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To: Brumar89 who wrote (679)	9/3/2011 11:46:27 AM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 85487

You should be sorry. It's MM and Wegman who have been discredited. Having a paper pulled for plagaisam is considered discreditation, or being disredited, or whatever. Wegman et al miscellany Posted on December 2, 2010 by Deep Climate\| 56 Comments By Deep Climate John Mashey has suggested a new thread for general talk about various aspects of the Wegman Report, and I’m happy to oblige. Of course, the immediately preceding Replication and Due Diligence, Wegman Style will remain open for discussion of Wegman et al’s, ahem, statistical analysis. But other Wegman Report discussion should happen here for now, pending further posts (and there are a few in the pipeline). To get us started, here are excerpts from some interesting comments that came in over the last few days, comments which clearly show that the emerging expert assessments of plagiarism in the Wegman Report are showing just the tip of the iceberg (sounds like a good title for a future post). First here are Andy S and dhogaza on Barton staffer’s Peter Spencer’s role in the Wegman Report and the supposed independence of the panel. Andy S \| December 1, 2010 at 1:56 pm Whether Peter Spencer sent them x or y papers seems rather moot. What astounds me is why a team of scientists asked to review research findings should be provided reading materials by a political staffer in the first place and why that group of scientists felt obliged to use that list as the basis for their inquiry, as if this were a high school research project with a prescribed reading list. dhogaza \| December 1, 2010 at 2:30 pm \| Oh, it’s even worse, because they were asked to provide an independent review. Basing one’s review on reading materials provided by a political staffer you’re supposed to be independent of rather misses the point of independence … If Spencer is the high school teacher, one might well ask who the private tutors may have been. We also had andrewt’s discovery of two paragraphs from a 1995 GMU PhD dissertation, showing up (decidely out of context) in a 1996 article on statistics software by Wegman and several of his proteges. David Grossman’s dissertation Integrated Structured Data and Text: A Relational Approach is here, while the technical report Statistical Software, Siftware and Astronomy by Wegman et al can be found here, with an unformatted version here. And to top it off, the same two paragraphs, plus seven more from Wegman et al, can be found almost verbatim as section 1.4.2 in Wegman student Faleh Al-Shameri’s 2006 PhD dissertation. That dissertation is embedded in their joint patent application for “Automated generation of Metadata” (for use in a data and text mining context) . If you’re keeping score, that’s the fourth Wegman student PhD dissertation to emerge with clear evidence of improper scholarship. (By the way, here’s a handy way to keep track of Wegman’s “descendents”). Finally, in case you want to catch up on, or react to, mainstream coverage of the affair, here are links to USA Today coverage by science reporter Dan Vergano: deepclimate.org