Comments on: The Lewandowsky Ethics Switch

By: Skiphil

Skiphil — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:55:48 +0000

P.s. I did not insert that incorrect apostrophe above. Sometimes the auto-correct function does the wrong thing.

By: Skiphil

Skiphil — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:53:51 +0000

Lewandowsky 2012 does not seem to be pending or “in press” at the journal Psychological Science.

Can anyone find anything on it’s status?

Lew was at AGU recently spewing to some blogger for NPR, but the great article on conspiracist ideation seems not to be making its journal debut??

By: Skiphil

Skiphil — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 03:45:37 +0000

Lewandowsky continues to spew vile misinformation, parts II and III

At his vanity blog “Shaping Tomorrow’s World” which has proved impervious to rational discussion Stephan Lewandowsky has two posts subsequent to ones discussed at CA. One equates Sandy to a “frankenstorm” caused by CAGW and links to SL’s discussion on ABC. The other post talks about yet another paper on his bogus survey work.

Frankenstorm Sandy and Tobacco

Posted on 31 October 2012 by Stephan Lewandowsky

What does “frankenstorm” Sandy have to do with smoking? Well, quite a bit actually, in an indirect way. I talk about the underlying cognition of tobacco and climate change here, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

By: Watchman

Watchman — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:51:30 +0000

Probably worth noting that the Ethics Committee were probably making their judgement on Professor Lewandowsky’s assurance that the survey would be ‘modified slightly’ – it seems that someone (Ms Kirk?) then failed to check the changes against the earlier documentation (or just didn’t realise the significance of it) before sending this to the relevant approver.

The issue is therefore that as you point out, this is not a slight modification, and the presentation seems to be designed to deliberately mislead the Ethics Committee by implying a minor change to existing approval, rather than what is in effect a new application (which would probably have had no ethical issues – the execution and analysis is the issue with the paper). This does look to me like a deliberate attempt at misrepresentation – I cannot see how anyone could fairly argue that degree of change was a slight modification.

Incidentally, it is normal to accept academic’s word at face value within Universities (because otherwise we generate a lot more paperwork and it is thus easier to hide inconvenient facts) – so the fault here lies squarely with whoever decides to abuse this system, not the misled Officer who had to deal with the enquiry (and may not be happy to find all this attention on her).

By: Lewandowsky and “Hide the Decline” « Climate Audit

Lewandowsky and “Hide the Decline” « Climate Audit — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 19:01:47 +0000

[...] Climate Audit by Steve McIntyre Skip to content Hockey Stick StudiesStatistics and RContact Steve McProxy DataCA blog setupFAQ 2005Station DataHigh-Resolution Ocean SedimentsSubscribe to CAEconometric ReferencesBlog Rules and Road MapGridded DataTip JarAboutCA Assistant « The Lewandowsky Ethics Switch [...]

By: geoffchambers

geoffchambers — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 18:45:39 +0000

Lewandowsky’s new paper on misinformation at
http://psi.sagepub.com/content/13/3/106.full?ijkey=FNCpLYuivUOHE&keytype=ref&siteid=sppsi
contains an interesting detail relevant to the discussion of the change to his research proposal discussed here.
In note 1, he defines misinformation as “any piece of information that is initially processed as valid but that is subsequently retracted or corrected”.
On this definition, nothing said by Lewandowsky can ever be misinformation, since he never retracts anything. (Unless you put the accent on the “..or corrected”, in which case everything said by Lewandowsky is, by definition, misinformation).
There’s a profound philosophical problem here, which deserves to be known as the Lewandowsky Paradox.

By: Jeff Norman

Jeff Norman — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 16:44:22 +0000

I am waiting for the usual suspects to show up claiming that these changes were minimal and such minimal changes are always included in the approvals processes for research projects. This will be followed up with rhetorical interpretations of certain phrases revealed by the FOI request and links to different research project applications that are claimed to show support this contention but that on close reading reveal nothing of the sort. Standing by…

By: tktom

tktom — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 11:16:50 +0000

A. Scott – Excellent summary of the issue here

By: jim

jim — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 02:54:50 +0000

On the basis of the information available
the ethics approval at UWA was less than
diligent.

I formal complaint to the Australian
NHMRC requesting they investiagte/audit
UWA ethics approval might be appropriate.
A deficient ethics application is sufficient
reason to retract any paper from publication.

By: HaroldW

HaroldW — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 15:37:52 +0000

X Anomaly: “The share price is gistemp up side down?”

The exemplar graph shown at the ACM link, “Share Price MajorScoop Corporation” is an excellent match to 150-index, where index is GISS’s stations-only temperature anomaly in hundredths of degrees C. I used the Wayback machine to access the file as it would have appeared towards the end of 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20091129071448/http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

The other graph in the documents link, “Share Price SupremeWidget Corporation”, is the same data, but plotted with a trend curve added. Interesting change in appearance which might well affect people’s extrapolations. The appearance changes even more if one creates a separate trend segment from 1998 (say) on.