Posted on 08/17/2006 11:03:30 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
Excellent!
Thanks weegee; I'll have to get back to this one. I don't recall who has it, but there's a "science" ping list around here somewhere whose membership might be interested in this thread, no? Pinging a few that come to mind who might know...
An excerpt from McIntyre's and McKitrick's compelling criticisms:
Hockey Sticks, Principal Components and Spurious Significance
This article identifies what is almost certainly a computer programming error in the principal components method used in MBH98. The error causes their PC method to nearly always identify hockey stick shaped series as the “dominant pattern” in a data set (the so-called “first Principal Component” or PC1), even when the data are just random numbers. We carried out 10,000 simulations in which we fed “red noise”, a form of trendless random numbers, into the MBH98 algorithm and, in over 99% of the cases, it produced hockey stick shaped PC1 series. The figure below shows 3 simulated PC1s and the MBH98 reconstruction: can you pick out the reconstruction?
Figure 1. Three simulated PC1s and the MBH98 reconstruction.
Suppose his findings, which precisely identified people at high risk of the deadly disease, were accurate even though data were faked?Heh heh... Hey, I've got one... the mortality rate is still 100 per cent. [rimshot!]
I remember when Nat Geog added a letters to the editor section -- something that should be dropped by all magazines in this day and age, when that kind of feedback should appear on the mags' website forum. That was the beginning of the end of NG, and while they do have stuff of interest from time to time, most of it just regurgitated PC BS.
Si la mierda fuera oro, los pobres no estarian en culo.
I believe that that phrasing constitutes a question, not a finding. Weak premise.
I do think human-caused global warming is nonsense but it's a poor move to base an article on a weak premise
Thank you for your message. I mean seriously. It sums up my lifetime of experience in the academic establishment.
Ain't that the freaking truth (LOL!)?
"I remember when Nat Geog added a letters to the editor section -- something that should be dropped by all magazines in this day and age, when that kind of feedback should appear on the mags' website forum. That was the beginning of the end of NG, and while they do have stuff of interest from time to time, most of it just regurgitated PC BS."
When did this happened. We hadn't subscribed to NG for over 20 years after our sons hit the teenage years. We were surprised at how the pictures were still great and how the bad science of global warming and enviral whackoism dominated today's NG.
We used to have rummage sales at our church. People would bring in years of NG. We seldom sold them at 10 cents.
The Salvation Army and another charity which usually loved our left over items refused to pick up the so called collections of NG. So we started to refusing them when members tried to bring them in for the rummage sales.
That happened in the 1980s sometime. I remember reading the leadoff in which the introduction was mentioned, and being puzzled, then checking previous issues and not finding a letters section. I mostly don't care to read letters to the editors, because they're mostly more nonsense and a waste of the news hole. So I'd never noticed there hadn't been any. It's kinda like how I'd never noticed that Muzak is 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off... ;')
Thanks. We stopped subscribing to the NG in the early 1980's.
I noted this sad trend in Scientific American several years ago. I gave up reading that formerly terrific magazine immediately and have not gone back. Sorry to see the same PC disease affect Science.
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