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No, no. I agree with you that we need to hold them over the fire on this. But "purposely" is going too far. The best explanation, until proven otherwise, is th
by thras 17y ago
No, no. I agree with you that we need to hold them over the fire on this. But "purposely" is going too far.
The best explanation, until proven otherwise, is that somebody goofed.
- patio11 17y agoI tend to think good faith is a nice assumption to have, but it should be rebuttable. For example, if someone were to say "I'd rather destroy my data than let it fall to a Freedom of Infomation Act request", and then they were served with a Freedom of Information Act request, and then the data were to be suddenly missing...
- randallsquared 17y agoYeah, "goofed" by sending emails that talk about a plan to delete data rather than turn it over. ;)
- Anechoic 17y agoWere there emails that actually talked about deleting data? I've seen the emails that talked about deleting emails, but not raw data.
- patio11 17y ago1107454306.txt Professor Jones: Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [Patrick notes: he is referring to McIntyre and McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.
- Anechoic 17y agoHmm. The rest of that email reads: Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.
- Tichy 17y agoWhy did they not want to give away the data?
- protomyth 17y agoWell, if a group has your original source data, they can try to reproduce your results and/or challenge your process. I gather that the results are not likely to stand up to scrutiny.
- Tichy 17y agoThat seems kind of weird - if they don't show the data, they might as well not bother with collecting data at all. They could just make it all up. Why then, would they bother to mail it around, as they did in the quoted email? I suspect there are some other reasons.
- randallsquared 17y agoIt would be harder for the scientists to justify making it up to themselves. I assume none of them set out to do bad science when they started investigating climate.
- Tichy 17y agoSorry I don't think this makes sense. Personally I'll just wait to see how the story unfolds. This makes me glad again that there is some kind of legal system in most civilized countries. So many people seem to be ready to form a lynch mob at short notice.
- CamperBob 17y agoJudging from the sheer volume of replies you've made to every HN thread on the subject, one has to wonder if you have a dog in the fight.
- 17y ago
- Nelson69 17y agoNormally, I'd agree with you. There seems to be more incompetence than malice, in general. With technology as it is and science as it is and has been for hundreds of years, this seems like an extraordinary goof. I could see a goof being losing a block of data, but all of it? Why was destruction of this data even an option or consideration? How expensive and difficult is it to keep it? I suspect there are numerous other organizations that would store it if they were given copies of it. "Purposely" might be a bit extreme but it was more than a simple goof.
- protomyth 17y agoThe thought that someone couldn't walk down to the local store and buy an external hard drive(s) to store this data is unlikely. Heck, a general call out to the community to find storage would work (ask google, they would do it and index it). No, I believe malice is really the only explanation. Raw data allows reproducibility and intelligent debate.
- Joeboy 17y agoThe data in question dates from the 1980s. You couldn't "walk down to the local store and buy an external hard drive", and if you could a gigabyte of storage would cost you tens of thousands of pounds. Google didn't exist.