Saturday, March 29, 2014

Steve McIntyre in the library with the knife



Steve McIntyre, in his usual passive aggressive style been harassing the University of Western Australia to use "the coercive power of the state to force other people to give him, gratis, the fruits of their labor".  In this case, of course what McIntyre wants is the data used in LOG12, Lewandowsky, Oberauer and Gignac (2012) aka Recursive Fury which had been published by Frontiers in Psychology and recently retracted because of complaints which threatened legal action.  The recursive fury which had broken lose among those who felt themselves called out only recursed with the retraction, with new recurses.

However, our friends appear to have missed something.  Having been retracted, the paper is no long published in it's final form, but a work in progress, that has been made available as a pre-print.  It may be published in another publication,  perhaps with some more work, improved treatment of the data, even more data drawing on the recurse.  Thus, as a work in progress, not a published scientific paper, it is no longer subject to Freedom of Information requests.

UPDATE:  Eli got it wrong, it was another paper from Lew.  Steve still has the knife in the library. see the comments, and the UWA Vice Chancellor is still Faithful.

The University of Western Australia appears to have noticed tho, and sent a Dear Steve letter to dear Steve

Dear Mr McIntyre,

I refer to your series of emails to University officers including Professor Maybery and myself (which you have copied to other recipients including the Australian Research Council) in which you request access to Professor Lewandowsky’s data.

I am aware that you have made inflammatory statements on your weblog “Climate Audit” under the heading “Lewandowsky Ghost-wrote Conclusions of UWA Ethics Investigation into “Hoax”” including attacks on the character and professionalism of University staff. It is apparent that your antagonism towards Professor Lewandowsky’s research is so unbalanced that there is no useful purpose to be served in corresponding with you further. I regard your continued correspondence to be vexatious and there will be no further response to your requests for data.

Yours faithfully,
Professor Paul Johnson,
Vice-Chancellor
With no surprise to any, the letter has, well, not met with a great deal of understanding in some quarters.  Eli always enjoys April Fools jokes and has rebalanced his retirement portfolio to hold more popcorn futures.

UPDATE:  Paul Johnson is on a roll.  He writes to Barry Woods (found in the comments)
From: Paul Johnson
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2014 8:08 AM
To: Barry Woods
Cc: Murray Maybery ; Kimberley Heitman
Subject: request for access to data

Mr B. Woods

Dear Mr Woods,

I refer to your emails of the 11th and 25th March directed to Professor Maybery, which repeat a request you made by email dated the 5th September 2013 to Professor Lewandowsky (copied to numerous recipients) in which you request access to Professor Lewandowsky’s data for the purpose of submitting a comment to the Journal of Psychological Science.

It is not the University’s practice to accede to such requests.

Yours faithfully,
Professor Paul Johnson,
Vice-Chancellor

26 comments:

Magma said...

Johnson's reply will strike anyone who has dealt with university officials as amazingly blunt.

Good for him.

tonylearns said...

I know nothing about this,

but McIntyre's response seems reasonable to me.

I actually do not doubt that there are problems with either lewandowsky paper. I thought titling it with "fake moon landing" was a very silly thing to do, myself.

But I need no paper to know the degree of convoluted conspiracy ideation goes on in this world.
what fascinates me is the degree of conspiracy thinking with the amount of contending that it is NOT a conspiracy. People argue that scientists will do anything to promote ACC, that scores of scientists are involved in fraudulently changing data to support ACC. and that they do so in order to "keep the grant money coming in". but when confronted by this as being a conspiracy theorizing they deny they are saying that.

somewhat should rewrite Galbraith's book "The Climate Change of Innocent Fraud

MrPete said...

Uhh... the data being requested is not for the retracted paper.

I guess you accidentally supplied some April Fools fodder a few days early :-D

the revolution of not-yet said...

it's the same shit all around the world and in ganimedian and martian universe ties

inflammatory statements

means the same that flammatory some gigasec's away...

in plus flammatory should mean the reverse n'est pas

the revolution of not-yet said...

magma should be full of gas....
or fill with

thefordprefect said...

Mr Pete
The data requested by SM is full data with names an ip addresses so he can check veracity.

This presents a problem that SM Himself has complained about very vociferously. Such research has to be private according to EVERYBODIES rules!

So it is a lot 2 faced requesting such data.

It would have been nice to have told him on his web site but he seems to have banned me!!!

Anonymous said...

every bodies? is a body count

well the walking dead rule, yes

you don't like ,,,
xenos

is like xena but in greek

Devonshire Guy5:57 PM

You Guy's Should visit us, iIt's Like Venice, but without any gondolas or bridges.

and the virtual guy's and gay's

Britain love it or leave it
or live in it
and living in it feels like shit

Anonymous said...

Kernels sometimes get stuck to the palate
retracted one. Time for a "never mind" here.

Hardy Cross

Anonymous said...

SM wants data from the first study not the retracted one.

Hardy Cross

"Fixing post

chek said...

Why is SM so systematically incapable of doing his own research?
When did this "auditing" invention by unskilled, untrained, crank nonentities get to be valid?

Anonymous said...

Eli, I know you are inherently smart. Question is why are you so stupid at the same time? Ideology, perhaps?

Don Keiller said...

Trajectory sensitivity of the transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013GL059141/abstract
DOI: 10.1002/2013GL059141 Published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Shows a much lower TCR than the IPCC, irrespective of whatever "range" you chose to employ.
"We find the range of TCRE resulting from varying emission pathways to be 0.76 to 1.04 °C/TtC"

Real "Red Queen" stuff, Eli!

Sou said...

Mr Pete is correct. Steve's still harping on about the moon landing paper. The sort of information he is asking for could be sufficient, in some cases, to determine who wrote which response (the originating blog and date of response - could at a stretch be compared with comments on a website. And Steve does have a tendency to stretch).

I've added an addendum to my article on this which speaks a lot to Steve's mindset. He says that "the former employee of the University of Western Australia...purported to diagnose that I have psychological disorders" in the recursive fury paper. He's wrong of course, but it is telling that he thinks so. As you'll see if you read the Recursive Fury paper, it implies that Steve thinks that extraversion is a psychological disorder. Given his own personality traits, maybe that isn't so surprising.

Bryson said...

As I understand the situation, LOG12 is the paper that triggered the recursion, including the claims of 'false flags' and false claims of contacts with the blogs involve. The reaction to LOG12 gave rise to Recursive Fury. RF relies on blog posts-- public material, one might suppose, but Lewandowsky's critics seem to think his use of the material constitutes human subject research and needs very serious investigation by an ethics committee. The Vice-Chancellor's letter is a right treat.

Marco said...

As Sou notes, the information requested could allow identification of individual subjects. Now, what was one of the complaints about recursive fury again? Something about identifiable subjects being linked to certain comments?

Steve Bloom said...

Don Keiller, another denialist with a low range of reading comprehension.

Bernard J. said...

I completed the LOG12 survey, and I most certainly did not do so expecting that Steve McIntyre would have access to my data. I'm fairly sure that there was nothing in the terms of participation suggesting that my information could be given to science/climate change deniers.

Having said that, if McIntyre expects to have my data he can do so on the condition that he shares with me any and all of his data arising.

As an aside - and at the risk of starting a huge bun-fight - I am sure that I arrived at the survey via Skeptical Science...

Anonymous said...

Hi Steve, love you too.
Don Keiller (MA, PhD, Cantab)

Bernard J. said...

Why is it that the insecure ones always have to pull down their trousers to show the world how big it is, but forget that it's how you use it that matters most?

Anonymous said...

And McIntyre knows exactly *what* about psychological research to determine if a particular survey result is scammed?

This has been the problem with him all along. He doesn't understand the underlying science behind the data he is trying to analyse, so makes the same mistakes over and over: just because there is a dataset, doesn't mean it is a valid dataset. Like the time he seized on the polar Urals dataset that had TRW samples in it from the collars of trees instead of further up the trunk where they should have been taken.

And that whole fiasco with Marcott. Yes, there *theoretically* could be hidden temperature spikes due to the resolution of the proxies. But what would be the *physical* basis for those spikes? What could cause temps to rise by say 1 deg C over the course of a hundred years or two, and then dissipate just as quickly so that it was undetected by all the proxies? The answer is, of course, nothing. Nothing in nature could do that. Statistics without a physical basis underpinning it is just mathturbation.

In any case, The Auditor is the ultimate rent seeker. Get your own freakin' data like scientists do, and *publish*, or STFU! All he does is snipe from the sidelines and it is beyond getting tiresome.

Anonymous said...

These exercises by the 'squacktical' are always foolish. We need Tom Fuller here to tell McIntyre that it would be a violation of social science ethics, just as he argued that denialists should not be identified on the basis of their public statements, such as mass signings of WSJ letters.
As for not knowing about his analyses, that's a feature, not a bug. If McIntyre knew the implicit knowledge of a field, he'd just get the same answers as the researcher (minus a few examiner degrees of freedom, of course). This way, he gets enough different answers that he can always proclaim the scientists got it wrong. For example, on the first L paper (which he has the data for), survey data was factor analyzed. Any psychologist who doesn't this knows me that it means PCA, but not McI, so he got a different result, crowing loudly the scientists got it wrong. Not true, but useful for him. Cranberry you can do alone, science is something you have to do with others.
Stewart

Ian Forrester said...

Don Keiller, for someone claiming to have a background in the bio-sciences apparently cannot tell the difference between apples and oranges since he thinks that degrees C/GtC is the same as the temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 concentrations.

Ian Forrester said...

oops that should be degrees C/TtC

John Mashey said...

Some useful data on Don Keiler, who appeared above:

1) Principia Scientific International, i.e., base for the "slayers" who sponsored Murry Salby's tour last Fall.

2) Quick rush to judgment on the Salby affair @ Bishop Hill, whose owner's silly book relied on a dog astrology journal for its key theme.

'I guess Academic Freedom at Macquarie University is a concept that applies only to those who toe the party (in this case AGW) line?

A very sad state of affairs.
Jul 9, 2013 at 6:41 PM | Unregistered Commenter Don Keiller'

This comment was made hours before the working day started in Sydney, well before MQ could have responded.

Even more sadly, I found no apology to MQ, even after it was revealed that Salby had been debarred by NSF for long-time dishonesty, brought absurd court cases that kept getting dismissed. MQ described (to the extent they could) some pretty good reasons for dismissal, such as the credit card gimmickry (firing offense at any company I've ever worked for). Before he left Colorado, Salby had shafted his junior associate by trying to blame him ...but what he did to his grad student @ MQ was worse, although that never came up in the discussions. Most people familiar with universities or labor disputes were a rather more careful, even if they wanted Salby to be Galileo.

3) More @ DeSmogBlog.

I'm sad ... because I've spoken @ Cambridge, know quite a few Cantabrigians and despite the additional example of Lord Monckton, most do not go off into intense anti-science.
Sigh.

Anonymous said...

DK = DK.

Cymraeg llygoden

Anonymous said...

http://www.frontiersin.org/blog/Retraction_of_Recursive_Fury_A_Statement/812