem of global warming necessitates that carbon pollution is priced
Fran Kelly is as scatty and as clueless as ever, and it is no surprise that she was [shown the door under amazingly ludicrous circumstances](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Kelly#Political_scandal)
Guy Rundle deserves the tweet of "thinking man's super villain", and also muchos kudos for providing some intelligent discourse in an otherwise largely purile panel
Joe Hildebrand is actually a smart guy, but so grown in the light of his News Limited overlords that he leans almost horizontally toward their corporate interests.

If you haven't already seen it, watch it and despair at the state of Australian politics and media. It is apparent that the conservative side of politics will sell the souls of all their decendants for immediate electoral gain, and that most of our media will do the same for a simple headline.

[Lindsay Tanner had the right of it](http://www.smh.com.au/national/rudd-was-beheaded-and-it-was-all-for-not…).

If the Liberal/National parties succeed in their politcial attempts to prevent our country's proportionate action on global warming, Australia will carry a disproportionate load of future guilt. Newcorp will be no less guilty.

'Lucky country' be damned, when we are governed (by ransom, in opposition) and informed by so many stupid and selfish people.

'Lucky country' was always meant to be ironic.

Ironic yes. But it's a pity it drifted into moronic

I didn't think "Lucky Country" was ironic - I thought it was internal PR aimed at the tyranny of distance and Australia's cultural cringe, two problems which largely evaporated, respectively, by the late 1970s and during Paul Keating's time in office.

I'm not sure "ironic" is quite the right term, but it was not meant to be flattery. When Horne coined the term he was contrasting those countries who were generating their own wealth and social improvements through innovation with Australia, mired in Menzies-era conservatism, lack of innovation and simply relying on our abundance of natural wealth.

"Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck."

Not much has changed really - we remain conservative, unenterprising and riding our luck. And run by Bernard's stupid and selfish second-raters.

I got an email from GMU and my first thought was, why would they email ME?

I do think the Climate Communicators Awards being at Denial U is pretty darned ironic.

Anyone else agree?

Marion, you do but jest, surely?

Who was it with the sense of humour who organised that?

Actually, Ed Maibach and co at GMU's Center for Climate Change Communication are *OK*. I've met one at AGU, and have traded some emails with Ed.

See the authorship list of this letter to Science.
"Thomas E. Bowman, Edward Maibach, Michael E. Mann, Richard C. J. Somerville, Barry J. Seltser, Baruch Fischhoff, Stephen M. Gardiner, Robert J. Gould, Anthony Leiserowitz and Gary Yohe."

Recognize any names? Do you really think Mann and Somerville would be on this with Maibach if he were like Wegman?

GMU actually has some reasonable departments and reasonable people. I know some, so does my wife, so do some climate scientists we know. Lots are just regular academics doing normal academic things.

In my opinion, the issues are around the administration, institutes and a few departments that seem to pursue GMU's other missions on behalf of the Kochs & co. I think that most departments are normal academic departments. I have heard a few interesting stories I cannot repeat, but the skeletons in the closet seem to be banging harder on the door to get out.

Do *not* make the bad mistake of tarring the whole place with the Wegman brush.

John.

I suspect that Marion, like myself, was being a little ironic in the banter!

It's good to have the names of decent academics publicised though, as they certainly do not deserve to be tarred with Wegman's brush.

I just hope that the administration considers its responsibility to its other employees, as well as to the whole concept of academic integrity, when it decides what to do about Wegmanand his group.

[This may be of interest to some here.](http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/glass-houses-etc-2/)

re: #76
Yes, see pp.93-95 of CCC. Templeton shows up moderately often, although well below the Kochs and Scaife.
It does fund Heartland.

And BTW, if you want to see another interesting "handling" of a grad student, there's more.
See (sources) to Sharabati(2008) to Said, Wegman, Sharabati (2010).

John:

Good to hear they have good people still doing good work. I call em denial U not just because of Wegman, believe me. A very substantial amount of their work is doing freebies for the Kochs, Moranos, etc. Really, any RW think tank can get free research tailored to their needs via George Mason. My father went to the GMU School of Law while he was in the Capitol police and he said it was a very conservative U even then.

But thanks for the letter and the other stuff that's the other side of the coin.

Thanks, John Mashey.

I left a short response to you at the other site, but, by way of connection, should note that the person I was responding to in my first post about Templeton happened to be Josh Rosenau of the NCSE (also a blogger here at Sb), who was arguing that the case for the Foundation's climate-denial/antiscience activities was weak or nonexistent.

It does fund Heartland.

What's the source for this?

By funny coincidence, I had lunch with Eugenie&Josh Friday.
In some sense, you're both right. Unlike certain foundations, where climate anti-science is one of the pervasive themes, it's not with Templeton, but they certainly fund organizations that do it. Money is fungible, so it is hard to say where it goes.

but in #77, I pointed to the master table I had, which was derived from MMAN,
but now that I rerun and look, I don't see it, so I withdraw the Heartland comment. I'll have to figure out where the $623K came from on p.93 of CCC came from. With ~3,000 cells in that spreadsheet, there are bound to be a few errors. Thanks.

By funny coincidence, I had lunch with Eugenie&Josh Friday. In some sense, you're both right. Unlike certain foundations, where climate anti-science is one of the pervasive themes, it's not with Templeton, but they certainly fund organizations that do it. Money is fungible, so it is hard to say where it goes.

Well, I'm not sure if you went to my posts and read the exchange (such as it was) but I don't think he's right at all. As I've shown, they've given more than $4 million to Atlas over the past several years (the majority of it for Atlas' think-tank seeding efforts), independently funded denialist organizations, and the Templeton "Freedom" Awards, though given out by Atlas, are funded by them entirely and frequently go to explicitly denialist organizations for explicitly denialist projects. They've certainly tried in other contexts to conceal their connection with these activities and present themselves as pro-science, but I can't see how anyone could look honestly at the evidence and find that at all plausible. That they've been able to fly under the radar as they have to a great extent is part of the problem.

Oh, I don't think they are pro-science, the issue is that some of the other guys fund entities whose *only* or primary mission seems to be climate anti-science, and I hadn't seen that from Templeton. Atlas funds all sorts of stuff.

I've been to buys with other things, like Strange Falsifications in the Wegman Report, which I managed to keep to 12 pages, but I got to use red in the color displays.

Oh, I don't think they are pro-science, the issue is that some of the other guys fund entities whose only or primary mission seems to be climate anti-science, and I hadn't seen that from Templeton. Atlas funds all sorts of stuff.

Their primary mission is to seed, groom, and support conservative think tanks around the world, and it looks like Templeton is currently their major funder. That Atlas is doing Templeton's bidding as well as its own in funding not just neoliberal entities around the world* but specifically denialist think tanks is evident from the fact that Templeton specifies Atlas' think-tank seeding in the 2009-12 $4 million grant description, that this talks of building on the success of the Templeton Freedom Award program, and that all but one of [the known Templeton- and Atlas-funded organizations that were sponsors of the Heartland** conference](http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-on-templeton-atlas-and-cl…) (not to mention the Globalization Institute) have also been Templeton Freedom Award (or grant) recipients. So we have an organization funding awards with its name going to denialist think tanks and projects and the organization that funds them, then so approving of the award-giving and funding organization's efforts that it not only continues to fund the awards to denialist groups but gives it another $4 million for its think-tank work. They can't hide behind Atlas. The notion that they just give Atlas funds with no intent for them to go to denialism just isn't tenable.

I've been to buys with other things, like Strange Falsifications in the Wegman Report, which I managed to keep to 12 pages, but I got to use red in the color displays.

Off to read it now. Great work on this, btw. Now back to not commenting here. Cheers.

*And of course even without having a primary denialist mission, organizations that work for unfettered corporate power are promoting ecological harm.

**I think Templeton may have donated to Heartland as an individual.

SC: the general problem is that money is fungible, and when it goes through the money-laundering network shown in CCC,Section 2, it's hard to prove much. Put another way, I'd guess it very likely that Templeton money flows to climate anti-science, but it isn't easy to prove.
So, Templeton gives big money to Atlas, but so do Scaife and Earhart, as well as some from ExxonMobil.

Put another way, I'd guess it very likely that Templeton money flows to climate anti-science, but it isn't easy to prove. So, Templeton gives big money to Atlas, but so do Scaife and Earhart, as well as some from ExxonMobil.

But, again, it's not just that they give a lot to Atlas (which itself is suggestive - as I said in my post, the amount they've given 2009-2012 alone is greater than the other foundations combined that DSB considered over a very long period. Their money is bound to influence Atlas' priorities, and thus we can to some extent read back from those priorities to theirs, or at the very least judge that theirs aren't contrary). The circumstantial evidence that they give it with specific purposes that include denialism in mind is very strong especially from the Templeton "Freedom" Award recipients and the grant description re think tanks and the bit about building on the success of the award program. If it "proof"? No. But the idea that none of their money goes to this is seriously implausible, and certainly their support and promotion in terms of their name and recognition does.

Put another way, I'd guess it very likely that Templeton money flows to climate anti-science, but it isn't easy to prove.

The Templeton Freedom Awards, many of which have gone to denialist organizations including explicitly for denialist projects, are fully funded by the Templeton Foundation, so there can be no doubt whatsoever that Templeton money has flowed to antiscience.

Climate anti-science is a subset of anti-science.
Again, I am happy if there are clear direct links, I just haven't seen them yet and there are too many things ahead of it. Some of this, the only way to really find it is to have a reason for somebody with subpoena power to get reasons to ask.

Climate anti-science is a subset of anti-science. Again, I am happy if there are clear direct links, I just haven't seen them yet and there are too many things ahead of it. Some of this, the only way to really find it is to have a reason for somebody with subpoena power to get reasons to ask.

With all due respect, I don't know what you're talking about. I have to wonder if you've read the posts in question.

1) The Templeton Foundation is, as far as I know, the sole and entire funder of the Templeton Freedom Awards.

2) Poland's Globalization Institute won a 2009 Templeton Freedom Award - $10,000 - "for publishing âThe Mythology of the Greenhouse Effectâ, right before the 2008 United Nations Climate Change Conference in PoznÃ¡n."*

3) This is but one blatant example, but you wouldn't need a subpoena here to see the clear direct link between Templeton money and (climate) antiscience. And in addition to the award money generally, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.

Come on.

*I provide more details [in my first post](http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2011/04/yes-templeton-is-antiscience.h…)- an interested reader can check my links and determine if the Wikipedia entry is correct. (The 2009 page might have been disappeared...)

I link to it in my post, but it doesn't get much clearer or more direct than [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xLSF3TRaLg).

SC: I didn't say it wasn't there, I said I hadn't seen it. Trust me: if I listed the things I *have* to work on right now, you would not want me to drop them and go off and look at a new topic. You want me to do that. I can't right now.
But don't worry, I won't forget, I have a long list of such items and I come back to them when I have time.

SC: I didn't say it wasn't there, I said I hadn't seen it. Trust me: if I listed the things I have to work on right now, you would not want me to drop them and go off and look at a new topic. You want me to do that. I can't right now. But don't worry, I won't forget, I have a long list of such items and I come back to them when I have time.

What? My link wasn't for you specifically. I don't doubt that you have more, but this information isn't secret. It's in the posts I've linked to. Anyone who's read them has seen it.

I've no doubt that when you turn your considerable skills to this specifically you'll unearth much, but it's not necessary to make the basic points (vs. Rosenau) that I've made. It's right there - Templeton money has gone to denialism. And more.

> Do you really think Mann and Somerville would be on this with Maibach if he were like Wegman?

Well, yes.

If only because until someone proves themselves a cad, you ought to work with them (even if they are a cad) honestly.

And at the moment, there's still no proof of caddishness.

But a little bit of wariness may be in order.

Wow: well, since I know Mann and have met Somerville,
and have traded emails with Maibach, I think innocent-until-proven-guilty is in order. There turn out to be a bunch of people who have been associated with Wegman who turn out to be really good-guys appalled by what he's been doing, but I never would have found that if I assumed otherwise.

For more real caddishness,in some circles, "just plagiarism, no big deal, conclusions stand" is popular, which is nonsense, anyway, but...

Once found, near-verbatim plagiarism is the easiest to prove and explain, since a colored side-side-side is obvious even if one knows nothing of the field. Falsification/fabrication (the other pair of the FFP academic Big Sins) are harder to show.

However, it helps when someone plagiarizes big chunks of text, then methodically weakens, contradicts and even inverts its conclusions, with no justification.

See 12-page PDF @ Strange Falsifications in the Wegman Report.

DC has 2 more articles.
These were 2 of the missing letters in STaE, B.1.

> Wow: well, since I know Mann and have met Somerville, and have traded emails with Maibach, I think innocent-until-proven-guilty is in order.

That, however, is my point. In both ways.

I think "innocent unless proven guilty" (note the change: "until" gives the impression that there will be a guilty verdict, "unless" means the option of never having been guilty is forefront) is correct for calling someone a cad and treating them as such.

But the "until" you used (and is so common in the phrasing of that statement) shows that there's a wariness. "You may be guilty, but we have to prove it". If someone is innocent, you aren't looking for proof, surely. Therefore indicating wariness. A contingent "innocent" rather than a concrete standard of innocent.

Wow: you can word-split all you like, but I will point out that I more likely have spent a lot more time than you have researching GMU and finding things that make me nervous...
but also, have run across perfectly reasonable people who are appalled. You have yet to add a single concrete fact to make me want to worry about Ed Maibach ... and your argument is isomorphic to the "Climate scientists write papers together, so we should all be wary of bad peer review among these guys, even if there is no objective evidence."

Some people love guilt-by-association, but sorry, I've spent too much time on this already.

Now, back to something useful.
Andrew Gelman is a serious statistician, and his latest is Another Wegman plagiarism, referencing DC's latestMining new depths of Scholarship, Part 1.

re: 25, 30 to finish that
"re: 25 "I'm truly heartened that Nature has editorialised on this (though it's a shame they didn't acknowledge John Mashey's work)."
(me):
Thanks for the kind words, but don't worry, it is *just fine.* I'd much rather they wrote what they did than spend words thanking more people, and if there was just one, it had to be DC."

Again, Nature was *just fine* as it was, as DC deserves a lot of credit, and it's hard for MSM to mention anonymous bloggers.

But by odd coincidence, just yesterday (on-line), print next week, another fine journal was kind enough to mention me, see DeSmogBlog summary and link to it (subs req, sorry).

I urge anyone who reads the actual article to read very carefully and think about what's going on.

Wegman scandal: the first retraction

tlambert — Mon, 16 May 2011 03:18:47 +0000

Wegman scandal: the first retraction

Dan Vergano reports that Social networks of author-coauthor relationships by Said, Wegman, Sharabati and Rigsby has been retracted by Computational Statistics and Data Analysis.

Deep Climate has more details, but I want to highlight one particular thing:

"Neither Dr. Wegman nor Dr. Said has ever engaged in plagiarism," says their attorney, Milton Johns, by e-mail. In a March 16 e-mail to the journal, Wegman blamed a student who "had basically copied and pasted" from others' work into the 2006 congressional report, and said the text was lifted without acknowledgment and used in the journal study. "We would never knowingly publish plagiarized material" wrote Wegman, a former CSDA journal editor.

Even if Wegman believed that the text in the Wegman report was original work, he's still guilty of knowing plagiarism for lifting the text from the report into the paper without acknowledgement.

tlambert Sun, 05/15/2011 - 23:18

Tags

Wegman

Edward Wegman

Yeah, let's throw a student under the bus instead! When you thought they couldn't sink any lower...

Weatherman Watts has already started whining.

Who is this "student"? Did Wegman ever acknowledge this student's part in authoring the Wegman report? If not, then was Wegman falsely claiming credit for work which he didn't personally do?

-- frank

Firstly, kudos to DC and John Mashey whose diligent work appears at last to begetting the credit it deserves.

Aside from the tacit acknowledgement that Said et al did indeed contain at least some cut-and-paste work, what I can't get my head around is Wegman's blatant attempt to buck-pass and dump the blame on "a student". This is never a good look when the $hit hits the fan, and worse still when the report was trumpeted so loudly and made such grand claims for itself and its authors.

On top of that, Wegman appears to be admitting that neither he nor Said ever bothered to proof-read the stuff this "student" had done for them, which is bad enough on its own let alone in a paper whose central theme is the alleged "lax reviewing" in paleoclimatology. "Hoist with his own petard" as the Bard has it.

PS Tim, a minor nitpick - "Sharabati1" *[oops - fixed]*?

> Weatherman Watts has already started whining.

I guess that could be abbreviated to a WWWaaaaaah!

WWWaaaaaah-ing gives him the chance to deflect attention from his own paper confirming warming in the US.

If the student wasn't listed as an author, doesn't that let the student off the hook, leaving Wegman et al swinging in the breeze?

Typically, Watts makes a big deal out of Deep Climate's anonymity but turns his blind eye to the use of an anonymous author by Wegman. Personally, I donât care that bloggers use pseudonyms, but supposedly academic papers should not rely on anonymous and uncredited authors.

If the student isn't mentioned then the authors are responsible for the students input. I agree with Lotharsson@6.

Some, not I, might say that having a grad student write a paper for you ( wink, wink, nudge, nudge) then publishing it as your own work in order to collect the grant money is fraud.

WWTCD? What Will The Cooch Do?

Of course Deep Climate's anonymity is the real issue here.

Anyone have a link to the retraction? The above link to the paper has no notice of retraction on it. Or has it not formally gone through yet?

Bijan, the retraction is not formally posted yet.

Of course, everyone knows that Deep Climate is Bruce Wayne.

Not that it matters a whit to the whole issue of the behaviour of Wegman et al. Either Wegman and Said repeatedly plagiarised, and they are trying to blame it all on an anonymous student in order to skirt responsibility, or they had really did have said anonymous student prepare a Congressional report for them (amongst many other things - busy student...), and then permitted plagiarism to remain after proofing it, as well as not giving the student due acknowledgement for involvement.

Rock, meet hard place.

It strikes me that Wegman et al could have their anonymous "student" ghost-author another paper on the social networking and academic behaviour of GMU academics.

To do so they could plagiarise Deep Climate and John Mashey...

There is more from Dan Vergano:

[Retracted climate critics' study panned by expert](http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/05/retrac…)

Network analysis expert Kathleen Carley describes the Wegman, Said, Anonymous paper "as more of an opinion piece" that should have failed first review. What is more, there is more than a suspicion that the paper did indeed bypass external review.

1) The student Denise Reeves was Ack'd in the Wegman Report, although for unspecified work. She's the one at MITRE.

2) The paper has been scheduled for retraction, but it is not out yet. Why it has taken a while wil become clear soon.

3) Kathleen Carley is not the first expert to pan this piece. Recall that Australian expert Garry Robins was quoted in SSWR, p.151. There is however, a delicious irony in Carley being quoted like this, which will become clear fairly soon.

But do go back and reread SSWR, pp.148-151 on the CSDA article. The 6-day review was a tipoff.

they'll probably use this as an argument that peer review is corrupted

Headline over at Joe Romm's blog: "Wegman scandal rocks cornerstone of climate denial".

Win.

I have Part 2 up.
http://deepclimate.org/2011/05/16/retraction-of-said-wegman-et-al-2008-…
==========================
Early climate contrarian reactions to the retraction of Said, Wegman et al 2008 have grasped at straws, holding that this does not affect the findings of the paper and the earlier Wegman report alleging inadequate peer review in climate science.

Now USA Todayâs Dan Vergano, who broke the retraction story, addresses exactly that contention in a follow up piece. Social network analysis expert Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon calls Said et al âmore of an opinion pieceâ that would have required âmajor revisionâ to render it fit for publication in an SNA journal.

And it gets worse. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis chief editor Stanley Azen âpersonally reviewedâ the paper and sent Wegman an acceptance notice within days of submission. Meanwhile, Virginia Techâs Skip Garner enumerates the potential consequences of the research misconduct finding, including the possible need to investigate âethical issues such as conflict-of-interest, haste vs. scientific rigor and biasâ.

"The student Denise Reeves was Ack'd in the Wegman Report, although for unspecified work. She's the one at MITRE."

Wegman just threw her security clearance and thus her job under the bus

Wegman is the corresponding author. So what goes in the paper is very much his responsibility. Passing the buck to an identified student is disgraceful, pathetic, unprofessional and cowardly.

"Wegman blamed a student...."

on the other hand the Acknowledgements state rather robustly that "the content is solely the responsibility of the authors" (see below).

P.S. I suspect the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the Army Research Office aren't going to be to thrilled at the misuse of their funding....

Acknowledgments
The work of Dr. Yasmin Said was supported in part by the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism under grant 1 F32 AA015876-01A1. The work of Dr. Edward Wegman was supported in part by the Army Research Office under contract W911NF-04-1-0447. The work of Dr. Said and Dr. Wegman was also supported in part by the Army Research Laboratory under contract W911NF-07-1-0059. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism or the National Institutes of Health.

Eli, don't be silly. You don't lose a security clearance for plagiarism; you're much more likely to lose one for being original.

I never realised until recently [how important George Mason University was to the Kochs and vice versa](http://www.desmogblog.com/koch-and-george-mason-university). I know some good people there and I'm sure there's no relation between Wegman and Koch activities but ...

The thing is, it doesn't matter, any more than all the reports exonerating the East Anglia folks ... the reality-denying mentality operates on propaganda, not fact, logic, and evidence. One anti-GW paper, even retracted, has more convincing power than 10,000 peer-reviewed papers providing evidence of GW -- especially an anti-GW paper that sows suspicion about the integrity of scientists and their methods.

Bad week for the bad guys: first Watts is hoist on his own petard, and now this.

If we were all in the pub, I'd buy us all a round. As it is I'll lift a couple to John Mashey and Deep Climate. Good on ya', boys.

P.S. http://www.badscience.net/2011/01/none-of-your-damn-business/

ianam:

What you say is true but on the other hand, odds are good that Wegman will never publish in this journal again (he was editor, once), he'll be investigated by the feds who funded the plagiarized paper and very likely chastised in a professionally harmful way, and may yet be disciplined by his University.

So it may give cause for pause by idelogically-driven people who are attempted to lie about science ... they're under the microscope, now.

If Dhogaza's analysis is correct, then this is a watershed moment for climate change denialism in the USA.

re: 25
Ahhh, you might to study this a bit more, as per #22.
This one is *actionable*, unlike almost any other debunk we've seen. Actually, it has numerous actionable derivatives.

1) Having an article retracted is bad, if it is for academic misconduct. Google: plagiarism fraud and see if there are hits

2) It can lose people their jobs in academe.

3) It can get worse. Do people have any idea what happens if the Office of Research Integrity rules someone has been naughty?
By odd chance, one of my bookmarks is ORI Case Summaries. Google: FFP falsification fabrication plagiarism
the trio of Very Bad Things.
Most of these are the two FFs, but there's some Plagiarism now and then. The most typical penalty is debarment for 3 years. What does that mean? It means $0 research funding from *any* Federal government agency, not jut the health folks.

4) But there's more. There were 3 government agencies thanked for funding. How many of those normally fund low-grade SNA to attack climate scientists? Could there be misuse of Federal funds?

5) Then one must ask why, in the Wegman Report, work was (correctly) acknowledged to John Rigsby, shown affiliated with NSWC (Naval Surface Weapons Center). As far as I know (and I've spoken there), this is not an obvious part of its mission. The same work, used in the Said, et al(2008), has him affiliated with GMU. [In fact, he's been @ NSWC, part-time with GMU, just fine.]

However, Wegman can't have it both ways: he can't claim Rigsby as NSWC to bulk up the credentials of the team, if Rigsby was really doing GMU-affiliated work. it might not have looked good to thank 2 GMU students, since the Wegman Report was supposed to be expert work. Anyway, I think the NSWC affiliation was a mistake, as was the claim that he couldn't release code because some of it was from current/ex-students @ NSWC. At some point, questions may get asked of them.

6) Just to be clear: The Wegman Report is one thing, and Said(2008) something else, but a lot of the latter is a subset of, or derived from the former with minimal change. SNA is one of the two key memes of the former, whereas the latter seems an attempt to peer-reviewize the SNA part of the former.

7) But let me summarize: one can joust with sockpuppets, or more usefully, debunk bad papers that otherwise would get repeated even more. But a very, very few mistakes have legal and economic consequences, and those are worth chasing hard. After all, this sequence might eventually get to felony charges (18USC1001, 18USC371, 18USC4), i.e., misleading Congress is a felony, conspiracy to commit felony is a felony, and misprision of a felony has penalties also.

Now, I am no lawyer ... but I have talked to experienced Washington lawyers who explicitly said this wasn't fantasy, from what they knew (and we know much more now), although it wouldn't be easy.

Oh, and if any of the relevant problems get to felony level, destroying evidence is a problem, too, and there is this issue of files that suddenly disappear....

8) BUT, while the various students have screwed up, from my academic days, I'd say there was truly awful supervision by Wegman. PhD Students can be really vulnerable.

I think what John Mashey @30 and chris @21 & @22 makes sense: Wegman bears ultimate responsibility as senior author and as supposed supervisor of the research of others for this report. I applaud John and DC for their efforts and think that they are worthy because they shine a much-needed light onto the unsavory practices of some deniers.

Yes to all the above comments. But you know how the deniers work, at some point they start denying that the Wegman report was ever of any importance.

It will be a cascade of throwing-to-the-wolves, we've seen Wegman try that with the graduate student, then that will happen to Wegman.

I bet in six months to a year the Wegman Report will never have existed in the denialspehere with Winston Smith earning plenty of overtime.

Couple of other points:

(i) It's always a bit of a shock to discover the extent to which other's moral compass's are totally at odds with one's own. Wegman doesn't think he's done anything wrong, and it seems he's a serial offender. From such a jaundiced view it's perhaps not surprising that he projects the notion of malpractice onto pukka scientists. Perhaps he really does think everyone else is like him.

(ii) Some of the individuals that defend him clearly share his outlook. I've noticed people complaining that although the stuff is plagiarised it doesn't matter because "the results are correct". But there aren't any results in Wegman and Said's plagiarised paper. There are some block charts that illustrate how some publishing relationships between various types of author/coauthors might be represented. And then there is some conjecture. No "results".

(iii) Like all universities GMU has an Honor Code with guidance about what plagiarism is [*] (and presumably has some fairly standard penalties that range from downgrading the mark for an assessment or awarding zero, to witholding credits for a course unit, all the way to witholding a degree result or expulsion).

If I were a present or past GMU student who has been strongly penalized for plagiarism offences, I would be keeping an interested eye on the manner that GMU deals with this case. If GMU comes to the consideration that Dr. Wegman's actions aren't worthy of significant penalty, then I might consider it worth consulting a lawyer to have my own case reassessed...

[*]e.g. http://www.gmu.edu/resources/facstaff/part-time/plagiarism.html

If I were a present or past GMU student who has been strongly penalized for plagiarism offences, I would be keeping an interested eye on the manner that GMU deals with this case. If GMU comes to the consideration that Dr. Wegman's actions aren't worthy of significant penalty, then I might consider it worth consulting a lawyer to have my own case reassessed...

Chris, this is an interesting notion.

I'm wondering if there are statistics for student academic misbehaviour at GMU. I'd be curious to know the numbers and the severities of misbehaviour, because if GMU is lenient with Wegman's group then there could be a good-sized class action of students claiming that their own (perceived) excessive punishments for "lesser" breeches have led to lost earnings, humilation and other mental anguish, loss of reputation...

This could cost GMU hugely in terms of legal defense, potential compensation, and inevitable (further) loss of its own reputation.

The administration needs to be very principled in their response.

People were asking questions about Reeves, so Vergano updated this to add more information. That should answer some questions.

Also, see editorial in USA Today:

"Coincidentally, USA TODAY's Dan Vergano reported Monday, a statistics journal retracted a federally funded study that had become a touchstone among climate-change deniers. The retraction followed complaints of plagiarism and use of unreliable sources, such as Wikipedia.

Taken together, these developments ought to leave the deniers in the same position as the "birthers, ..."

From Vergano's update, kindly linked by John:

Adding that she has met with a George Mason University misconduct committee, Reeves concluded, "My academic integrity is not being questioned."

There's an implication here that presumably has Wegman squirming on the hot seat ...

@John Mashey

re: 25 Ahhh, you might to study this a bit more, as per #22. This one is actionable, unlike almost any other debunk we've seen. Actually, it has numerous actionable derivatives.

Whoosh! I never said otherwise ... but Wegman is just one individual, and there are hordes of other deniers, and most of their behavior is not actionable.

@dhogaza

So it may give cause for pause by idelogically-driven people who are attempted to lie about science ... they're under the microscope, now.

You're living in a fantasy world.

@Vince whirlwind

If Dhogaza's analysis is correct, then this is a watershed moment for climate change denialism in the USA.<./blockquote>
Waterloo!

If only it were so ...

@Jeremy C

Yes to all the above comments. But you know how the deniers work, at some point they start denying that the Wegman report was ever of any importance.

It will be a cascade of throwing-to-the-wolves, we've seen Wegman try that with the graduate student, then that will happen to Wegman.

I bet in six months to a year the Wegman Report will never have existed in the denialspehere with Winston Smith earning plenty of overtime.

Someone who gets it. (Actually, I think you all get it, but you allow yourselves to be deluded by your desire for a better reality.)

/per/ Vergano:

Azen says he must have overseen an earlier, more extensive review of the paper involving outside reviewers. But he says he has no records of this earlier review, because his records were destroyed in an office move. "I would never have done just a personal review," he says.

(end quotes)

'The dog ate my office...'?

Somebody dropped the office mail server during the move? :)

...his records were destroyed in an office move.

'The dog ate my office...'?

Zibethicus FTW!

The alternative is that he spilled sugared coffee on his office during the move, and then cockroaches came at night and ate it all up...

So, if Azen is referring to hard copy being destroyed, did he not have an electronic back-up? If he is referring to an electronic copy, are there no other people to whom the external reviews were distributed? And even if not, wouldn't the external reviewers to which Azen refers simply come out and provide evidence of their reviews? Or where their offices destroyed too? What of the usual professional practice of the receiver backing up to separate drives as well as to having access a campus mainframe? And did he delete the original emails containing the attached reviews?

Isn't telling porkies in such investigations another Naughty Thing To Do?

> And even if not, wouldn't the external reviewers to which Azen refers simply come out and provide evidence of their reviews?

The dog that did not bark.

Sounds like this one's worth digging deeper on too.

Computational Statistics and Data Analysis uses online submission. This "office move" rubbish is no less hollow than the "student did it" excuse.

The student (Denise Reeves) did collect the original text, although unclear whether she knew how it was to be used. Recall that she was really working a MITRE, not full-time at GMU. They did Ack her in WR; I could never figure out what she did or if she really did much, because I know of other cases where people have been surprised by Wegman Acks.

BUT, if Wegman thought it was original work, and he gave it to Sharabati, who put it in SAid, et al(2008), his dissertation, and then Rezazad did too, all without any Ack, that is ...bad.

Re 42: "The Dog That Did Not Bark"...because it was busy eating its master's paperwork during an office move, LOL.

Good ref BTW.

@ John Mashey

if Wegman thought it was original work, and he gave it to Sharabati, who put it in SAid, et al(2008), his dissertation, and then Rezazad did too, all without any Ack, that is ...bad

No matter which way you slice it, Wegman, Sharabati and Said end up smelling of manure. Given its Honor Code (and its specific rules on plagiarism) it will be interesting to see what GMU does and says, though I suspect a lot of duck-shoving will result if Adelaide Uni and Ian Plimer are anything to go by.

ianam is at least partly right - the rejectionist/ denier crowd are either burying this (Watts) in the hope it goes away (The Climate Scientist of The Year herself remains schtum on this, which seems a bit anomalous given the speed and volume of blog posts she writes) or, like Fuller over at Keith Kloor's, pretending that the plagiarism charges are trivial and "do not affect the results" of Wegman Report, Said et al etc. IOW beat the "Hockey Stick is Dead" drum as hard as you can in an attempt to distract and obfuscate and prestidigitate. Again.

> ...pretending that the plagiarism charges are trivial and "do not affect the results" of Wegman Report, Said et al etc...

He's right so far...

...said results being PR that sways the uninformed. But that may change.

As John Mashey noted, according to Deep Climate, this is now a self-refuting paper (on the question of peer review corruption and prevention).

Let me try one more time.
Ianam doesn't seem to understand the difference between the blogosphere and the real world, in which there are sometimes real penalties for misconduct.

For example, in Canada, Tim Ball has held forth for a long time, often producing material at Canada Free Press. one can debunk him as much as you like, irrelevant.
See Presentation, specifically p.38 on libel.
Roger McConchie "wrote the book" in Canada on libel, I've met him. CFP ran away. On Weaver+McConchie vs Ball, I know who I bet on.

The blogosphere can be terrifically useful for gathering info, and some people leave tracks they may regret at some time ... but the penalties are in the real world.

I bet the movers who destroyed Azen's records are the same ones who caused the [hard drive crash of John Lott's computer](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/04/malkinsoped.php). Most likely they're undercover agents sponsored by George Soros.

Ianam doesn't seem to understand the difference between the blogosphere and the real world, in which there are sometimes real penalties for misconduct.

Again you respond to a strawman, even after I pointed it out. I never denied that these people will be penalized for misconduct; sheesh. But that's not the point ... the point is what effect this will have on the dialog in the broad, and on policy. Do you actually think that this will "give cause for pause by idelogically-driven people who are attempted to lie about science"? That "this is a watershed moment for climate change denialism"? If so, you are living in a psychological and sociological fantasy world.

said results being PR that sways the uninformed. But that may change.

Not until human psychology changes. Did you notice what effect the East Anglia exoneration by numerous panels had on public opinion? In fact the propagation of claims that "the emails" show that climate change is a big hoax has continued to increase totally in disregard to those findings.

Mark Twain said that a lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. This is a sociological reality that we need to understand if we are to have any chance to change public perception and see a real "watershed moment for climate change denialism".

BTW, I do not mean to denigrate the work done by John Mashey et. al. ... not at all ... it is an entirely admirable and good thing, and we need more of it ... much more, in fact, which is the point. There will not be a "watershed moment for climate change denialism" until Fox News and The Australian are running banner headlines announcing the reality and threat of AGW ... and even then denialism will live on, but will finally be marginalized.

ianam:
I think you have me and Vince Whirlwind intermingled, I said nothing about watersheds. I really don't care about folks like WUWT fanboyz. I care about people in Congress and similar places. I'm told that the Fall's Wegman mess deterred some show-trials the Republicans were thinking of.
In some sense, too bad.

"The thing is, it doesn't matter, any more than all the reports exonerating the East Anglia folks "

a) Exoneration of a manufactured brouhaha, had exactly zero penalties for anybody who manufactured it...

b) The Wegman mess is the first part of an interconnected web of *actionable* issues.

They are *not* the same kind of thing. The equivalent of the first would have been to find the hacker(s) and put them in jail.

Back to real work.

I think you have me and Vince Whirlwind intermingled, I said nothing about watersheds.

You are a very confused person ... I was not quoting you and I gave no indication that I thought I was.

They are not the same kind of thing.

I find your strawmen fascinating. I never said that they are the same kind of thing. I never said that the similarity was in whether they were or were not actionable. That was not my point ... which I stated clearly enough, but you keep addressing something else.

Back to real work.

Like I said, your work is a good and admirable thing and we need a lot more of it.

> I'm told that the Fall's Wegman mess deterred some show-trials the Republicans were thinking of.

John Mashey, can you give us more information on this? It may help boost the morale of any present or would-be politicians who would like to air the truth in the halls of government.

* * *

ianam:

Speaking for myself, I do care about having real, enforcable climate legislation, and I don't care that much about whether some group of flying monkeys gathering at a denialist blog believe in it or not.

Also, read David Roberts about "post-truth politics":

http://climateprogress.org/2011/04/29/grist-post-truth-politics/

-- frank

Good statistician gets interested:
Statistics in the news - but not in a good way.

I just checked and the retraction still ain't posted. If one pays for a copy now, will they refund the price?

7 lord_sidcup -- "Typically, Watts makes a big deal out of Deep Climate's anonymity but turns his blind eye to the use of an anonymous author by Wegman."

There's better. Who is Steven Goddard? I once posed this question at WUWT and Tony closed comments very swiftly. There are some out there wondering if Goddard is really Bob Ferguson of SPPI (the one paid $243,000 in 2008-2009 by Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide).

Wegman update

tlambert — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 09:30:33 +0000

Wegman update

John Mashey has updated his report on the investigation into Wegman's misconduct. Deep Climate has some comments.

tlambert Sat, 01/08/2011 - 04:30

Tags

Wegman

Edward Wegman

I was scanning though the first bit of Mashey's report - the bit about plagiarism on page 4 - and was struck by a very strange phrase added by the Wegman team:

These bands are the so-called tree rings...

"So-called"? The pseudo-skeptics are so full of doubt that they question whether the rings in trees are really tree rings?

(I realize that a simpler explanation is that they're simply bad writers.)

Actually "so called" isn't all that bad. When you look at a cross section of a tree, you see distinct dark rings, but when you look at it under a microscope the "rings" disappear, and you are left with alternative bands of larger and smaller vessels. The rings are actually a bit of an optical illusion. It's unclear writing, but probably not the product of pseudoskepticism.

Oh, I wouldn't fault them for this, given the mass of other problems with the 1.5 pages of WR tree-rings discussion. Bradley did use "commonly called a tree ring."

But the plagiarism/distortion has been known, and the problems GMU is having are fairly recent news, but the new stuff is in SIGMU2 section 3, the Rapp originated/forwarded emails in A.2.10-A.2.13, and Wegman's new public comments in A.3.
Really, these will provide useful insight.

People might assess:
1) Donald Rapp's missives and his choice of people to forward to.

2) The fact that Wegman was happy to email to him.

3) Finally, here I thank Bernard J for his noble attempts to help me out at WUWT, where Rapp had posted (SIGMU2, p.12, fn.47). I was hoping Rapp might post some of Wegman's quote on p.13, and encouraged Bernard J to try to draw Rapp out, but alas, people have had to wait until now to see this material. This includes the fascinating revelation that as of September, Wegman thought he would be cleared because Scott had been... where as A.2.2, p.29 shows why that wasn't a good idea.

4) But throughout, in public comments, Wegman keeps claiming all this wasn't plagiarism:

"and we have never intended that our Congressional testimony was intended to take intellectual credit for any aspect of paleoclimate reconstruction science or for any original research aspect of social network analysis"

I'm sure students around the world will be pleased to know they can just do copy-and-paste and that's OK if they don't take intellectual credit.

The other surprise is that I figured there was some chance that Wegman would blame Said ("I'm shocked, shocked to find that plagiarism is going on in here!"

I don't actually think they were skeptical of tree rings. I just thought that bit sounded a little odd. I might be wrong, but my first thought was that it was unnatural English to describe things.

So I did a search for "so-called tree rings". Outside of the Wegman report, all I found was [Chapter 11](http://www.terrapub.co.jp/e-library/cra/pdf/chap11.pdf) of "COSMIC RAY ASTROPHYSICS", which seems to be a Japanese text book (p. 390).

...and the repetition of these two layers formed inside tree trunk produce the so-called tree rings.

...or maybe that's just normal terminology for astrophysicists talking about tree rings.

>I don't actually think they were skeptical of tree rings.

Don't give the deniers ideas. If they found a way to deny tree rings they would.

The so-called rings are actually ellipses - but we in the climate skeptic community will probably have to wait as long as Galilleo did for vindication of his ellipses! It's ellipses that defeat so-called consensus science. Every so-called time!

I have switched from Tolgate to here, so my response is to the ineffable wow's last at Tolgate.
There wow began by quoting me: "Wegman meantime has grounds to sue for defamation, but honourable gentlemen do not do that to worthless scum like Bradley and Mashey".

Then wow added "He's no gentleman, he's a hired hitman. The reason why Wegman doesn't sue is because he has no grounds and, if he were to press suit, he would be unable to quash the facts he wants hidden".

I disagree. Bradley & Mashey have no substance to their claims, and they are not worth suing, with their combined net worth unlikely to be more than $200,000.

Wegman has NEVER plagiarized Bradley, why would he? There has to be motivation, and the idiotic Mashey's 250 pages have never found any motivation for Wegman to pass off Bradley's work, which he disputes, as his own, nor has he ever.

> Then wow added "He's no gentleman, he's a hired hitman. The reason why Wegman doesn't sue is because he has no grounds and, if he were to press suit, he would be unable to quash the facts he wants hidden".

> I disagree.

Well of course you would.

Neither would A Crowley agree with Satan being touted as the bad guy.

> Wegman has NEVER plagiarized Bradley

None so blind as will not see. He's widely plagiarised Bradley. Full Stop. Period.

It's all to do with copyright law and what the definitions of copying a work is. You (and Wegman) merely don't understand it (except when you think YOU are being plagiarised).

> why would he? There has to be motivation

Yes there is. Power. Influence. Money. I already told you: he's bought and sold.

> Mashey's 250 pages have never found any motivation for Wegman to pass off Bradley's work, which he disputes, as his own, nor has he ever.

That would be because the 250 pages are about the plagiarism, not the reason for it, idiot.

I think Wegman had another reason for plagiarizing Bradley: he had to make people think he(*) knew what he was talking about. Same with the Social Network Analysis: copy a textbook, make some small changes so it isn't directly obvious, add a few references in some places, and presto: it looks like you just showed off your knowledge and understanding of the area!

Of course, the small changes that WERE made actually show Wegman had very limited understanding. As McShane and Wyner have shown, being a statistician and doing work in an area you do not understand, has major implications for your data analysis and conclusions. Result? A trainwreck.

(*) I'd like to point out, again, that I don't think Wegman himself did much of the writing. I know academic practice, and the main reason to involve postdocs and PhD students in writing jobs is to have people with time doing most of the work. You yourself mostly tighten the language up, and add/remove things where necessary.

In the meantime, Fred Knell still has not provided any explanation as to why THREE plagiarism experts, from unrelated fields I might add, call it "plagiarism".

He also has failed to explain why references for the tables should be counted as a reference for the text.

Finally, Wow, much of the 250 pages is not about the plagiarism, but contains a lot of other issues. For example, why are there references on the list that are not in the text, and why does it include a reference from a...ehm....fringe-journal (as in "Lyndon LaRouche publication") ?

> Finally, Wow, much of the 250 pages is not about the plagiarism, but contains a lot of other issues.

Aye, and so missing any report of why Wegman might want to plagiarise (in court, shot down for "hearsay and opinion") is no proof that Wegman didn't plagiarise.

Bradley has made it clear in public comments that his only objective is to force Wegman to withdraw or modify his testimony to congress; testimony which was critical of Bradley's work.

The specific law that Mashey and Bradley need to be mindful of is Â§ 1512.(b) "Whoever knowingly uses intimidation, threatens, or corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, or engages in misleading conduct toward another person, with intent toâ (1) influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding;... shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both."

And (d) "Whoever intentionally harasses another person and thereby hinders, delays, prevents, or dissuades any person fromâ
(1) attending or testifying in an official proceeding; ...or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 3 years, or both."

mpaul:
"Bradley has made it clear in public comments that his only objective is to force Wegman to withdraw or modify his testimony to congress; testimony which was critical of plagiarized from Bradley's work."

Fixed it.

As for the rest, since Wegman already has testified, and was in no way prevented, intimidated, or threatened to not testify by *anybody*, the laws you mentioned are completely irrelevant. It's comical that Bradley, who was smeared by Wegman et al for political reasons, is somehow at fault for pointing out his work was plagiarized in the attack. As is the idea that anybody else who points out the grand canyon of a hole that Wegman et al have dug for themselves with their pathetically inept analysis is somehow legally at risk for calling Wegman et al on their academic failings, of which dishonesty is only a part.

Robert Murphy, plagiarism is an insult among polite gentleman, witness tampering is a federal crime. Both need to be investigated. The political wind is not blowing in your favor.

SSWR p.34 mentions 18 USC Â§ 1512.(b), which by odd coincidence, I bookmarked long ago.

The part that might sometime become relevant (unlike that cited) would be a later one:

"1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or"

IF it eventually happens that the DoJ gets into the 18USC1001 area, then it is possible that one of the file deletions that happened the week of August 16 might be seen as attempted destruction of evidence. Specifically, that's Said(2007), the talk that mentioned Peter Spencer and Jerry Coffey and other useful info. That"s discussed in SSWR A.11, but at that time the chronological coincidence of Wegman's Facebook post was not yet known. I.e., see SIGMU2, p.9.

And yes, I have talked to a (very savvy Washington-experienced) lawyer who said of the 18USC1001 that it was not fantasy, and they are not the only lawyer with that opinion. That doesn't mean it will happen, just that it's not crazy under the US law. Of course, removing a key evidence file is pretty silly, given how long it had been known about.

One more time: 35 of 91 pages of the Wegman Report contain plagiarized text, of which only a few are from Bradley(1999), and only a few more (social networks) were reported by Bradley to GMU in May 2010.

Many people have not yet twigged to the BAD consequences of acknowledging 3 Federal agencies in the derivative Said, et al (2008). My academic friends shudder at the idea of messing with ORI.

Bradley(1999) is not MBH98 or MBH99. MBH98 is one reference in 80+ pages of references. MBH99 isn't there.

mpaul:
"Robert Murphy, plagiarism is an insult among polite gentleman, witness tampering is a federal crime. Both need to be investigated. The political wind is not blowing in your favor."

Witness tampering? WTF?? Are you stoned? Nobody has tampered with a witness or anybody's testimony, nor has anybody even hinted at doing so. Wegman and friends testified under no restrictions or "tampering" of any kind, and in doing so they plagiarized the work of others because they were woefully incompetent when it came to climate science (and social network analysis as well, which they also plagiarized and royally screwed up).

The calls for having the Wegman Report removed from official testimony is a logical position considering the incredibly weak and sloppy scholarship involved. The report is garbage. In your twisted mind, calling for the removal of scientific testimony that is not only plagiarized from the people the testimony is attacking but is utter crap when it comes to the actual analysis is "witness tampering". That's nuts.

And no, plagiarism is not "an insult among polite gentleman", it's grounds for termination at GMU.

"The political wind is not blowing in your favor."

There's something blowing, and its coming straight out your backside. It certainly doesn't smell like a coherent argument.

Robert, mayby mpaul thinks you can say whatever you like to congressional committee and then any criticism of witness's claims are tampering with the witness?

Bizarro! By that dumb logic then McIntyre (and even Wegman) is witness tampering by criticising Mann.

Here is the [real intimidation](http://www.desmogblog.com/tags/michael-mann).

Breaking News!

Sad to report, there is no news ... still.

GMU fails to conduct Wegman investigation in a timely manner

tlambert — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 07:06:41 +0000

GMU fails to conduct Wegman investigation in a timely manner

Deep Climate details how GMU has failed to follow its own policies in its investigation of Wegman:

Perhaps, then, it's time to take the obvious next step - a formal complaint to the Office of Research Integrity. And not against Wegman and Said, but against George Mason University itself. In fact, it is high time to recognize the obvious: GMU is simply not up to administering their own misconduct policy. Isn't it time to hand the job over to an organization that can?

tlambert Thu, 12/23/2010 - 02:06

Tags

Wegman

Edward Wegman

George Mason University

Isn't it time to hand the job over to an organization that can?

Yes.

WHITEWASH!!!!!

WHITEWASH!!!!!

I wish that I had said that.

Remember Mason in Your Year-end Giving

Your support helps us to offer scholarships, conduct groundbreaking research, recruit the best professors, and more.

Climategate: A Fake Scandal That Refuses to Come Alive.

Wegmangate: A Real Scandal That Refuses to Go Dead.

"Perhaps, then, it's time to take the obvious next step - a formal complaint to the Office of Research Integrity."

Yes please!

I find the outside meddling in University business problematic when the deniers do it. I find this call equally problematic.

#7 Winnebago -- I challenge you to find equivalence between the two. Please lay out your case. For the life of me, I can't even see how you call this "meddling". So far, the "University business" has been duly ignored by GMU, and we're just witnesses to them dragging their feet with respect to complainant Ray Bradley's request that they assess whether or not a formal investigation is warranted. Perhaps I haven't been reading this right? Convince me.

It doesn't seem that strange to me that a university investigation would be slower than even their own timelines. I'm not saying it's okay or excusable, but these things get pushed back all the time. That doesn't mean that they won't bring the hammer down on Wegman.

It seems a lot of the issues deal with Said, who isn't at GMU (right?) and might not be cooperating in the investigation.

So, this isn't good, but I still expect GMU to do the right thing here. Eventually.

Boris, I think you're a bit too trusting. Read DeepClimate's and John Mashey's comparison of timelines for investigations that were conducted by Penn (re: Mann) and Rice U. (re: Wegman's coauthor Scott). When you follow the history of GMU's inexcusable delays and failure to follow their own policies from the very beginning of their unquiry and unvestigation of the allegations against Wegman, Said, et al., it's amazing that they are able to retain their accreditation (which is up for review in Spring 2011). GMU's own alumni and faculty should be calling for a thorough and prompt investigation to salvage their own reputations from GMU's tainted behavior.

I doubt GMU would have delayed their inquiry this much unless they felt they could do so with impunity. The VA Attorney General (Cuccinelli) is a GMU alumnus and he's been trying to get a witch trial moving against U.Va. and Michael Mann, using the Wegman report as his primary piece of evidence. The new Republican majority in Congress has promised to hold high-profile McCarthyite hearings into the science of anthropogenic climate change. There are a lot of very powerful and well-connected interests who would like to sweep Wegman et al.'s misconduct under the rug.

Boris: I'm sure you wouldn't have uttered your opinion without carefully assessing the timeline I put together, the letters and the emails? Right?

So, please go through that discussion, like to explain why the first meeting of the inquiry committee took 5 months to happen, and why the story kept changing, and why wegman seemed surprised in August.

http://mercatus.org/
Associated with GMU
and Joe Romm has a little to say about them
http://climateprogress.org/2010/12/23/energy-and-global-warming-news-fo…

Interesting.

The university committee by now, must wish that they had acted very quickly, before additional evidence of academic incompetence and malfeasance was brought to light. As someone who sometimes serves on university committees, it's easy to immagine how uncomfortable and, potentially, at least, divided the relevant committee finds itself.

BillD:
Maybe you can give us some more insight.

GMU had not yet given Bradley an *inquiry* report, not an investigation report.
All an inquiry is supposed to do in thus case us look at a few pages of text with obvious near verbatim plagiarism and say whether it us worth investigating or not.

I am a loss to explain how there can be much argument, of course unless some has strong orders not to complete that report. Any other ideas?

As a non-academic, I suppose it would be naive to assume that all the apparent foot dragging until the next Republican Congress kicks off in January will have little connection to the credibility of GMU's investigation once it does eventually conclude.

John,

I haven't read your timeline. This post was about DC's post, so I did read that.

But I have witnessed committees being formed, missing deadlines and generally failing to follow their own institution's guidelines. Maybe I'm jaded, but it's pretty common in my experience. It certainly shouldn't happen in a case of this much import, but ti wouldn't surprise me if professor's weren't too keen on gathering info and releasing a report that would make their institution look bad.

I'm not trying to excuse GMU's handling of this. It's terrible and nearly as embarrassing as Wegman and Said's academic malpractice in the first place.

So I fully accept that GMU could be attempting to cover for Wegman, but it isn't obviously so at this point.

Sigh, Boris wants to offer opinions, is unconvinced by DC's post, which references my detailed report, but doesnt want to read the report.

Read the report, including the entire sequence if emails and letters. Argue that the exhibited behavior is well within normal parameters, giving examples.
I am keen to get real academic calibration.
Vague comments from people who won't read the report don't help much.

Maybe after basketball season they'll have more time to focus.

http://gomason.cstv.com/ot/mascot-08-naming-contest.html

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/gmu-needs-to-get-rid-its-mascot-the-pa…

I don't understand Hank Roberts, are you saying GMU getting rid of Gunston is prctice for dumping Wegman?

DesmogBLog has an update, the attached PDF V2.0.
Deep Climate will have a post soon on it.

+ It adds a new section 3, which has emails from Donald Rapp:
- threatening {Ray Bradley, Elsevier, Deep Climate, and me}
- blaming Ray for everything
- castigating the USC administration
- introducing new terms, like climategate-ists, along with "Taliban of the Internet"
- forwarded to {Ray, Elsevier} or Dan Vergano
- and best of all, forwarding several emails of Wegman from September 2010. Wegman is very supportive of Rapp.

And more.

>DesmogBLog has an update

[...here](http://www.desmogblog.com/gmu-paralyzed-plagiarism-investigation).

Oops, thanks. One click off.

For fun, here's a sample from SIGMU2.

Donald Rapp often sent or forwarded interesting emails.

p.11, Rapp wrote to USA Today's Dan Vergano, forwarded email including Wegman's, told Vergano:
âYou can do anything you want with this. Spread it over the Internet if you please." I aim to please...

Wegman (a senior Professor at George Mason University):

âThe web blog deepclimate.org is, in my opinion, a totally unsavory operation. They have developed conspiracy theories and have consistently made charges of plagiarism not only against Dr. Rapp, but against me and my colleagues in our report to Congress. They have never spoken with me and have jumped to wild conclusions that have nothing to do with reality. Interestingly enough, they have posted copyrighted material from my website on theirs without acknowledgement. What is even worse is that they hide behind anonymity. It is my opinion that Dr. Rapp has not plagiarized anything and I hold him harmless. This web blog seems to have been developed in retaliation for the enquiries associated with the climategate email releases and the obvious misconduct made clear by those email releases.â

People may not have been aware, that DC started Deep Climate in late 2008 as retaliation for the 2009 climate gate.

The truly weird thing is that Rapp, Joseph Kunc (Willie Soon's PhD supervisor, wanted to rehire Rapp), and Wegman were all sure that the complaint against Rapp was meritless ... but none of them had actually seen the complaint, as Rapp accidentally revealed later on.

But there is much more... although some of it might not make it through spam filters.

John, I'm itching with curiosity!

But there is much more... although some of it might not make it through spam filters.

You could always type the contentious terms in *sdrawkcab*!

re: #24
Well, it's all in the PDF @ SIGMU2, and DC has further discussion, although mostly on the Wegman comments, not so much on the Rapp comments. See SIGMU2, section 3.

USA Today: Wegman report was plagiarized

tlambert — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 18:31:23 +0000

USA Today: Wegman report was plagiarized

Dan Vergano, USA Today reports:

The plagiarism experts queried by USA TODAY disagree [with Wegman's denial] after viewing the Wegman report:

â¢ "Actually fairly shocking," says Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg by e-mail. "My own preliminary appraisal would be 'guilty as charged.' "

â¢"If I was a peer reviewer of this report and I was to observe the paragraphs they have taken, then I would be obligated to report them," says Garner of Virginia Tech, who heads a copying detection effort. "There are a lot of things in the report that rise to the level of inappropriate."

â¢"The plagiarism is fairly obvious when you compare things side-by-side," says Ohio State's Robert Coleman, who chairs OSU's misconduct committee.

More at Climate Progress.

tlambert Sun, 11/21/2010 - 13:31

Tags

Wegman

Edward Wegman

Cue the complaints of bias and witchhunts in 5... 4... 3...

George Mason is a public university, so no doubt Cuccinelli will now stop harassing Mann and instead launch a fraud investigation into Wegman's machinations. /sarcasm

The charges of plagiarism don't negate one of the basic premises of the report â that climate scientists used poor statistics in two widely noted papers.

Yawn. Anyone willing to bet that the above sentence from the Vergano article will be repeated ad nauseum by the usual denier crowd?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

[Former Sceptic](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/11/usa_today_reports_that_wegman.p…).

With repect to his comment:

The charges of plagiarism don't negate one of the basic premises of the report â that climate scientists used poor statistics in two widely noted papers.

Vergano is incorrect.

Wegman et al used/pliagarised incorrect and/or dubious statistical methodology as well, as [Deep Climate has shown](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/11/wegman_scandal_where_was_the_d…). This does negate the basic premise of the report, irrespective of the storm in a tea-cup about short-centred principal component analysis which, in the wash-up, had negligible impact on the outcome of the early analyses.

I've tried to say as much on the USA Today site, but for some reason they won't let me register.

Vergano I'd very good and absolutely correct that plagiarism dies not invalidate any results in the WR. How could it? There are no meaningful results there to invalidate, and even those that try to seem like it have bern demolished before, but deep climate right now is erasing the rest.

Bernard J.: I think they were just playing "the both sides" a little bit. They also mentioned the conclusion of the NRC report, so at least they are not promoting the broken stick meme.

Good article, kudos John Mashey.

Elf Eye: Wegman has been very adamant in describing the work on the report as being done on his own nickel...

All:

1) Make sure you *really* thank DC, without whom none of this would have happened. DC made the key breakthroughs.
I had certainly stopped looking at the WR years ago.

2) I don't think this is a playing both sides thing at all. This is simply being accurate, and Vergano tries to be very accurate. If people go back and check SSWR, you will find a long list of issues, a lot more problems (like errors, changes of meaning, and biases; some of this is real distortion, maybe falsification/fabrication). I alluded to the fact that plagiarism is more obvious, so didn't bother with the FF.
Google: ffp falsification

Vergano *has* read SSWR (and a lot of other stuff that is not yet public), and has talked to an amazing number of people. Plagiarism may destroy someone's credibility, but by itself does not invalidate conclusions.

Note: when going to print, space is limited. There is way too much stuff for one article...

John Mashey: You are right that plagiarism itself does not invalidate the conclusions. It's just that the way the article puts it can make it seem as if plagiarism is the only problem with the report, and everything else is fine.

It's just a minor issue, though. Overall, the article is great.

At least Vergano quotes one of the investigators:

"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.

I suppose we will now see Fox News and the WSJ take up ths story, right? Equal criticism for climate scientists AND their critics, right?

Rocco: your heart is in the right place... trust me on this one ... I am actually quite happy to have that statement in there ... and at a future time I may be able to explain why.

However, bad statistics doesn't make the result wrong.

Heck, you can guess the right answer and be right, and the "stats" in that case are non-existent!

The central point of Wegman's report is that the PCA done by MBH got the wrong answer and TRIES to prove this with the explanation that the stats were wrong.

But the stats weren't wrong. They could have used more a rigorous test, but then again, you can get fairly close to a student-t distribution result using plain old gaussian distribution. The answer is right enough except in some specific cases.

And Wegman didn't manage to show that the analysis done was in one of those special cases where the answer gotten was wrong.

In short, Wegman tried to show that MBH "did a Nahle" with their maths.

And did a Nahle in doing so.

That is the irony. In making all these pronouncements about the incompetence of climate scientists in the area of statistics and rigor in procedures, they go and break all their own rules in the process. To top it off, the 'auditor' find nothing amiss.

Jones and his colleagues knew years ago what they were up against, lying hypocrites who would stop at nothing to smear them and science in general.

To add more irony to the pot, other institutions such as Scientific American have found out over time just how they work. WUWT made them look like idiots with their poll on the issue of Judith Curry.

This is going to be a long bumpy ride for Wegman and Said. There is lots more to come.

> Yawn. Anyone willing to bet that the above sentence from the Vergano article will be repeated ad nauseum by the usual denier crowd?

Expect the next denialist headline (if any) to read "Warmist journalist at USA Today vindicates Wegman findings".

Thanks, DC, John Mashey, and Dan Vergano.

@ #1

Ask and you shall receive:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/22/wegman-whiners-this-posts-for-you

[Snide](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/11/usa_today_reports_that_wegman.p…).

Mann didn't 'break rules' with his short-centring methodology; he simply didn't select the best alternative. This is the sort of thing that is rapidly corrected in the subsequent replication phase after publication. M&M, and Wegman et al after them, engaged in a rather more serious error of statistics, not least of which was some egregious cherry-picking that exaggerated their 'case'.

If you're not conversant with statistical process, it can be difficult to explain the difference. For undergraduates I might consider using the example of the choice of post hoc tests for an ANOVA, in order to explain Mann's short center issue, and compare the M&M cherry picking to doing a hundred t-tests and choosing the 'best' dozen, rather than doing a single ANOVA.

Of course, it's never as simple or as directly comparable as that, but the fact remains that there is a difference between what Mann did, and what M&MJ&W did.

Via [Rabbet Run](http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/11/ed-wegman-sends-dispatch.html), [Wegman responds](http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-22-plagia…).

Via Rabbet Run, Wegman responds.

That's pretty close to an admission - they didn't intend it, they were rushed,...

Wegman digs himself deeper yet. Note that the Sept 2007 Said talk is the one that suddenly disappeared in August 2010, just after Wegman (finally, apparently) was told of plagiarism charge.

Cripes, even the Daily Mail is covering the story:

[Influential climate change report 'was copied from Wikipedia'](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1332347/Influential-climate-cha…)

Good to see your and DC's hard work getting major traction, John.

We'll know it's really getting to the point when the still careful 'plagiarism' allegation becomes 'plagiarism and fabrication'.

Calling George Monbiot...hellooo George!

Maple Leaf,

Don't blame George, he just reacted early and has already drawn attention to his error of judgement.

However to John Mashey,

R u going to need police protection?

I think Hansen has mentioned that he has had police accompany him to public meetings and now that you have blown apart one of the holy scriptures underpinning denialism then you will receive a denialist jihad, if you haven't already. Perhaps you should contact Salmon Rushdie for advice on how to avoid hit men.

re: 26, not yet.
Friends often ask if I've seen any dead rats yet. :-)

Meanwhile, keep an eye on USA Today.

Finally, I do report one more delicious time, which I learned while researching the WR, but was even more applicable to the Hockey Stick Illusion, by HWQDAJ (He Who Quotes Dog Astrology Journal). See The Journal of Scientific Exploration is a Dog, posted for me by the Rabett.

The most influential reference reference (but not actually cited) in the WR was McIntyre and McKitrick(2005), a talk given for GMI & CEI. SSWR calls this MM05x, and it's reference #79 on p.168.
It has its own section W.8.9, because it is so important.
The red-coded Memes are all found there.
It was preceded by a few weeks by McK05, McKitrick's talk in some far-off land, i.e., Australia.

Both cite Davd Deming's quote as a key idea that the climate guys were trying to make the beloved MWP disappear.
Deming's quote comes from JSE, although by the time it's in MM05x, somehow the cite has changed from JSE to another journal, Science. (I.e., falsification of reference. Hmm, McI isn't anybody, but McKitrick is at Guelph....) Anyway, learn about JSE, provider of key quote for the article on which the WR most depended.

Google: ffp falsificaiton

['oogled](http://www.google.com/search?q=ffp+falsification)

The charges of plagiarism don't negate one of the basic premises of the report â that climate scientists used poor statistics in two widely noted papers.

Charges of plagiarism against an author of a flat Earth article wouldn't negate the basic premise of the article that the Earth is flat, either, but such an observation is stunningly irrelevant.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/22/wegman-whiners-this-posts-for-you

I'm sure his next post will point out that, even if you believe that "climate-gate" shows unprofessional behavior, that doesn't negate the science.

Wegman scandal: where was the due diligence?

tlambert — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 06:37:45 +0000

Wegman scandal: where was the due diligence?

Deep Climate continues his examination of the Wegman report. It would seem that Wegman's "reproduction" of McIntyre's results amounted to nothing more than running McIntyre's code without understanding what it did. And while Mann's "short centring" method does tend to produce a hockey-stick McIntyre greatly exaggerated the extent that it does so.

tlambert Tue, 11/16/2010 - 01:37

Tags

Wegman

Edward Wegman

Steve McIntyre

Without bona fide climate scientists advising and educating the statisticians, which would quite probably be what the denialsphere would regard as preferential (climate scientists will corrupt the statisticians somehow), we're doomed.

The Wegman Report must be the most highly regarded statistical analysis amongst contrarians, sceptics and deniers alike, but all it's turning out to be is an exercise in mass confirmation bias.

No, it's much worse than that.

Once the WR is widely and officially recognised for what it was, M&M's entire intellectual underpinning (such as it is)of the denialist machine goes down with it.

Not that that will stop it completely, but it's a great start.

Looks like the Wegman and M&M scandal is beginning to look like the Bre-X scandal. Not surprising since both were orchestrated by mining executives. Cherry picking is just as dishonest as salting mining samples.

On a related note, a random blog commenter was recently touting a recent paper (2010) by McIntyre and McKitrick, so I asked him what, in his understanding, their method actually was. I still haven't got a reply.

Frank, keep in mind that said commenter also refers to Pat Michaels as his "hero".

I thought the thread between you, Timothy Chase, and the CA guys was going to go on forever...don't they have day jobs?...but as soon as Tim argued that McIntyre "stokes paranoid delusions on the part of rightwing fanatics that â judging from the death threats and at least one dead rat that someone found on their doorstep just after the doorbell had been rung one night â may end up getting someone killed some day", they disappeared. It was really weird.

1) Read SSWR, pp.134-135:

"Given all this, I had resolved to avoid the real statistics analysis in the WR, but eventually realized there was none."

"Using McIntyreâs code and help, they reproduced MM05b-like charts. Re-running code does not prove that its assumptions are correct."

"The WR contains no actual new statistical analysis of MBH itself, just reworks of MM material."

Of course, I talk to DC occasionally.

2) But do not be deterred by the stats discussion in DC's opus.

To me, the real zinger is showing that WR Figure 4.4

a) Was produced by McIntyre code whose output hadn't been published.

b) Was effectively presented as a sample of 12 from 10,000, that showed that MBH "mined" random data for positive hockey sticks.

c) Whereas it was a sample of 12 from the 100 (1%) sorted as having the highest positive hockey sticks... MM screwed up various places in the sequence of steps to generate that, but this takes cherry-picking to a new height. Does anyone have any idea how serious statisticians might view this?

d) In the US, this would be like declaring the average male height to be 6'6", without bothering to mention the sample was taken on an NBA basketball court.

Does anyone know where GMU is at with their investigation of Wegman et al?

Now we are all eagerly awaiting Judith Curry's reaction.

Kate:

Well, whatever the cause of his leaving, it's clear that his 'arguments' were getting less and less defensible.

Re 8 Jeremy c

A) VP Research takes quick look at complaint. If substance:
B) inquiry committe named, only job is to decide if an actual investigation warranted, writes yes/no report.
C) If warranted, investigation committee formed, investigates in detail.

I've surveyed policies at 6 schools, all of which require report back to complainant at end of B) and C). At GMU, each committe recommends whether or not to give report to complainant.

In Bradley's case B) should consist of locking at DC's side-by-side comparisons (of Bradley text and a month later, the SNA text) and reporting whether or not they look enough like plagiarism to investigate. Personally , I would estimate this to take 5 minutes, but what do I know?

Sadly, wheels turn slowly at GMU.
It took them 5 months to have the first meeting of inquiry committee.
It has been almost 3 more months, and at least as of 11/15/10, no *inquiry* report had been given to Bradley. Again, their process seems to allow them to say nothing, ever....

Sorry this is kinda off topic (but on metatopic);

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnh1m3jgjRY

but I think it's almost as good as the "What if we make the world a better place for nothing" cartoon.

Yes, McIntyre's exaggeration of the effect of Mann's algorithm is one clue that he is not some honest participant in the debate (as if you needed more clues than his obsession with himself and certain climate scientists who don't take him seriously)

Another example of McIntyre's sketchy relationship with the truth comes from his recent reply in PNAS to Mann 2008. McIntyre claimed that:

Their CPS reconstruction screens proxies by calibration-period correlation, a procedure known to generate âhockey sticksâ from red noise (4)

Ref. 4 is:

Stockwell D. (2006) Reconstruction of past climate using series with red noise. AIG News 8:314.

(Ignore for the moment that this ref is not peer reviewed and was published in a newsletter)

If you take a look at figure 1 you will notice that what McIntyre calls a "hockey stick" is a record with an MWP almost as warm as late 20th century warming. The only similarity to the MBH graph is the twentieth century warmth--and that is already known.

McIntyre loves playing language games. Watch the pea under the thimble, as he loves to say. :)

Boris,

So Stockwell generated a set of random stochastic series with red noise, smoothed with a 50-years filter, selected those that had a distinct upwards blade (i.e. significant correlation with temperatures from 1885-1990) and found that they tend to look like hockeysticks.

FYI: Wegman plagiarism story going mainstream - USA Today, today.