Re: ping Jörg: on what 'raw data' is
Eeyore
> Hi. I just came across (for entirely different reasons) two articles
> by someone I very slightly know, Bob Grumbine. His blogs neatly
> address the discussion you and I had regarding raw data.
>
> This one nicely discusses _some_ of the problems:
> http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/11/data-set-reproducibility.html
>
> As does this one:
> http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/11/where-is-surface.html
>
> On both links, a poster, EliRabett, makes some interesting comments.
>
> On the first, EliRabett writes, "Any auditor who demanded all of the
> data would be fired summarily.
It is the job of an Auditor to demand ALL the data. It's his JOB !
Without it he can't do his job responsibly or accurately.
Steve McIntyre was in no different a position as a peer reviewer of
Michael Mann's work. Yet he was deliberately refused the data even after
taking it to a high level. THAT is how he smelt a RAT !
A sewer rat amongst many sewer rats it now becomes obvious.
Graham
Eeyore
> Jon Kirwan wrote:
>> Hi. I just came across (for entirely different reasons) two articles
>> by someone I very slightly know, Bob Grumbine. His blogs neatly
>> address the discussion you and I had regarding raw data.
>>
>> This one nicely discusses _some_ of the problems:
>> http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/11/data-set-reproducibility.html
>>
>>
>> As does this one:
>> http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/11/where-is-surface.html
>>
>> On both links, a poster, EliRabett, makes some interesting comments.
>>
>> On the first, EliRabett writes, "Any auditor who demanded all of the
>> certainty that the records are in good shape without tying up the firm
>> forever. McIntyre's 'audit' demands all of the records at the start.
>> The purpose is to burden the scientist. He then yells and screams
>> about every little dot and jot almost 99% of which is due to his not
>> understanding what was being done. At the end maybe one or two points
>> remain. October's Briffa Fest is an excellent example."
>>
>> On the second, EliRabett writes, "What the surface of a liquid is, is
>> by itself an interesting question. With the exception of liquids that
>> have vanishing vapor pressure such as gallium and mercury (at room
>> temperature), it is hard to say, as the molecules in the vapor can
>> interact with the molecules in the bulk over several atomic distances.
>> Ron Shen did a lot of early work on this with a very imaginative
>> technique. Since the molecules on the surface are in an anisotropic
>> environment, only they can participate in non-linear sum frequency
>> generation." And he then goes on to add an interesting comment from a
>> paper that I won't quote here. But if you don't see the relevance of
>> EliRabett's comment to the blog written by Bob, then you missed
>> understanding some of the difficulties that face instrumentation
>> designers and those scientists who must then also interpret their raw
>> data.
>>
>> Regardless of your view, at the very least I hope you find these two
>> blogs interesting to read.
>>
>
> They are interesting. However, I don't think Eli has ever witnessed the
> audit of a business. I have, many times. The auditors used me at times
> to translate stuff for them because I spoke Dutch and they didn't on
> days when the South African auditor was not there. I was amazed how fast
> and how complete they crunched through tons of data.
>
> Furthermore, do we know McIntyre demanded _all_ the data at once? Many
> other sources say very different things. Just one example:
>
> http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/08/raw-temperature-data-no-longer-available/
>
>
> Quote: "... Steve McIntyre was denied access to specific data files at
> the Climate Research Unit ...". Specific does not mean all.
>
> Secondly, the assertion that they do that to "burden the scientist" is
> not a proper fact statement, it is a clear case of judgement and the
> writer had better back that up. I don't see where he did. That lessens
> my interest in a certain piece of writing rather dramatically because in
> my eyes it makes it lose credibility, whether it's an answer to a blog
> or whatever.
The story Steve McIntyre was finally told was that the raw data belonged
to the intended publisher of Mann's report and was therefore
confidential under copyright legislation !!! ( source Steve McIntyre )
In other words, a proper peer review was made impossible.
Graham
Eeyore
<big snip>
> Finally, on auditing, an auditor needs access to ANY data he desires,
> and it is a huge red flag if some is not available. Now, a business
> auditor doesn't review every single data point, but does review a very
> large and carefully sampled set of them. When there are parts not
> available, it becomes pretty much impossible to verify anything.
ALL too true. I've known a few auditors and they have pretty sharp eyes
for the 'out of place'.
Graham
jmfbahciv
> Joerg wrote:
<snip> thread drift
>> Secondly, the assertion that they do that to "burden the scientist" is
>> not a proper fact statement, it is a clear case of judgement and the
>> writer had better back that up. I don't see where he did. That lessens
>> my interest in a certain piece of writing rather dramatically because
>> in my eyes it makes it lose credibility, whether it's an answer to a
>> blog or whatever.
>
> The story Steve McIntyre was finally told was that the raw data belonged
> to the intended publisher of Mann's report and was therefore
> confidential under copyright legislation !!! ( source Steve McIntyre )
>
> In other words, a proper peer review was made impossible.
>
That has deeper implications for data that is owned by businesses
who are used as outsources for the work. I've been worrying about this
for a long time.
/BAH
JosephKK
Hmmph. I had been led to believe that work paid for by public monies was by
definition public domain. WestLaw last a big lawsuit over that.
John Larkin
Apparently research paid for with public funds actually belongs to a
few highly profitable publishers like Elsevier, Springer, Wiley. Their
abstracts are deliberately pitched such as to be vague enough that you
have to buy a $25 paper just to find out that it's not useful.
I have to resort to subterfuges (like fudging on student IDs) to get
at this stuff.
John
Bill Sloman
<rabbitsfriendsandrelati...@removethishotmail.com> wrote:
> Jon Kirwan wrote:
> > Hi. I just came across (for entirely different reasons) two articles
> > by someone I very slightly know, Bob Grumbine. His blogs neatly
> > address the discussion you and I had regarding raw data.
>
> > This one nicely discusses _some_ of the problems:
>
> > As does this one:
> >http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/2009/11/where-is-surface.html
>
> > On both links, a poster, EliRabett, makes some interesting comments.
>
> > On the first, EliRabett writes, "Any auditor who demanded all of the
> > data would be fired summarily.
>
> It is the job of an Auditor to demand ALL the data. It's his JOB !
> Without it he can't do his job responsibly or accurately.
>
> Steve McIntyre was in no different a position as a peer reviewer of
> Michael Mann's work.
A peer review isn't an audit. A peer reviewer is asked whether a paper
is a useful contribution to the literature. Traditionally, they were
anonymous, and have absolutely no responsibility beyond giving an
opinion.
In practice, since they aren't paid for the work, they confine
themselves to looking at the paper. If the editor that selected them
is any good at their job, they will know the relevant literature in
some detail, and they can - and often do - point out that some results
are unexpected and can be explained in ways that the author hasn't
discussed, and suggest additonal experiemnts or investaigations that
can clarify matters.
Asking for access to the orginal data is unusual, and Steve
McIntyre's behaviour was downright strange.
Loooking at his subsequent history, as a bloodhound looking for
possible holes in evidence about climate change, he would seem to be
part of the denial industry, intently searching for any suggestion -
no matter how far-fetched - that might be construed as damaging the
case for anthropogenic global warming. He desribes himself as semi-
retired and claims to have spent some $5000 of his own money on his
quixotic crusade. He may be being less than candid, granting his links
to at least one oil and gas extraction company.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Steve_McIntyre
> Yet he was deliberately refused the data even after
> taking it to a high level. THAT is how he smelt a RAT !
Most climate scientists see him as a vexatious nuisance, trying to
confirm some imagined conspiracy theory.
> A sewer rat amongst many sewer rats it now becomes obvious.
Only to gullible suckers for far-fetched conspiracy theories, of whom
Graham is a particularly depressing example.
--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Bill Sloman
This is more or less true - when a scientific paper is published in a
recognised journal, the authors have to sign over the copyright to the
journal, who can then charge fro access. Elsevier and Springer do very
well out of it.
represents a mechanism recently devised to open up the scientific
literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Library_of_Science
PLoS Biology is now the highest-impact journal in biology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLoS_Biology
Some of the journals published by scientific socieities have made
their content freely available, usually some time after publication.
The IEEE isn't one of them.
The American Institute of Physics will effectively sell free access to
authors for the same sort of money that they would pay to publish in
PLoS journals
http://journals.aip.org/au_select.html
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
John Larkin
<bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
>> Apparently research paid for with public funds actually belongs to a
>> few highly profitable publishers like Elsevier, Springer, Wiley. Their
>> abstracts are deliberately pitched such as to be vague enough that you
>> have to buy a $25 paper just to find out that it's not useful.
>>
>> I have to resort to subterfuges (like fudging on student IDs) to get
>> at this stuff.
>
>This is more or less true - when a scientific paper is published in a
>recognised journal, the authors have to sign over the copyright to the
>journal, who can then charge fro access. Elsevier and Springer do very
>well out of it.
>
>http://www.plos.org/
>
>represents a mechanism recently devised to open up the scientific
>literature.
Cool. Too bad it's all wet stuff.
has more physics.
John
Bill Sloman
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:12:48 -0800 (PST),Bill Sloman
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv
I'd heard about it and seen references to it in Physics Today. It is a
bit surprising that the model hasn't been taken up outside phsyics and
mathematics. Maybe the physicists have just had more of a head start -
the World-Wide Web was invented at CERN by a physicist, for
physicists, and the rest of us have been behind the game ever since.
--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Don Klipstein
Bill Sloman wrote:
But if our tax dollars paid for it, is it not already paid for?
- Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
jmfbahciv
Bit babysitting is expensive, especially if the goal is to
ensure that the bits don't change and are the same as they
were yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, 5 years ago, a decade
ago, and a century ago.
/BAH
/BAH
John Larkin
Google does it for free. And publicly-funded research could easily be
burned to DVDs that could be ordered at the cost of production.
John
JosephKK
I sincerely hope that they get clobbered like WestLaw did.
JosephKK
$25, and up, for 2000 words, charts and graphs omitted, expensive??
Maybe in the days of hand calligraphy. Standard photocopies are less
than $0.05 per page. BTW prove that the author gets any of the price.
JosephKK
Which is mostly labor.
jmfbahciv
/BAH
jmfbahciv
That's only the price you see. You don't see the costs involved
ensuring that the original remains the same.
/BAH
Bill Sloman
> On Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:52:24 -0500, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> wrote:
> >Don Klipstein wrote:
> >>Bill Slomanwrote:
They don't. Peer-reviewed journals don't pay royalities to the authors
of scientific articles.
--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
John Larkin
Most journals charge the authors a "page fee". They get everybody
coming and going.
John
Bill Sloman
Not everybody. I've never paid one.
--
Bill Sloman
JosephKK
>JosephKK wrote:
>> On Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:52:24 -0500, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> wrote:
>>
>>> Don Klipstein wrote:
<snip>
>>>> - Don Klipstein (d...@misty.com)
>>> Bit babysitting is expensive, especially if the goal is to
>>> ensure that the bits don't change and are the same as they
>>> were yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, 5 years ago, a decade
>>> ago, and a century ago.
>>>
>>> /BAH
>>>
>>>
>>> /BAH
>>
>> $25, and up, for 2000 words, charts and graphs omitted, expensive??
>> Maybe in the days of hand calligraphy. Standard photocopies are less
>> than $0.05 per page. BTW prove that the author gets any of the price.
>
>
>That's only the price you see. You don't see the costs involved
>ensuring that the original remains the same.
>
>/BAH
Please detail these costs and how they come about.
JosephKK
>On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:10:37 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
><bill....@ieee.org> wrote:
>
>>On Dec 22, 7:43 am, "JosephKK"<quiettechb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:52:24 -0500, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv@aol> wrote:
>>> >Don Klipstein wrote:
>>> >> In <7d809a30-108d-4439-b68d-bddb1d5a5...@n35g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
>>> >>Bill Slomanwrote:
>>>
<snip>
>>>
>>> >Bit babysitting is expensive, especially if the goal is to
>>> >ensure that the bits don't change and are the same as they
>>> >were yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, 5 years ago, a decade
>>> >ago, and a century ago.
>>>
>>> >/BAH
>>>
>>> >/BAH
>>>
>>> $25, and up, for 2000 words, charts and graphs omitted, expensive??
>>> Maybe in the days of hand calligraphy. Standard photocopies are less
>>> than $0.05 per page. BTW prove that the author gets any of the price.
>>
>>They don't. Peer-reviewed journals don't pay royalities to the authors
>>of scientific articles.
>
>Most journals charge the authors a "page fee". They get everybody
>coming and going.
>
>John
Small wonder that they are very jealous of their setup.
jmfbahciv
It was part of my job for 10+ years. It required at least
an engineering level knowledge. It requires an adept at
managing computer systems and networks. It requires using
or writing tools which help to verify that 1. files haven't
disasppeared 2. files haven't changed 3. files haven't
appeared. It requires verification and validation of backups
of the system over long- and short-term saves. It requires
an ability to work with anybody who has questions about
the files. It involves documenting everything. (That means
that you need a writer, probably full time.) It requires
all the monies required to buy and keep all hardware working.
It requires all monies required to buy and keep all
software working (this is can get very expensive quickly).
and that doesn't include the physical placing of the
system nor the humans which have to tend it.
Detailing costs depends on the task involved. And, yes,
I know you were asking a trick question.
/BAH
JosephKK
Sure. And when was this? And how has the costs and methods
of maintaining filesystem integrity against changes in the
intervening years?
jmfbahciv
Nothing has changed except the probability of losing stuff
has increased a lot.
Just because computer gear is cheaper and can store lots
more in tinier devices does not mean that babysitting
all those bits has become cheaper. Since more bits
can be stored/sq. ft, the costs of ensuring that
bits don't disappear have increased. Specialists
have to do the work which file clerks used to do.
/BAH
/BAH
JosephKK
Mostly due to the degradation of the standards for file clerks.
>
>/BAH
>
>
>
>/BAH
I had hoped for a rather better answer from you.
Oh well.
jmfbahciv
No.
>
> I had hoped for a rather better answer from you.
> Oh well.
It's impossible to give an exact dollar figure of the
costs. If you have to keep track of a trillion bits,
the monies will be spent on different things than
if you have to keep track of a million bits.
/BAH
JosephKK
That much we can agree on.